The Entry: The Sunday Nobody Scheduled

I missed it three Sundays ago and I have been thinking about it since.

Not on purpose. My sister was in town, we ate late, somebody opened a second bottle, and the hour I usually spend between four and five on a Sunday afternoon — reading the week, checking the forms, looking at the calendar with the fridge open — simply did not happen. It is not on any calendar. It has no name in our house. I had never once described it to my husband, which is its own admission.

By Wednesday it had cost us about three hours. A permission slip found at 7:50 a.m. Two dinners bought instead of cooked. A dentist appointment nobody had registered was on a day I teach, resolved by a phone call I made from a parking ramp while apologising to a receptionist who has heard this before.

None of those failures are interesting on their own. What is interesting is that they were all downstream of one unscheduled hour, and that the hour had been running for probably nine years without anybody in this house, including me, ever naming it.

We spent this week itemising the mental load, in a piece I would recommend to anyone who has ever tried to have that argument without data. One mother in Helen’s reporting logged 147 things in seven days; her husband logged 39. My own household’s version of that number is concentrated, unhelpfully, into sixty minutes on a Sunday, held by one person, undocumented, and — until three weeks ago — untested.

The test result was not flattering.

So we have put it on the calendar. It is called The Hour, which my 14-year-old finds ridiculous, and it is on a rota, which she finds worse. Last Sunday my husband did it. He found two things I would not have found and missed one I would have caught, which is roughly the outcome you would expect the first time anybody runs a process they have only ever benefited from.

The point of writing it down was never that he would do it as well as I do. The point is that the house now has two people who could.

— Cat