What occurred once I went on strike and left EVERYTHING to my husband, by BRYONY GORDON… it wasn’t fairly

When I tell my husband Harry that I will be going on strike from all of my domestic duties for a week, his response is brutal, blunt… and exactly why I need to down tools for a bit and allow him to fend for himself.

‘But what do you actually do?’ he sniffs, as he goes to unload the dishwasher – a task he likes to complete only when there’s at least one person present to congratulate him on his courageous ability to put a cup back in the right cupboard.

Less than 24 hours later, he will discover exactly what it is I do, when we arrive almost three hours late for a weekend away with his exceedingly annoyed best friend.

The carefully prepared lunch is cold and ruined. His young children are tired and fractious, having spent the best part of a day impatiently waiting for their promised ‘playdate’ – with our 12-year-old daughter Edie, who is herself pretty cross about the hours she has spent on the M4, listening to her parents bicker.

An entire day of everyone’s precious weekend is wasted, and all because I turned my back for five minutes and left my husband in charge. 

I wake up that Saturday morning, packed and ready for the three-and-a-half-hour-long journey from London to Herefordshire, where his friend Jonathan moved a few years ago.

Despite John and Harry having known each other for decades, the weekend has been organised entirely by me and John’s wife Justine, a 48-year-old mother of three who has her own busy interiors business.

And despite informing Harry, a 45-year-old man who has somehow forged a career as a serious and successful journalist, of said plans on several occasions, here I am watching him walk out of the house at 7.30am – not to go to the car to pack up our things, but for an hour-long CrossFit class.

I could say something. But reminding him of the timings surely breaks the strict rules of my experiment.

For an entire week, I am not to perform any of my endless household roles – those invisible chores that working mothers end up doing even when their job is as demanding (if not more so) than their partner’s.

For the next 90 minutes, I pace around the house nervously, fretting obsessively about what to do – even though I know I must do nothing. Should I call Justine, to let her know we are going to be late? Should I make sure that Edie, currently watching Stranger Things in her room, has packed?

I think this all counts as caretaking behaviour, so I try and distract myself by tinkering with the weekly supermarket order… only to realise that even this is now off-limits, too.

By the time Harry returns, I am a ball of raging, anxious energy.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asks, as I stomp around the hall.

‘I’m just keen to get going to Hereford,’ I say.

‘Oh yeah, what time are they expecting us?’ he asks.

‘In about two hours,’ I reply.

‘What! Why didn’t you say?’

By the time we arrive, extremely late and extremely cross with one another, I have to remind myself why it is I am doing this. And the reason I am doing it is because – like many women in their forties – I’ve had enough of all the unpaid labour I am expected to carry out without any thanks or acknowledgement. I’ve had enough of washing my husband’s clothes in a heady mix of Persil and resentment, feeling as if I have an extra child to care for.

Figures released last year by the Office for National Statistics found that women spend almost an hour a day longer than men doing unpaid work, such as cooking, cleaning and caring for both adults and children.

But it’s not just physical work: a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family earlier this year found that women overwhelmingly carry the burden of ‘cognitive household labour’ – that’s all the mental tasks, such as planning and managing household finances, required to keep family life running smoothly.

It’s a problem that even Hollywood actresses such as Claire Foy struggle with, the 41-year-old admitted this weekend that being a working mum meant things were an ‘absolute s***show’ in her house.

‘Working and trying to do anything else at the same time is pretty harsh, especially in the modern world,’ she said, while promoting her new movie, The Magic Faraway Tree, in which she plays a professional woman who moves her family to the country after suffering burnout.

‘So much is required of us to succeed in all sorts of different areas, and we’re told we’re supposed to succeed, otherwise we’re getting it all wrong.’

Despite classing myself as an ardent feminist – one who writes endlessly in this very newspaper about the need for women to believe in themselves – I have found myself 13 years into a marriage where I do almost everything.

In our house, I am not just a journalist, an author, a mother and a wife, but also: the (somewhat terrible) cook; the meal planner; the manager of everyone’s diaries; the booker of all holidays; the only person capable of remembering birthdays.

Harry unloads the dishwasher, makes the bed and sometimes puts away clean clothes – all tasks which can crucially be done while watching a podcast on YouTube.

To be fair to him, he does deal with the household accounts and all the bills, but as the main breadwinner, I’m the one who pays them. He doesn’t even do the traditionally ‘blokey’ DIY activities around the house, like putting up the shelves in the kitchen that I’ve been asking him to do for two years now.

My irritation has been building for quite some time, just as my hormone levels have fallen off a cliff with perimenopause.

The fluffy, nurturing power of oestrogen has worn off and in the process it seems to have revealed just how much I am doing, and just how little it is appreciated. This could be why I’ve felt compelled to write a novel called People Pleaser, about a woman so desperate to keep everyone happy that she ends up having a sort of breakdown, leaving her unable to please anyone but herself.

One morning, Olivia Greenwood wakes up and finds she no longer cares about upholding the status quo in her home or at work.

She stomps around telling everyone what she really thinks of them, and goes on strike, leaving her husband and two children to pick up all the slack at home.

Writing the novel was a little like wish fulfilment, based mostly on conversations I had with female friends who were also sick to the back teeth of trying to uphold the ‘you-can-have-it-all’ fantasy that was foisted on us in the name of feminism, one which we are slowly realising was just another form of patriarchy in disguise.

