You can have your no-spend dry January; September will always be my new year. It’s the month when I sharpen my proverbial pencil and resolve to be a newer, better version of myself. This year’s resolution is embarrassingly simple: get a hobby.
My choir (Laetare Vocal Ensemble, directed by the talented Dr Róisín Blunnie) broke for the summer in early July. September to June I go every Tuesday and for two hours I sing, breathe and go to the pub afterwards. Now, as the summer stretches on with no summer camps and no rehearsals in sight, I find myself really missing it. Not just the group harmony, but that small, non-negotiable pocket of time that’s just mine.
When I met my husband at 28, he played the occasional five-a-side game. These days he has football twice a week, runs every other day and goes to the gym regularly. Studies have found that after we have children, our relationships become a battleground over who does more parenting and who gets to do more nice things away from the tiny people we’ve made. What am I saying – studies? Honestly, I’m speaking from experience. But yes, studies have also shown that after they have children, heterosexual couples conflict over time use and the division of domestic labour. Time away becomes a form of emotional currency – one we tally jealously to see who’s getting more of it. Men do.
Men’s hobbies often involve leaving the house with expensive gear, and venturing far away for protracted periods
The Gender Equity Policy Institute in the US last year published a report, the Free-Time Gender Gap. It found that women overall had 13 per cent less free time than men, and working mothers spend twice as many hours per week on unpaid household activity compared with working fathers. Another by Pew Research drew on the 2023 American Time Use Survey and found that among employed, married adults with children under 18, husbands enjoyed 25.7 hours per week of leisure. Their wives had 22.8 hours – a gap of nearly three hours weekly. The gulf widens when our progeny are small: with children under five, husbands have 24.6 hours of leisure compared with wives’ 20.1 hours.
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Across the EU, the pattern holds: women’s leisure time is consistently squeezed by the small, invisible tasks of everyday life, though it varies from country to country.
It is also true that men’s hobbies often involve leaving the house with expensive gear, and venturing far away for protracted periods to bike or row, hit balls or bond. Women’s hobbies, conversely, are supposed to slide into the margins of domestic life, like a Billy bookcase wedged into the last free corner. We’re encouraged to read and discuss divorce memoirs, to journal, to do yoga, or knit ironically, or sew bitchily, if only we can master it, quietly, while everyone else is watching The Bear.
It’s been a long time since I had to describe my pastimes to my second-year German pen-pal. Back then, they were swimming, reading, and listening to Oasis and All-Saints. (Lies. My 14-year-old hobbies were actually: sleeping, reading and shit-talking everyone I knew in my diary. In my childless 20s, things were more diverse: reading, playing the piano, occasionally tapping a snare drum, but mostly just saying I played the drums while carrying a pair of sticks around in the hopes of striking up a conversation with the good-looking man in the health-food shop. I went to gigs. I ran long distance. The running thing was like a religion in that I became one of those insufferable people who said things like, “Running? It’s like my religion.”
Now I’m 41. My hobbies are: the aforementioned choir, listening to audiobooks while folding small pairs of socks, drinking wine, looking at pictures of beautiful clothes I can’t afford, and swimming. (The last one doesn’t involve any actual swimming. Mostly I just change into a swimsuit and lower myself into the pool like a giant baby in a bathtub.)
This is it. The sum of my extracurricular self. Recently I started running again. I’m even contemplating a half marathon. My eight-year-old offered to act as my personal trainer. He even offered to do it for free, skipping lithely ahead of me, performing a variety of warm-up moves he’s seen in the prematch segment on Sky Sports. We stopped at the park to stretch and he told me to reach down until I could feel the stretch in the back of my abdominal muscles – you know, the ones in your legs. He’s free, I guess.
This doesn’t factor in the time parents spend curating the extracurricular lives of our offspring. My sister with four children has a house in Kildare – and lives in her car. If adult relationships are mostly sending memes and cancelling plans, sisterhood, for me, can be distilled to shouting through our car’s speakers on the way to or from a drop-off.
And this is where I recently stumbled on to a solution. The real parenting loophole isn’t in the division of chores or hobbies at all, it turns out. it’s all about finding a pastime that your partner and children can do together outside the home, ideally something they are so invested in they can’t bring themselves to let you do your share of the lifting. In my case this is football. Recently my son’s football training has gone from two nights a week to training and matches almost every evening and weekend. This puts my husband in a bind. He’d really like to see me do my fair share, on principle, but much like Erling Haaland’s dad, I’m guessing, he also doesn’t want to miss a moment of his wunderkind shining on the field. Suddenly there are hours of free time stretching ahead of me. I’ll probably spend them looking at coats online.
