The hidden costs of chronic accommodation

Why would so many women carry an anvil of resentment rather than stand up for themselves? Because speaking up comes at a cost. But so does keeping the peace. That cost is just better hidden.

Whenever I visit my parent’s house I can count on a few things: 1. a lifetime supply of shredded cheese in their fridge, 2. the back door knob never reliably doing its job and 3. the chipper sound of Jody Moore’s voice streaming out from my mother’s IPAD at full volume.

Who is Jody Moore? She is an LDS life coach for Mormon women. My mother is a proud paying member of her gold/platinum/highly decorated/very important person/monthly membership club six years running.

It’s my fault actually. I discovered Jody in 2016 when I still went to church and I liked her way of getting us to question our normal patterns of thought. I thought my mom could benefit from her podcast, so I recommended it and here we are.

At least four times per week, members of her very important person club can tune in to Jody’s coaching calls where Jody or one of her employees will coach women through their problems.

Having involuntarily tuned in to dozens of these calls the past six years, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern.

Under the surface of the vast majority of these women’s problems lies this question: how do I fix my problem without inconveniencing anyone?

How do I ask my husband to help me around the house without making him mad?

How do I deal with my sister hurting my feelings without hurting her feelings?

How do I decline going on the family vacation without disappointing my parents?

How do I say no to my teen without them being mad at me?

How do I get the support I desperately need without inconveniencing anyone?

And I get it. Trust me.

I’ve been these women. I AM these women. They are me and I am them. I so want for there to be a way for me to honor my own desires without disappointing anyone. Wouldn’t that be so great? A world where I can stand up for myself and where everyone still likes me and no one is uncomfy?

A gal can dream.

I’m going to hold my hand as well as your hand when I tell you this- I’m so sorry but you can’t change the status quo AND not inconvenience anyone. You can’t stick up for yourself and not disappoint anyone. You can’t set boundaries without making anyone uncomfortable.

I know. I know. Inconveniencing and disappointing others goes against the way we’ve been trained to safely navigate this world from the time we were itty bitty:

“The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early on that she must become something other than herself and deny her true feelings in order to attract and please others.” - bell hooks, All about Love

We’ve been taught that we must figure out what people want from us and give it to them. We must keep the peace. We must focus all our attention on love, charity, service and kindness. We must be accommodating.

After all, all you need is love…

Right?

Well, if you feel like charting your inner canoe through the raging waters of resentment for the rest of your life, then yes, all you need is love and kindness.

But if we want balance, inner peace, health, confidence, freedom, a strong sense of self, healthy relationships, trust, authenticity and self-love?

—> We need to hold others accountable when they misbehave.

—> We need to set boundaries.

—> We must grow a tolerance for people being disappointed in us.

—> We must teach people how to treat us.

—> We must inconvenience others.

This is in fact the spiritual work of women. It’s very important.

Don’t hold your breath for religion to tell you this, but the spiritual work of men is to lose the self, the spiritual work of women is to build the self.

Building the self includes standing up for ourselves and our desires.

The bad news is, when we do this spiritual work, we will immediately understand why so many women DON’T do this work. Our culture is not kind to loud women who take up space. There are real social consequences for women who make a stink. Our society runs on the accommodation of women- it is very invested in ensuring that women continue to accommodate everyone around them.

Don’t expect a reward when you stop accommodating everyone else’s needs and desires.

Expect the opposite of a reward.

Expect for your intentions to be questioned, your concerns diminished. Expect to be called unkind or difficult. Expect to be asked why you are stirring up contention and why can’t you just get over it? You might be called a bitch. Count on being labeled selfish. Especially if you’ve always been accommodating, the people in your life, even those you love most and who love you most, will not applaud you for changing.

There are real costs to speaking up.

But equally, there are real costs to NOT speaking up. These are just more hidden. Sneakier. These costs lurk in the shadows biding their time. They are playing the long game- slowly chipping away at our health, our confidence, our relationships, our capacity for joy and contentment.

