It takes my grandpa at least two minutes to pull a Saltine out of the plastic – this is impressive compared to him performing other domestic duties …

To scramble an egg can take up to 30 or 40 minutes, to heat dinner usually takes the same length of time. Grocery shopping, vacuuming, cleaning a spill, and all “more advanced” cleaning duties are not even in his job description. My mom finds this maddening, my grandma expects it, I find it endearing.

Now don’t judge my grandpa, as this has no reflection on his talents. If you want him to fix a kitchen sink, build a fence, install a water heater, construct a bird feeder, or any type of handiwork, he is your man. And for my grandparents this balance works. Never has my grandma had a broken garbage disposal without it being fixed 30 minutes later, if she wants new white shelves above the TV, three neatly placed white shelves are up the next day. Just the same, my grandpa has a hot meal three times a day, the carpet is always clean, the sheets washed, the kitchen tidy, and the cookie jar aplenty. The only time there ever are issues is when one of them goes off balance, like in the current case, when my grandma is semi-bedridden after knee surgery.

The last two mornings I’ve gotten up and first thing walked down the street to their house. I’ll scramble an egg, wash the counter and floor, possibly pull out the vacuum, start a load of laundry, start a grocery shopping list, take the dog out for some exercise -- all in under 40 minutes. Then the bigger tasks like grocery shopping and going to the bank are still done in less than 60 minutes. Tasks like these would take my grandpa days, or possibly -- and more than likely -- never all be completed. Now, as an XY chromosome, and a highly-domestic personality, I find joy in this. I can’t change a tire, I’m not the biggest fan of mowing the lawn, and if you told me to fix a toilet I would cry. But ask me to polish a wood floor, make a decent meal, and sew a rip in a pair of jeans, and I put on a little music, cheerfully getting to work. Despite this, I realize not all men and women are so keen on their exact gender roles, and in today’s society the extreme dependency on each role is more or less a rarity. Yet for my grandparents, this isn’t the case.

While I understand the frustration my grandma must feel when it takes my grandpa 30 minutes to fry her egg, she also feels lucky that she has him to try to help her when she’s sick. Though I find a flicker of humor in it all, I go back to the word endearing, as watching him clumsily get her a cracker and stiffly put the long white sock on her bad leg is real love. Sure he can’t really do it, he may burn things, under or over feed her, and scrunch her toes as he fights with the sock, but he overcomes his unnaturalness toward domestic duties because he loves her, and because of that, it wouldn’t be natural to do anything else.