Dividing the Season

The agreements you make in summer are tested in autumn.

The summer is a kind of holiday from the truth of how you divide a household. Things are different — the children are home, the routines are looser, nobody's quite in their normal shape. You can tell yourself that the imbalance is situational. That it will be different in September.

September arrives, and you see.

We had a conversation in August about how we would manage the autumn. I am a person who has this kind of conversation. He is a person who participates in them with more goodwill than fluency — he agrees in good faith without quite knowing what he's agreeing to, not because he doesn't mean it but because the shape of the thing isn't yet visible to him. The shape becomes visible in the doing.

By the end of September, some things have shifted. Some things have not. The things that haven't are not because he doesn't care. They're because they were never named as things. They live in the margin, in the between-tasks, in the category of just things that get done — and the person who has always done them continues to do them because nobody has yet sat down and said: that is a thing, and it has a name, and we need to decide whose name is on it.

Autumn is the season I name things.