My Son Fired Me From Shower Duty

"I don't want daddy to shower me anymore. Tmr mummy shower me."

That's a direct quote, delivered tonight by a person who is not yet three years old, with the flat administrative tone of someone reading out a roster change. No anger in it. He'd just decided, the way he decides which cup he wants.

He's asleep now. I'm not.

I've showered that boy since he was an infant. We didn't have a nanny, so there was no one to hand him to and no one to learn from except the internet and my wife, both of whom were making it up too. I remember the lying-down phase, when he was small enough to fit along my forearm and I was mostly worried about the water pressure. Then the sitting phase, in one of those plastic tubs, where the job was mostly containment. Then standing, holding the wall, very serious about it. And now the current phase, which involves me chasing him around the bathroom with a showerhead while he laughs at me.

Three years of that. Nobody ever asked if I wanted the job, and somewhere along the way I started filing it under things I do. A duty. Bath time is mine, bedtime is hers, that's the arrangement.

Four seconds after he said it, I understood I'd had the category wrong the entire time.

Access, not duty. Every one of those nights was a thing I got to do, and the only reason it felt automatic is that it had never once been in doubt. It took a not-quite-three-year-old with a grievance to put it in doubt, and the moment he did, I saw it properly for the first time.

The tell is that you only notice when it's threatened

I think this is the general shape of it, and it's the bit that's kept me up.

Whether something registers as a duty or a privilege has almost nothing to do with the thing itself. It's about whether you can imagine losing it. Anything reliably available gets quietly refiled as obligation, because obligation is cheaper to hold. You don't have to feel anything about an obligation. You just do it and move on.

Which means the reframe is a correction, not a mindset trick or a gratitude exercise. The privilege reading was the accurate one all along, and duty was the error you'd been running on for three years without noticing.

Let me put some Singaporean specifics on that, because abstract gratitude is worthless and I don't want to write a National Day message.

I vote, and I care about voting. But it's a Saturday, there's a queue, there's the ritual complaining about the queue, and it comes around rarely enough that some part of me files it under admin. Something to get done before lunch. I have relatives and friends across this region for whom the ballot is either theatre or unavailable. I know that. Knowing it has never once changed how the morning actually feels, which tells you something uncomfortable about how little the information does on its own.

Here's one I like better, because I didn't choose it at all. HDB has an ethnic integration policy: every block has quotas on how many units each community can hold, so a block can't quietly become an enclave. It's a rule that shaped where my family lived without anyone asking our opinion, and in the abstract that's exactly the sort of thing people grumble about.

And because of it, I grew up next to an Indian family whose auntie made muruku that I have never found the equal of, in any shop, at any price. During Deepavali she'd draw kolam on the corridor floor outside her flat, chalk and coloured powder, an enormous geometric thing that took hours and got walked over by Tuesday. I didn't understand what it was for. I just knew our corridor was better than other people's corridors.

I got that from a housing quota. A rule, on a form, drafted by people who never met us, and it handed me one of the warmest memories I have of growing up.

Where this gets uncomfortable

Now the part that applies at work, and the part I'm least sure about.

Most of us hold our jobs the way I was holding bath time. The tasks are the tasks, the responsibilities are the responsibilities, and it's all filed under things I have to do. Under that framing sits a different set of facts: that the job was chosen and can be left, that there's a legal floor under the arrangement, that discrimination in hiring is something a person can actually complain about to a body that exists. Fair employment rules, notice periods, CPF. Structural things that took decades to build and are completely invisible right up until the day they're the only thing standing between someone and a bad outcome.

I run an agency, so I'm going to be honest about the angle I'm writing from here. I have a direct commercial interest in people finding meaning in their work, and there's a version of this argument that gets used badly: told to someone underpaid and overworked, "see it as a privilege" is just a request to complain less. I've heard bosses say it. It's a cheap move and I don't want any part of it.

So the limit matters. Some duties are only duties. Caring for a dying parent while holding down a full-time job is not a privilege waiting to be reframed, and telling someone in the middle of it that they should feel lucky is an insult wearing a smile. The reframe is something you do to your own ledger, and it stops being honest the second you hand it to someone else as advice.

For my own ledger, though, the test has been useful, and it's a small one: what would I lose if this were taken away tomorrow? Not "should I be grateful", which I've never heard anyone answer honestly, including me. Just: what disappears.

Tomorrow

I don't know how this ends, which is the annoying part.

He might wake up and have forgotten the whole thing, because he's not yet three and the emotional half-life of a grievance at that age is roughly one sleep cycle. He might hold the line and go to his mother. He might do it again next month and mean it more.

What I do know is that I'll be standing in that bathroom tomorrow evening genuinely not knowing whether the job is mine, and that will be the first time in three years I've paid full attention to it.

Which, if I'm honest, is the whole thing. He didn't take anything away from me tonight. He just showed me it was possible, and that turned out to be enough.

I'd rather have learnt it some other way. But you don't get to pick the teacher.