Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu

Author:Tiffany Dufu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

PART FOUR

All-In Partners

CHAPTER 14

Done Is Another Person’s Perfect

I hate my kitchen faucet. It looks like it’s from the seventies, and not in a cool retro way. And yet, I love that ugly faucet, too. It reminds me every day how far I’ve come and how much I’ve gained by flushing my HCD down the drain.

Let me explain.

One morning as I was scrambling to pack lunch boxes, which I had almost forgotten to do because I was up until 2:00 A.M. the night before prepping for a big meeting (for which I was about to be late), I noticed the faucet was leaking. I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with it for at least a couple of weeks, so once the lunch boxes were packed, I sent Kojo a text: Kitchen faucet leaking. Please fix.

I didn’t think twice about the fact that Kojo was in Dubai. We had created our MEL, so I knew he would find a way to handle it. And handle it he did. When I arrived home that night, there was a shiny new and woefully unfashionable faucet staring back at me. Ugh. I’d been envisioning something classy and sleek—something Gwyneth Paltrow would approve of. I immediately began mentally rearranging my schedule so I could find the time to swap out the faucet the next day.

Then sanity prevailed. The whole reason I’d texted Kojo was because I’d had too much on my plate to deal with the sink myself. And there was an X in his column next to Facility Maintenance Director. How lucky I was to have a spouse who, even across the Atlantic Ocean, had managed to get a leaky faucet fixed in fewer than twelve hours in response to my five-word request. An ugly faucet was a small price to pay for an infinitely improved quality of life.

In every home, there are leaky faucets—real and metaphorical. Women must trust other people to tackle the problems, even if they do it differently from how we would. It’s time to take a page from Princess Elsa of Frozen and simply let it go. If we can do that, we’re likely to discover the kind of innovation that can transform our lives on the home front for good.

The insight I gained from delegating the task of fixing the leaky faucet to Kojo was an important one because for so long, most of the learning about how to manage our home had involved a transfer of knowledge from me to Kojo. Rarely was it the other way around. Just as the workplace is a male-dominated environment, our household was a female-dominated environment, even more so given my HCD. And with no human resource staff at home to draw attention to this inequity, Kojo had often experienced worse than an ultimatum. It was just my way; the highway wasn’t even an option. But once I began relying more on his help—and really letting him do things his way—I benefited in new and unexpected ways. Take, for example, Kojo’s having the dry cleaning delivered.

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