It would be so much more convenient if these costs weren’t there at all. If we could just be kind and accommodate everyone else’s desires for the rest of time with no consequence to ourselves whatsoever. This is a lie patriarchy likes to whisper in the ears of women.

This lie is so alluring that many women seem to be operating under the false assumption that there are no costs to chronic accommodation.

It therefore behooves me to un-veil some of these costs.

Call me a bitch if you must.

The hidden cost of resentment in the second shift

Just yesterday I finished reading the book The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild. In the 1970s Hochschild read that the working married woman spent on average three hours doing housework a day, while the working married man averaged 17 minutes.

The women who worked full time were putting in a first shift at their paying job and then a “second shift” at home after. But Hochschild wanted to know how couples felt about the second shift- what was going on in their heads to manage this inequality?

Thankfully Hochschild was a sociology professor at UC Berkeley at the time- a very convenient profession for her to find answers to her questions.

From 1980-1988 she interviewed 50 couples to see how they divided the second shift and how they felt about it. For 12 of the couples, she went deep. Over the course of eight years, she was in these 12 couple’s homes interviewing them and observing their division of labor- who was cooking dinner, watering the plants, washing the car and giving the baby a bath? And how did they both feel about it?

Each chapter in The Second Shift follows the story of one of these 12 couples.

Her findings?

Combining paid work, housework and child care, Hochschild discovered that women on average worked 15 more hours per week than men. Adding up those 15 hours over the course of a year, the women worked a full extra month of 24 hour days compared to men each year. 

I want to zone in on just one of the wives in the study to examine the hidden cost of accommodation. Her name is Nancy.

Nancy considered herself a feminist. She wanted an equal marriage. Her husband Evan also said he wanted an equal marriage, but when it came to sharing the load, it just wasn’t happening.

Two months after their first child was born Nancy reached a breaking point. Something had to change. She made a plan. She wrote lists. She confronted Evan. Her new plan included them taking turns cooking dinner every other night and equally sharing the laundry.

On Nancy’s night to cook, she would cook, but on Evan’s night to cook, he wouldn’t. He would forget or he was too tired. The same thing happened with the laundry. They began fighting a lot.

After months of frustration and fighting, Nancy gave up. She conceded. She would accommodate Evan’s desires and neglect her own by doing the second shift of cooking, cleaning and child care alone.

How did she cope? She used a tactic Hochschild found was very common among couples with an unequal distribution of labor- she made up a “family myth.” Everything was fair after all. She just redefined fair. Evan would take care of the downstairs (just the garage) and the dog. She would take care of everything else.

"The Holts presented their upstairs-downstairs agreement as a perfectly equitable solution to a problem they 'once had.' This belief is what we might call a family myth… Why did they believe it? I think they believed it because they needed to believe it, because it solved a terrible problem. It allowed Nancy to continue thinking of herself as the sort of woman whose husband didn't abuse her-- a self-conception that mattered a great deal to her. And it avoided the hard truth that Evan had refused to share. It avoided the truth too, that in their showdown, Nancy was more afraid of divorce than Evan was. This outer cover to their family life was jointly devised. It was an attempt to agree that there was no conflict over the second shift, no tension between their versions of manhood and womanhood, and that the powerful crisis that had arisen was temporary and minor."  - Arlie Hochschild The Second Shift

Cultural norms deeply supported this couple in their delusion. The wife doesn't want to see herself as the demanding nagging wife. The husband doesn't want to see himself as the lazy dullard husband. 

She didn't want to give up her feminist ideals. He didn't want to give up his traditional ones. They didn't want to get divorced. They were at an impasse- the solution? Nancy would do the physical work of accommodating, and she would also do the necessary emotional work to cope with her accommodation.

The catch? Her resentment required constant management.

