Stepdad: I think I'd rather have a messier house than a stay-at-home wife.
Me: begins to dawdle so I can eavesdrop and hear his reasoning for such a weird thing to say
Stepdad: I mean… what would you do?
Mom: Clean the house, cook. (She doesn't say garden even though she makes time to do that while working full time, I'm sure she'd love to have more time for it.)
Stedpad: I don't think I'd want that.
Mom: What if I wanted it?
Stepdad: long pause I just think you'd be bored.
Evidently he'd be bored if he didn't work. Even though he likes to fix and build things and has a wide range of skills which could lead to hobbies. I have to wonder if that's just a personality thing or if he's one of many who have been brainwashed into thinking work is the only valuable thing people can do with their time.
But to try to project that onto everyone else in his life, that's what gets annoying. My mom makes more than him, she has more education, so I could see him thinking it's somehow wasteful to not use the education and experience to make money. My mom has pretty much always been the breadwinner too, and I think she absolutely deserves to not work if that's what she wants. She's owned her own business in the past, found she could make more money with a few extra certifications, moved across the country several times to work for a better-paying employer and now for one that services a low-income population so she can get some forgiveness on student loans. Those loans will probably never be paid off, she's 54 and retirement is nowhere in sight.
So she probably won't ever have the choice not to work anyway. But to be told that even if she could, she shouldn't, based on some arbitrary feeling that my stepdad “doesn't want a stay-at-home wife” is just bonkers.
Overall I guess he's one of those people that thinks everyone should have to work as hard as he has, even when they don't have to. Earlier in the evening he also talked about how he realized when he had his first child that he didn't have time for video games anymore, and added that my boyfriend and I “don't realize that yet.” We don't have kids yet. Of course we realize that parenthood severely limits your free time, especially in the first few years. But why should we live like we have kids when we don't yet? He complained that he and my mom only have time to watch one or two episodes of a show a week, hinting that we're lazy because we binge watch most days. My boyfriend is between jobs but he's never unemployed for long, and filling out 10 applications a day just doesn't take that long. Apparently he should be spending all day every day filling out applications. When he is working he makes enough to cover us both and doesn't insist that I work. So yes, I spend most of my day playing video games or cross stitching. I mentioned that when I'm watching TV it's almost always just in the background while I stitch, and my stepdad said stitching counts the same as playing video games or watching TV. I get what he means, that it doesn't bring in money. But at least it is constructive, as much so as the koi pond it took him two years to build, and much less expensive.
Maybe he's right that we're lazy. But as for my mom, if anyone deserves to be lazy then she does.