The magic coffee table, or A Woman's Work Is Never Noticed

(Trying not to go full ranty-pants here, but We Gotta Talk About This, right? Right.)

Some of you may have seen this before. It's a bit by Australian comedian Troy Kinne, and it never fails to make Captain Midnight cackle.

Yes, it's silly. It's meant to be. But like most comedy, it's also truth writ large. And the truth is that, in our society, domestic maintenance -- the work traditionally done by women -- goes largely unnoticed and unappreciated.

A few months back, Robin Schaer observed one real-life version of the Magic Coffee Table on Twitter: "My friend & her husband lived in an apartment that had a soap dispenser installed on the edge of the kitchen sink. When they moved out after two years, he marveled to her: '[I]t's amazing how that dispenser never ran out of soap in all this time.' Women's work is truly invisible."

Responses to this tweet ranged from hilarious to alarming.

For my part, I shared an experience from my extended family. My maternal grandfather, who lost a leg in WWII when he was in his early twenties, always took pride in his ability to get as many things done with only one leg as other men did with two. It wasn't until my grandmother died that he discovered the full extent of the illusion under which he had lived his entire adult life. Grandma, who was a registered nurse, had done practically everything for Grandpa in a way that rarely drew his attention, so he was able to take most of the credit for being "independent." She died a mere month after being diagnosed with uterine cancer -- as quietly, tidily and efficiently as she'd done everything else in life -- and it was instructive to see how quickly Grandpa succumbed when she was no longer there to support him.

As for me, this blog is called "Confessions of a Laundry Faerie" for a reason. I hope not to be a huge martyr about it, but there are some days when people appreciate the myriad things I do to maintain a household, to run it smoothly -- and there are days when they don't. I'm not alone in this; most people who run households have had similar experiences. The continuous work of maintenance, so critical to a happy and comfortable life, usually isn't important enough to be noticed -- unless and until it stops happening.

Forgive this minor slip into misandry, but thanks to my experiences, and further because of my faith in God, I can't help but assume that the current prevailing theory about the cosmos -- that the universe and all its wonders spontaneously came into being with no need for a higher power to cause or direct it -- must have been thought up by male scientists. Specifically, male scientists who were able to focus their time and efforts on this theory and its implications, never noticing the person(s) in the background who emptied their trash cans, cleaned their coffee mugs, washed their lab coats, got their cars' oil changed and did all the other countless quotidian things that needed doing. (I'm not wrong about this. Read the names of the greater lights of M-theory, for instance, and you won't see many Sophias or Marcias or Jennifers on the list. You will, however, probably notice the name of Stephen Hawking -- a man who required near-constant physical support by a caretaker just to stay alive and thinking, and who nonetheless averred that the universe went on ticking along with no divine maintenance work whatsoever. The irony there is so thick you'd have to cut it with a blowtorch.)

About a fortnight ago, the United Nations dropped a bombshell summary of a report that, among other things, warned that up to a million species on Earth face extinction within the next five years unless human beings work together in concert to turn around the biodiversity crisis. And at the time, I couldn't help thinking (although I believe God isn't this petty, and indeed is a lot more patient and loving than most people give Him credit for) of a deity who, after having all his cosmic maintenance work ignored for millennia, finally gets fed up: "You humans don't appreciate or recognize all the things I do for you? Don't even think I exist? Fine. Have a crack at taking care of your own biosphere for a while; let's see how you do!"

So what's my point?

Domestic maintenance work is real, it's important, and unless you do this work yourself, you rely on it more than you probably think. So please, practice looking around you. See not only where you are now, but also the people who helped get you there and the work they do. Notice that work, appreciate it, and maybe, occasionally, take the initiative to do some of the heavy lifting yourself. Because you know what? I don't know how the universe works, but I can tell you EXACTLY how the laundry gets done. And I can assure you, no magic coffee tables are involved.