"Emotionally, Nancy's compromise from time to time slipped; she would forget and grow resentful again. Her new resolve needed constant maintenance. Only half aware that she was doing so, Nancy went to extraordinary lengths to maintain it. She could tell me now, a year or so after her decision, in a matter-of-fact and noncritical way: 'Evan likes to come home to a hot meal. He doesn't like to clear the table. He doesn't like to do the dishes. He likes to go watch TV. He likes to play with Joey when he feels like it and not feel like he should be with him more." She seemed resigned. Everything was 'fine.' But it had taken an extraordinary amount of complex emotion work--the work of trying to feel the right feeling, the feeling she wanted to feel- to make and keep everything fine. Across the nation at this particular time in history, this emotion work is often all that stands between the stalled revolution on the one hand and broken marriages on the other."

When I read about this “extraordinary amount of complex emotion work- the work of trying to feel the right feeling” without inconveniencing anyone- I immediately thought of Jody Moore the LDS life coach. She earns upwards of $2 million a year helping women do this very same complex emotional work. She sells the very thing that women so desperately want- to have everything be “fine” without having to disappoint or inconvenience anyone.

“You don’t need to change your circumstances, you just need to change your thoughts” is her constant refrain.

No shade to Jody- she is simply a by-product, not the cause of the cultural messaging that women must be selfless and accommodate at all costs. Unfortunately she doesn’t tend to mention any of those costs:

"Codependency not only strains your relationships, it can lead to chronic stress, anxiety, and depression, significantly impacting your physical health... including heart disease, obesity, diabetes, chronic inflammation, and various autoimmune disorders. By neglecting self-care and personal health, codependents often suffer from a weakened immune system, making them more susceptible to illnesses.

The health implications of codependency extend beyond the physical, deeply affecting mental and emotional well-being. Individuals in codependent relationships frequently experience feelings of guilt, low self-esteem, and inadequacy as they constantly prioritize others’ needs over their own. 

This self-neglect can lead to emotional burnout, a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion.” - Brookview How Codependency is Keeping You Sick

The Second Shift tells the story of one wife who collapsed with panic attacks just before her child’s first birthday party. She had been struggling with insomnia, headaches and colds she couldn’t shake. The panic attacks led her to see a psychiatrist and get on some antidepressants. The insomnia led her to a sleep lab where she got a sleep apnea machine and sleeping pills.

Unfortunately the anti-depressants caused further sleeplessness. The sleep machine dried out her nasal passages making her more susceptible to colds and the sleeping pills gave her headaches.

Speaking of this health hamster wheel from hell she hit the nail on the head when she said, “It’s crazy to put working parents in impossible situations where they are bound to go crazy and then act like there is something wrong with them for going crazy.”

So true. We happen to live in a particularly hellish time in history to be a mother where expectations are at an all time high and support is at an all time low.

I’ve written in the past of the curious cover up certain matriarchs are involved in to defend the patriarchy at all costs while hiding their mountain of resentment over the unfairness over their lack of support and the little they have to show for a life time of dedicated service to accommodating the needs of others above their own.

In A Will to Change, bell hooks describes her own mother as a fierce defender of her role as a patriarchal woman. She did all the housework, cooked all the meals, and supported and accommodated a husband who mistreated her only to become an older woman bursting at the seams with resentment. Where was her reward for her lifelong commitment to faithfully fulfilling her assigned patriarchal duty as a doting mother and wife?

The truth is the answer to these daily decisions of ‘when do I accommodate my self and my desires and when do I prioritize those of others?’ are not easy or clear cut. There are no solutions, there are only trade offs. We must proceed with a great deal of self-compassion for the double-bind we are in.

Speaking on the wife Nancy, author Arlie Hochschild said, “She faced the terrible choice between having a stable marriage or an equal one. She chose the stable one.”

Choosing accommodation and stability is of course understandable, and sometimes the benefits really do outweigh the costs, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that there are no costs to chronic accommodation.

Resentment that requires daily management, stress, headaches, a lack of self knowledge and confidence- the costs are many.

Let’s at least acknowledge the costs as we navigate the choppy waters of patriarchal womanhood and grant ourselves and the women in the water with us copious amounts of grace.

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