'Just Delegate More' And Other Offensively Bad Advice Disguised As Empowerment For Women
Lena Wagner | PexelsThe mother standing in my doorway wanted to know if I’d gotten a text from her husband. He is one of the few fathers in my children’s various friend groups who is listed in my phone contacts. That’s because, from time to time, he takes the initiative to coordinate things, like sleepovers and drop-offs.
Or so I thought.
At first I was impressed that he’d reached out to ask about soccer sign-ups and to see if it would still be okay for his son to hang out at our place after school on Thursdays. If his wife had reached out with the same questions, I wouldn't have been impressed at all. She would have been just another mom sending another text about another set of logistics.
I told the mother that yes, I’d gotten the text from her husband and I’d responded to both inquiries. I asked him if he was in the soccer team's WhatsApp group and told him it was fine for their son to spend Thursday afternoons at our place. I never heard back.
The mother grumbled that she would reach out to the soccer coach to get added to the WhatsApp group because, clearly, her husband hadn’t closed the loop, and he didn't have the coach’s contact information either. She said she asked her husband to text me because she was feeling so overwhelmed with the start of the school year (she’s a teacher). But she wondered aloud what good it was when she had to circle back and ask me the exact same questions to get the information she needed to take the next step.
Her son finally found both socks he’d been searching for, and we said our goodbyes. As I closed the door, I knew two things to be true: 1) I was no longer impressed with her husband, and 2) I was so, so, so very grateful that I no longer have a husband of my own.
Throughout my marriage, both my husband and society told me that if I was feeling overwhelmed, I needed to delegate
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So, being the dutiful wife I was, I tried. Like the mother in my doorway, I tried to distill the messy work of caregiving into discrete tasks I could hand off to my husband.
I instituted a weekly family meeting to help with the task delegation. I created an enormous board dotted with Post-it notes and hung it up above our dining room table. I started a family Google calendar. I bought a magnetic notepad with a pen holder and stuck it to our refrigerator so we could all add to the grocery list as needed. I wrote out priority tasks for each week on a dry-erase board.
In certain contexts, my husband and I had always made a good team. When we hosted birthday parties or dinners, I enjoyed being Delegator-in-Chief, and he was happy to “yes, dear” me for a few hours. He ran errands, set tables, and greeted guests. When the overpriced balloons from Target lost their air before our daughter’s fourth birthday party began, he made a last-minute dash to the Dollar Store. When I forgot a knife to cut our son’s cake at the park, he ran home to get one.
Every day, we had most of our physical chores down to a science. I made dinner; he cleaned the kitchen. I gave the kids baths; he swept the floors. I read to the kids; he tidied and wiped down surfaces.
He and I were equally invested in hosting social events and keeping a nominally tidy home; thus, we took on our tasks with equal enthusiasm. In this regard, I was one of the “lucky” wives. Unlike quite a few other husbands I knew, mine wasn’t a slob and didn’t have a habit of inviting people to descend on our home while leaving me to do the prep work.
The problem was all the other stuff. Yes, I appreciated his heroic dash to the Dollar Store at the 11th hour. But what about the labor that had preceded it? Who had reached out to our daughter’s preschool teacher to get contact information for the other parents? Who had created the E-vite? Who had fielded the RSVPs?
Who had fielded questions about what presents my daughter wanted? Who had researched reasonably priced cakes? Who had researched party activities? Who had researched affordable party favors that weren’t totally lame? Who had made the shopping list?
During the party, who made notes of which presents came from which kids? After the party, who handled the thank-yous?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. We all know who did these things. Could I have delegated more? Probably. I could have listed all these tasks out on Post-it notes and attached my husband’s name to some of them. I could have talked with him about which tasks I was delegating, and checked in along the way to make sure nothing fell through the cracks.
I could have bickered with him about whether thanking parents for gifts was actually necessary. I could have spent energy making my case that acknowledging a gift is respectful, and if it doesn’t happen, the judgment falls back on me because women are society’s default thankers.
I could have delegated the heck out of these logistics, including partaking in the requisite bickering and nagging, and I could have delegated all the other logistics required to maintain a home and family. I went through cycles of making the effort, always convinced that the color-coding system on the Kanban board or the new agenda format for our family meeting would be the magic ticket to all that time and energy delegation was supposed to grant me.