‘Nobody is asking men if they can have it all,’ commented one friend. ‘It’s just assumed that they will, while we all run around enabling it as we try and prove that we’re perfect.’

I know my friends and I aren’t alone in feeling this, because for some time I’ve been seeing similar sentiment expressed on social media. For a while now, I’ve been running a weekly ‘Fresh out of f**** Friday’ post on my Instagram, where I encourage my followers to list all the things they’re fed up with.

Each week I’m amazed at the response – hundreds of thousands of women engage with these posts, sharing what they’re no longer willing to put up with (‘fresh out of f**** for having to decide what is for dinner EVERY day,’ wrote one woman on the most recent post, ‘and feeling like “me time” is just a concept from a science fiction novel’.) 

When we finally arrive at our friends’ house in Herefordshire, I leave Harry to do all the apologising, staying resolutely mute as he lies about the traffic being terrible. My strike extends to the endless emotional smoothing that falls to women too.

The next day, as Justine serves up delicious food we really don’t deserve, it occurs to me that my husband is extremely lucky that the first two days of my strike are taking place while we stay at the home of someone who isn’t walking away from all the work in protest.

But on day three, during the drive back to London, he realises he is going to have to start pulling his weight.

‘What time is the Ocado coming?’ he asks, of our usual Sunday night delivery.

‘It’s not,’ I reply, bluntly.

‘What happened? Did they cancel?’

‘No, it never got ordered in the first place,’ I reply. ‘I’m on strike, remember?’

We arrive home to an empty fridge, and only half a roll of loo paper.

Half an hour later, a Deliveroo driver appears at the front door, holding bags full of ‘provisions’ – toilet roll, Haribo, and a selection of frozen pepperoni pizzas that I assume are to be eaten as dinner.

‘See, it’s not that difficult!’ Harry gloats, but given that said delivery cost him £45 – almost a third of our weekly Ocado shop – I’m not sure this is a financially viable way for us to live.

As time goes on, it becomes clear that Harry has little understanding of the military precision it takes behind the scenes to ensure everyone’s life runs smoothly.

He’s not aware, for example, that our daughter’s school has an app that enables us to plan things like her extracurricular activities and pay for her lunches – and so I receive a terse email to tell me we owe the school £14.78, and need to top up her balance ‘as a matter of urgency’.

(Of course, he doesn’t get the email, something I remind myself to change when I come off strike.)

Nor does he know who to add to the WhatsApp group I ask him to set up for Edie’s 13th birthday party to share details with the parents of her friends.

As a result, two don’t get invited, which is the equivalent of starting World War Three when you’re in year eight. I spend an evening mopping up many tears, and promising Edie that it is all easily rectified, which – thankfully – it is.

‘Can I just check we’ve got her presents sorted?’ he asks, alarmed, once I’ve calmed things down. And by ‘we’ I can only assume he means ‘me’. Fortunately for him, I ordered them all months ago. We’re lucky enough to have a cleaner who comes for a couple of hours a week (organised by me) but he seems unaware that the house doesn’t just tidy up after itself in the intervening days.

That said, nor does he seem that bothered when dishes start to stack up in the sink and fluff accumulates on the carpet. He doesn’t notice the hairs in the shower, the toothpaste stains on the hand towels, nor the gone-off milk in the fridge.

I begin to wonder how feral he might become without me.

He does notice when he runs out of clean shirts for work and has no gym kit for CrossFit.

‘It really does pile up quickly, doesn’t it?’ he says, marvelling at the mountain of dirty laundry in the basket.

I explain to him that I do at least one wash a day to keep on top of everything, with specific days for towels and bed linen. He looks at me in a sort of startled awe. ‘I had no idea,’ he gasps.

He begins to cook dinner – bland meals like pesto pasta – and starts doing the washing. He shrinks things, mixes white with colours, destroys a £59 hand-wash-only top of mine by putting it in the washing machine.

By the time we are due to leave for an Easter holiday to Spain on day five, my nerves cannot take it any more. I hate flying as it is, but what I hate more is the knowledge the day before that Harry hasn’t checked us in, found our passports, booked a taxi to the airport, or told our daughter to start packing.

I break the strike and check us in online, terrified he’ll forget and we will miss our precious holiday.

I want to scream in frustration. But it’s at that point that I realise I am as much to blame for this sorry state of affairs as he is. I am a control freak, and I have enabled his domestic incompetence by deriving some weird pleasure in trying to do it all myself.

I sort the holidays because I don’t want to spend Easter hiking up a mountain in Scotland, which is exactly the kind of ‘holiday’ Harry would book.

I am in control of the school apps, because I want to know exactly what Edie is up to (down to the last croissant she’s ordered at break). And I do all the laundry, because it’s easier (and less depressing) than trusting he will bother to separate the whites from the colours.

Enough! I cannot spend all this time asking him to pull his weight and then complain when he doesn’t do it exactly the way I want him to.

He’s trying, and that counts for something. Has my decades-long habit of pathological people pleasing made me forget that progress is so much more important than perfection?

‘I’m grateful that you’ve made an attempt to do more around the house,’ I say to him, through extremely gritted teeth on the last day of my strike.

‘I’m grateful that you’ve shown me how much you do,’ he replies, through equally gritted teeth.

Like all the most successful strikes, we seem to have come to a begrudging resolution: I need to get off the cross, because my husband needs the wood.

After all, how else is he going to manage to put those shelves up in the kitchen?

• People Pleaser by Bryony Gordon (£20, Viking) is out April 23.