I wasn’t expecting to be as charmed as I was by Helen Hayward’s Home Work.
What do I, (‘privilege-check on aisle 5!’), a childless older man, with a deep and abiding lack of interest in housework (and a visceral dislike of mops and brooms), have in common with Hobart writer and mother of four’s paean to the work we menfolk, and many women, dismiss as being ‘real’ work?
It turns out this memoir is a thoughtful, caring and philosophical analysis of something much bigger than our weary yanking of a vacuum cleaner through the labyrinth of our furniture. It’s about love – every sort of love.
“At the heart of Home Work is a simple question. Is the time I spend caring for myself, my home and the people I love most time well spent, or time wasted?”
A memoir can be a work of self-indulgence or, in this case, a thoughtful act of generosity; an invitation into Hayward’s life to compare, judge, be entertained, provoked and learn. Her journey through life from Adelaide to London, Melbourne to Hobart, encompasses her journey from childhood, through her careers, family and marriage, to find new understandings that bring her full circle – to a mother’s love.
“One big conclusion from this journey is that taking the leap as a young woman to do for myself what, as a small child, parents and carers did on my behalf, was one of the biggest leaps I took in life.”
Even as she travels, explores careers, and finds marriage and children, Hayward also finds a life constant she doesn’t want to find time for – housework. But are unpaid household chores ‘work’ in the sense we think of work – of worthy transactional effort for some form of return?
Do we have a choice to ignore chores if others seem willing to do them? If we’re a man…[checks research on unpaid domestic work, the entire feminist canon, own life]…then, yes, we do. Do we have a wife, a mother, a female flatmate, or paid house-cleaner who will, however begrudgingly, clean the toilet, leaving us to do real work like…leveling up on our PS4 game?
Australian women average around 64% of their time in unpaid care work. Men spend around 36%, and will probably mansplain from the couch, our eyes focused on the screen, hands grappling a game controller, that ‘care work’ plausibly includes supplying fresh meat for the rest of our outlaw camp in Red Dead Redemption 2.
But, while the insidious impacts of the patriarchy pervades all our lives, Hayward’s focus returns, again and again, through every struggle, to what is the most right thing in the moment to do – for herself as much as for those she loves.
“So much of what we do at home comes down to our willingness to keep on going in the face of uncertainty. This, in essence, is what home work is for me. It’s a daily expression of my willingness to do things that I don’t really care about, for the sake of something bigger that I really do care about. For me, these big things are love and beauty.”
She means all forms of love – love of objects and art, family and friends, one’s lover, and life itself. Even one’s ‘nagging’ or ‘controlling’ mother. Love comes, and is expressed, in many forms.
Hayward’s readable and engaging collection, book-ended by a warm foreword from Alain de Botton, and a well articulated and insightful final chapter, is a different sort of philosophy-adjacent memoir, with a ‘self-help’ aspect that’s humble, heart-felt and honest. I, for one, have stopped swearing at the vacuum cleaner. Why would I curse the poor thing when it helps create a home from a house, and quietly-but-noisily expresses my love for my family and myself?
Home Work, by Helen Hayward, is published by Puncher & Wattman, 2023, ISBN 9781922571915
B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author.
