On more than one occasion I have been advised that all I need to do to make my life easier is to get my husband and children to do more around the house. I find this suggestion irritating in the extreme. It's like telling someone that all they need to do to lose weight is to eat less. In theory, it's simple. In reality, close to impossible.

Sally Owen, who lives in North Carolina, holds down a fulltime job and also manages a household that...read more

Case in point: Putting the toilet paper roll in the toilet paper holder. Why am I the only member of the family who can manage to do this? The fact that this job falls to me is ridiculous and anachronistic - like a joke about women drivers or ads with the housewife putting a roast in the oven for dinner with the boss.

Some household jobs I don't really mind. I do many motherly and wifely tasks, if not happily, then with a certain sense of accomplishment. Dinner made? Check. Laundry clean? Check. Children bathed recently? Check.

But the toilet paper thing is annoying. Was there ever a task so menial, so mundane - and so easy?

The lengths to which my family members will go to avoid this simple task are astonishing.

My husband and daughter come very close. They both will get the roll, bring it into the bathroom and unwrap it. (My son just sits there and yells.) But nobody except me will take that extra step and actually place it in the holder. I find the roll on the back of the toilet, on the floor and even propped up on the very holder in which it belongs.

I have tried various methods to change this habit. First I teased them about their lapses, thinking some embarrassment might do the trick. They all denied the obvious and insisted that they often performed this task. My husband even got a little huffy about it.

Next I tried waiting them out. Surely they'd get tired of hunting around the bathroom looking for the paper, and put it in the holder just for their own convenience. No dice. I waited until we were down to the cardboard tube in all three bathrooms. Nobody even noticed.

Perhaps I could make it even easier for them. In our main bathroom, I installed one of the new TP holders that doesn't even have a spindle. It's just a piece of curved metal. All you have to do is slide the roll onto the stick. It's actually more effort not to put it in this holder.

Strike three.

So I was faced with a choice: If I refused to do it I'd have to deal with unsightly rolls of paper and the unsanitary possibility that they'd been dropped and unfurled across the bathroom floor. Or I could do it myself.

So I've given up. I'll continue to fill the toilet paper holders. But they can cook their own damn roast....read more blogs