Mahjong, Moms, & The Double-Standard Around Hobbies

Imagine this. All the families in the neighborhood have gotten together to hang out on a Saturday afternoon, but instead of a small child constantly asking me for a drink of water or whining about someone else taking a toy they were playing with, I’m sitting with the moms. We’re actually having a conversation where we can complete a full sentence without being interrupted.

Better yet, the dads — usually the ones devoid of any responsibility outside of manning the grill at these gatherings — are taking care of the kids.

That’s the scene that unfolded a few months ago. It sparked a bit of drama in the ‘hood but ultimately led to a series of good conversations about stereotypical gender roles around child-watching and the double standards around having a hobby that takes up several hours at a time.

You see, the moms were playing mahjong, the popular tile-based game that’s swept middle-aged moms like myself (including Meghan Markle!) up into a total tizzy. It’s a centuries-old game that originated in China before making it to the States in the 1920s. Mahjong has been a popular game in the Jewish community since then, and over the past couple of years, it has exploded in popularity.

The goal of the game is to be the first person to match your set of tiles to an allowed winning combination. If you’ve seen Crazy Rich Asians, Rachel and her mother-in-law play the Chinese version of mahjong near the end. To prove a point, Rachel gives her MIL the tile she knows she needs to complete her combination.

I started playing in January this year and quickly became obsessed. I’d been looking for a hobby that involved people, and mahjong fit the bill perfectly. While I consider things like needlepoint and reading hobbies of mine, they’re solo activities. Mahjong is fun, social, and you get to use your brain.

To play a traditional game, you need a group of four people. To try to ensure I’d always have someone to play mahjong with, I had a teacher come and give the neighborhood women a lesson.

My plan worked like a charm. The rest of the moms got sucked in immediately and also developed a major affinity for playing mahjong.

And so, there we were that afternoon, drinking our savvy b with jalapenos, chatting and tossing tiles as they say. The problem that arose, though, is that playing mahjong is a lot like opening a can of Pringles: Once you start, it’s hard to stop. The hours ticked by in a glorious blur, all of us oblivious to whatever kid chaos was happening outside.

Suddenly, the dads were the ones fielding request after request and shuttling kids to the potty. Suddenly, they were the ones not able to conduct any sort of conversation.

The role reversal was stark and eye-opening. Our mahjong session completely removed us from childcare duty and highlighted just how unbalanced the child-watching typically is at these events.

Not that this is groundbreaking, but the Gender Equity Policy Institute reported that, on average, women spend more than twice the amount of time on childcare in a week than men do. In other depressing news, the American Time Use Study they analyzed shows that “women across almost every group studied have less free time than men to socialize, relax, and pursue their interests and hobbies.”

So it’s not totally surprising, then, that the dads were a bit miffed by the turn of events. It’s literally a societal norm that we moms should have been the ones watching the kids, and that playing mahjong was too much free time for us to take.

When it comes to hobbies, men often have ones that take hours and often involve being away from home. Golf is a great example of this. It takes three to four hours to play a round, and then there’s travel time to factor in, too. Before starting to play mahjong, I can’t think of a time that a hobby took me out of the house for that long.

Women, as influencer Paige Turner has pointed out, are more likely to have hobbies that can be done at home. She explains that they’re often hobbies that we can complete in shorter amounts of time or even while watching kids, such as hosting a book club or gardening. Historically, it hasn’t been as “acceptable” for women to be away from their kids and family for long stretches of time, like their husbands might be.

F that, right?

We played mahjong for about four hours that afternoon, and would have kept going had there not been whispers of mutiny.

It was a good lesson for the dads and a good taste of what the moms experience on a regular basis. Since then, we’ve aligned as a group that, while the moms need time to play mahjong, we won’t play it for the entire neighborhood gathering. Just like it isn’t fair for women to be stuck with childcare all of the time, it isn’t fair for men to be either.

We didn’t press pause on our love of mahjong just because we ruffled a few feathers. If anything, seeing the reaction bolstered my resolve to play. Will our mahjong games help shift the narrative on women and their free time? Sadly, probably not… but who knows? If we get all moms to play, maybe we will.

Let me know if you want in on the next game.