All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (10 page)

My elder daughter, from the time she was eighteen months of age, attended excellent part-time preschools where she painted and played with modeling clay and ate cookies and napped for about $150 per month—the top end of the fee scale. She could have started public school at age three, and could have opted to stay until 5
P.M
. daily. My friends who were covered by the French social security system (which I did not pay into) had even greater benefits: at least four months of paid maternity leave, the right to stop working for up to three years and have jobs held for them.

Meanwhile, a report from Child Care Aware of America notes that in 2011 it cost more for families to put two children in day care than it did for them to pay their rent—in all fifty states.

It’s worth imagining how different Angie and Clint’s lives might be if they were assured access to the same affordable child care arrangements, and if they both knew they could leave their jobs for a year or three without fear of losing their place in the workforce. At the moment, such luxuries are unthinkable to Americans.

Yet they appear to confer true psychological benefits. In a 2010 study, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and four of his colleagues compared the moment-to-moment well-being of women in Columbus, Ohio, to that of women in Rennes, a small city in France. Although the researchers found many similarities between their two samples, the French and American women differed in one very significant way: the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more,
and
they spent a good deal less time doing it. In his 2011 book
Thinking, Fast and Slow,
Kahneman speculates that this may be the case because French women have greater access to child care and “spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities.”

“me time”

Clint is in the kitchen. His mission: dinner. He puts Zay in the Bumbo, and Eli climbs up on the counter next to his brother. “What do you want to eat?” Clint asks. “I can grill some chicken, or we can have some shrimp. . . .” He pulls out a box from the freezer and shows it to Eli.

“I just want to make toast.”

“Toast is a breakfast food. It’s not for dinner.”

“I don’t like anything.”

“This is why you need a nap,” Clint tells Eli, picking him up. Eli holds his father’s face and, for the first time ever, notices his stubble. “What’s that?”

“Hair. I forgot to shave this morning.”

“Why are you wearing it?”

“It just grows. On boys. Right there.” He points to his chin. “Are you avoiding my dinner question? Are you going to eat my dinner? If you do, maybe you can watch one more show.” Eli seems content with this plan. In the meantime, Clint sends him downstairs to clean up his toys.

I ask if this is his usual routine—kitchen prep work first, then some playtime with the boys, then dinner. It has a comfortable rhythm to it, and it’s awfully efficient.

“Pretty much,” he says. He puts away a last glass from the dishwasher. “That way,” he adds, with a mild smile, “later on, I can get in some me time.”

ME TIME.
SUCH A
simple phrase, and yet it reveals a universe of difference between Angie and Clint, and possibly between most mothers and fathers. The majority of parents feel like they don’t have enough time for themselves, but mothers are especially burdened by this feeling.

One can easily see this pattern with Angie and Clint. Clint gets home after a long day, and his goal, quite reasonably, is to get the kids situated and to map out the rest of the evening, in the hope of creating a modest stretch of leisure later on. If that means doing mundane housework while the kids are still awake, rather than in bed, so be it. “Whenever the kids are doing something where I don’t have to interact with them,” he says, “I use the time to do daily chores.”

Something where I don’t have to interact with them
is another telltale phrase. It’s not the sort of phrase that would spring to mind for most middle-class mothers, particularly if they’re in the workforce. Painfully aware of the time they’re
not
spending with their kids, working mothers are more likely to say that they should
always
be interacting with their children once their heels are off. If they’re not working . . . well, why are they at home, if not to interact with their children?

Yet Clint is perfectly comfortable leaving his children to their own devices every now and then, and no rational jury of his peers would declare him unloving on account of it. They would simply say he’s protective of his time.

Angie, however, has no such attitude toward
her
time. Earlier in the morning, as she put Zay down for a nap, I asked if she, too, wanted to try to nap. She swatted the idea away with her hand. “It’s not worth it. I’ll only get an hour, and I need like twenty, and there’s so much to be done here. . . .”

The Cowans have a word for this feeling. They call it “unentitlement.” I thought of it a lot as I watched and listened to Angie. Clint must notice it too. As he’s making dinner, I ask him why he thinks he has more free time than Angie does. “Maybe for the same reason she buys more of the kid stuff,” he answers, after mulling it over. “When she has money, she feels guilty if it goes to her, but if it goes to the kids, it’s good. It’s the same with time.”

This guilt plays out in all sorts of contexts. But the most striking, by far, is the night shift. The next day, when I come to visit at 8:25
A.M
., Clint, who has the day off, tells me that his evening duty went very well and that the kids slept until 7:30. It is only when Angie comes downstairs a few minutes later, showered, lovely, and wearing a cheerful Yoo-Hoo T-shirt, that the picture shifts: Zay, she reports, was up five times. Clint handled the first four episodes. But she got the fifth, which included a bottle, at 3:00
A.M
.

“I don’t think you realize,” she tells Clint as we all head outside to the patio, “how many times I’ve been getting out of bed for the last three years.”

“Sure I do.”

She takes a seat and looks at him skeptically. “Even though you’ve been sleeping through it.”

“Yup.”

“How? Based on how much I complain about it?”

“No. It’s not just based on how much you complain. I absolutely know how much you deal with at night, but—whether or not you’ll like to hear this answer—it’s because you
wanted
it that way.”

Angie gives him a sheepish look. “Because of the whole cry-it-out method that I don’t want to do.”

“Yah.”

Angie says nothing.

“After two years, you let me do it with this one”—Clint points to Eli—“and it was done in two weeks. But you didn’t want to do it with this one.” He gestures at Zay. “You had your method, and I let you have your method, but that method entails getting up very,
very
frequently. I didn’t want to be a part of that, just like you didn’t want to be part of cry-it-out.”