When I tired of trying, I wrestled with the guilt of nottrying. Obviously, I was just being a martyr, and I therefore had no right to complain.
The sense of liberation after my divorce was real and all-consuming
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Some of the ways I felt liberated took me longer to name. There was, of course, the immediate liberation from the devastating process of divorce — the relief of no longer being subject to calls from my lawyer bearing bad news, no longer spending Friday evenings tracking down statements from defunct accounts, no longer fretting about whether or not I’d be able to keep the home in which I was now single parenting my children.
There was the liberation from my husband’s emotional abuse, the relief of no longer having to tiptoe around his moods and tantrums, of no longer feeling obligated to “work on” a marriage he took for granted, of no longer worrying over if or when he might lash out at the kids, or in what ways he might exploit the many loopholes of family law to take his revenge.
And then there was the liberation from the daily, sometimes hourly, question of whether or not to delegate. I felt this first during our separation, and it puzzled me. I couldn’t understand why I suddenly had so much more time. After all, now I had to make dinner, clean up after it, and sweep and tidy up the house. And though my kids had outgrown baths, I still read to my son every night after my new chore regimen.
Yet instead of feeling more exhausted, I felt a swell of post-bedtime energy. I had an entire hour to myself, and I didn’t have to spend a single minute of it fretting over what I would or wouldn’t ask my husband to do. I’d just do it. No guilt, no blame, no trepidation, no frustration. It would just be done.
It’s not that I don’t believe in delegation. As a co-owner of a worker-owned cooperative, a member of a local co-op network, a member of a volunteer board, and a member of a recovery group, I understand firsthand the power of joining forces to get things done. Ideally, one person never does it all, and one person never consistently delegates tasks to everyone else.
Ideally, all group members both self-delegate and delegate tasks to one another. Positions rotate. One person leads in one context, and someone else leads in another. Yes, challenges and interpersonal conflicts inevitably arise. But when groups divvy up tasks among people similarly invested in a project or cause, delegation can be remarkably effective.
I tried so diligently to translate this model to our family, with the calendars and meetings and Kanban boards, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why it never seemed to take hold. With the benefit of hindsight, I understand now that my husband simply wasn’t as invested. As society dictated, the home and family were still considered my domain.
I’d always be The Delegator, and he’d always be The Helper
Being 'The Helper' means you simply complete the tasks assigned to you. You don’t feel particularly invested in the outcome; the goal is to check it off the list.
Then, if your wife complains, you say, “Look, honey! I did what you asked me! If you needed me to do more, you should have said something! I can’t read your mind!”
That’s precisely why my son’s friend’s father never responded to my text. He didn’t think to follow up. It didn’t occur to him that what was needed now was to get the soccer coach’s number, reach out on WhatsApp, and get himself added to the group. He’d already checked the item off his list. He’d done what his wife asked.
In the end, delegating that one simple task created more work for his wife. Instead of texting me and following up with the coach, she asked her husband to text me, asked me if he’d responded, and still had to follow up with the coach. It’s not just executing these tasks that requires energy.
Deciding what to delegate and remembering to circle back requires energy
Feeling frustrated with your partner’s minimal effort requires energy. Defending yourself from accusations of martyrdom and/or nagginess requires energy. It all takes So. Much. Energy. I knew the daily delegation puzzle was sapping my energy during my marriage, but I couldn’t quantify just how much until I no longer had to contend with it.
I ask for a lot of help now as a single mother. I ask other parents to give my kids rides; I ask my friends to watch my kids; I ask my neighbors to borrow tools; I ask my sponsor to volunteer her time for my recovery. I wouldn’t list “asking for help” as one of my favorite activities, but the more I invest in mutual networks of support, the easier it gets. I also give plenty of kids rides, return favors for my friends, lend neighbors items when I can, and contribute to my sponsor’s recovery.
The problem for so many women is that the institution of marriage is not a mutual support network. Women have long been socialized to invest more. And when we invest more, delegating more is not a viable solution. It’s just another piece of advice that pretends to be empowering. Ultimately, it only shifts the onus and the blame.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories interrupt notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Life Beyond Marriage.
