It's a television stereotype - the nagging wife and her reluctant husband. In the media, the wife asks too much of her overburdened husband, who rolls his eyes at the camera. But in real life, it's not always that way.

I grew up in a house with two very motivated parents. My friend who lived across the street used to joke that everytime she came over something had been renovated or redecorated. This was very close to the truth. My parents mowed, pruned, painted, rearranged, and redecorated on a nearly continual basis. As a result, their house and yard always looked (and continues to look) very nice.

My parents seemed to be equally interested in keeping their house in this particular way. My dad would work long hours at the office and my mom long hours caring for her children, but I don't think either of them nagged at the other to get things done. They just did it.

Imagine my surprise when I got married and found out that the nagging wife/reluctant husband thing was NOT just a media stereotype. I also learned that in the real world, the level of burden the "poor" husband is enduring isn't really a big part of the deal.

My husband does various things around the house, and if I'm really overwhelmed myself, he does more than his share. Since I've been pregnant, he's done a particularly good job of pitching in. But if I ask him directly to do certain tasks, he absolutely will not do them. For example, we've had a light in our dining room out for probably six weeks. It's one of many in a light fixture, so it's not like the room is dark or anything. But it's noticeable and annoying. At five months pregnant, I'm not thrilled with the idea of perching on a chair or the top of the table to fix it. But I can't get him to do it. For some reason he can never do anything at the time I ask him to do it. He always says he might do it later (he's learned to not say that he WILL do it later, because I remember those things) and then I think he pretty much forgets.

More frustrating is our lawn mowing situation (or lack-of-lawn-mowing, as the case may be). We have a front yard that literally takes ten minutes to mow (and that counts getting out the mower and pushing it around the house and back to the shed). Our backyard is covered with mulch, so there's no real mowing there. Yet my husband needs the Earth to move and Hell to freeze over in order to mow.

I hate having my lawn look like a jungle. Now, I'm no neat freak. I spent the first nine years of our marriage rarely cleaning house, since I had four dogs and I was focused on training and competing with them. But I have always been ashamed to have people see a dirty house. I managed this conflict by never having people over. It literally took a day of both husband and I working in order to get the house "guest clean." We did it when we needed to, but that was rare. We both worked full time, I was practicing most nights, and competing most weekends, who had time to clean? And besides, with four dogs and sand for a backyard, it just got dirty again in a minute anyway.

But I always wanted the outside of the house that people could actually see to give the illusion that we were reasonable, clean people. So husband and I have always had a war over the front yard. Every summer, it was a battle - me nagging, him not mowing. It sucks.

As my life has changed, so have my standards for cleanliness. I now have a small person on the floor and I want his friends and our family to come over. I also no longer have a full time job, only one of the dogs competes, and we've adjusted our lives to make things as easy to clean as possible (mulch over the sandy backyard, terrazo floors, leather furniture, and so on).

Fortunately, I believe that husband has also come to appreciate living in a house that doesn't require you to dust the sand off the sheets before you sleep at night. But his standards are still WAY below mine. And there is still the matter of the yard.

I told him that this summer, I wasn't going to nag. It is going to get done or I'm going to try to find some kid to pay 20 bucks to every week or so to do it. Not that we have the 20 bucks to spare when we could technically do it ourselves, but hey, I'm tired of struggling over this. He said he promised that I wouldn't have to nag him over it this summer, and I've held him to that. I've bitten my tongue more than once. The lawn is currently about six inches long in spots, and if something doesn't happen this weekend I'm going to jump out of my skin.

I'm not someone who normally discusses my marital issues with anyone, but somehow my two mom friends and I began talking about this subject today. I was stunned to find that they are suffering from exactly the same issue! In fact, one of them, who is due to have her second child in late August, was discussing how she recently wound up scrubbing the entire porch herself, and how her husband was so bothered when she had to rouse him off the sofa in order to help her move a heavy piece of furniture. We shared stories of climbing atop furniture and summoning up more strength, knowledge, and experience than we thought we had in order to spackle, hammer, move, and hang. I was amazed to hear that these ladies had actually experienced the same difficulties that I did in terms of motivating their husbands to do household chores that were much more difficult for women than they would have been for men (we are all significantly smaller than our husbands).

I thought it was my own husbands spark of passive aggressiveness that caused him to drag his feet on certain tasks (or to do half-assed versions of others - on trash day, why is there always some trash that doesn't get taken out?). If that's the case, then there's A LOT of passive aggression in husbands these days, if my friends are a representative sample.

Here's the final, most interesting point. When the wives in many cases finally step up and do the task themselves, the husbands get angry! When they come home to find the curtains hung, the towel rack fixed, or heaven forbid, the lawn mowed (which only happened once - I'm no longer strong enough to get the mower started or else my pregnant butt would be out there mowing), they complain! "I was going to do that! I said I'd do it!"

What the hell is that?

So, husbands out there - can you enlighten me? Is this a controlling behavior - the husband uses that passive aggression to frustrate the wife, but when she gets the task done some other way the the husband loses his power and he's pissed? Or does the whole them stem from procrastination and then guilt? Maybe today's husbands aren't angry as much as they are lazy, or something. What do you think?

Note - I'm sure there are some things that we wives ask our husbands to do that we really could do ourselves. For example, I COULD (and sometimes do) take out the trash. But, quite frankly, I feel like since every other household task seems to be my responsibility (I'm not sure my husband has cleaned a toilet more than twice in 11 years) I just feel like something has to be his job. I mean, he "helps" with some of the work (if I ask him to swiffer the floor so I can take a shower, for example, he will), but why is the swiffering of the floor MY job that he has to HELP me with? Why is it MY dishwasher that needs to be emptied, MY floor that needs to be mopped, MY laundry that needs to be done, and he gets to HELP me with it? And it's been this way since I made more money than he did, so it isn't just because I've been working part-time away from home (squeezing in freelance writing whenever I can) and technically don't have a full-time job that has made me the manager of all things "house." Does anyone see where I'm going with this?