He waits. Angie is silent. Then she makes a face. “I just don’t think that you have the same response that I do to him crying. I get that internal anxiety, that physical
pain,
that
guilt. . . .”

“I understand, it’s a motherly link. You’ve explained that.”

“So I could not be anywhere near it or hear it. Honestly, I would have to set up a cot downstairs in the office, because emotionally, I can’t deal with it. . . .”

“Okay. But I think it’s more like, you want me to endure the stuff that you’ve endured, rather than getting it done.”

Angie doesn’t get angry when he says this. She appears to take it quite seriously. But she’s not convinced. “So last night, after the fifth time, would you have just let him cry it out?”

“No. If you were paying attention, I was increasing the amount of time I waited between each time I went in, which is how cry-it-out works.”

Again, she looks at him skeptically. “Was it working?”

“Yes! I mean, I didn’t have a stopwatch or anything, but yes!”

“So how come, when I started asking you questions about it, you didn’t tell me what you were doing?”

“Because,” says Clint, “you don’t want me to do the cry-it-out method!” He looks guiltily at his toes. “At least this way you perceived it as me being really lazy and not wanting to get up. I can combat that.”

It was easier, in other words, for Clint to leave Angie with the impression that he was a bum than to confess he was covertly sleep-training their child.

There was probably some passive aggression in that choice. But Clint also knew the process would fill Angie with anxiety and self-reproach, and the one thing Angie did not need in her life, clearly, was more anxiety and self-reproach. So he tried to sleep-train Zay on the sly, and then felt guilty the next day because he couldn’t come clean about it. Thinking he would be judged for it, he made the executive decision that it would be better to be deemed lazy than unfeeling. But he
isn’t
unfeeling.

“The way I approach this type of thing,” says Clint, “is the same way I run the house. If I have $2,000, and I need to spend $1,500 on the mortgage and $400 of it on utilities, the $100 left over is going to me so that I can
maintain my sanity level.
And if I have two hours, it’s the same thing. I get ten minutes, regardless.”

“And I don’t take that.”

Clint shrugs. “If
I
don’t take that ten minutes, the quality level of all the rest of it is going to go downhill really quick.”

Zay is starting to fuss. Angie lets him for a second. She’s thinking about this. “But lately I’ve been doing more for myself.”

“Not as much as you could.”

“I think the
want
is there,” she says, “but the guilt holds me back. Like I love to go to Barnes & Noble, I love to go to movies, to be by myself. You know? And yet I don’t take that. . . .”

At this point, I ask her a question: if she said, “Hey, Clint, I need an hour to go to Barnes & Noble or it’s just possible that I’ll go crazy . . .”

“He would say, ‘Fine, go.’ ”

And if she said, “I really need you to take care of the kids 50 percent of the time in general?”

“I think he’d encourage me to do that too,” she says, but Clint’s not even here to hear her. He’s gone inside with Zay.

CERTAINLY, IN SOME COUPLES,
men don’t do their fair share and would never even consider it, no matter how badly their circumstances require it and how far the culture has moved along. But even before meeting him, I knew Clint wasn’t a slacker. In part it was because I knew the long hours he worked, both in the office and at home. In larger part, however, it was because Angie had said so herself, during her ECFE class, after she’d exorcised some of her frustration: “I mean, you’ve all met him! He’s not a bad guy!”

But the world does not make it easy for working parents. And because of that, says Philip Cowan, “you often get all these attributions about what one person will and won’t do.” He and his wife hear litanies of them. “But if you have both the husband and wife in the same room,” he says, “and attempt to get both sides, what gets fleshed out is how complex this is.”

The thing Clint won’t do, according to Angie, is the night shift. But if you ask Clint, he reframes the night-shift dispute in terms of something
Angie
won’t do: sleep-train their children. More generally, he says she won’t take any number of small and reasonable measures to give herself a break. “It’s hard,” he says, “to make Angie want things for herself.”

This feeling is common. To me, it suggests that Hochschild’s observation—that power struggles over who does what in a relationship aren’t just about fairness but about the “giving and receiving of gratitude”—has an added layer today: guilt. Like many women, Angie feels resentment because her husband is not doing enough. But she also believes that
she
is not doing enough, and can never do enough, and that she should be doing everything all the time.

“If I were to say, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a break and take care of the kids 100 percent, but it’s going to be
my
way,’ ” Clint confesses to her at one point, “I’m afraid you’ll be calling the shots from the couch.”

“Well,” asks Angie, “what are you considering
your
way? Is your way turning on the TV and letting them do whatever, or is it taking them somewhere?”

“It’s all those things,” replies Clint. “If I needed to do the housework and get everything cleaned and do the dishes and make dinner and all that, there’s going to be some TV time involved. I’d
occupy
them while you took your break. I’d keep them safe and engaged. But I wouldn’t necessarily
entertain
them.”

This may be the reason Clint believes he does 50 percent of the child care. He counts it as child care if he’s doing one thing and the kids are doing another, so long as they’re safe. Whereas Angie feels obliged to immerse herself completely in their world.

And Angie herself is complicit, to some degree, in this increase in her workload. Before leaving for the hospital, she fretted about the relative state of disorder she’d left for Clint. “He’s going to come home to a crabby baby and a kid who hasn’t napped,” she said, her face bunched in a frown. “I try to get them
both
to be napping when he comes home so that he can have some free time to go to his office or go onto the computer.”

It isn’t only Clint who is protective of his free time, in other words. Angie protects his free time too.

“Sometimes I just assume you should
know
I’m stressed out,” Angie says to him at one point. “You should see me running around, or how I’m acting. And you don’t. And then I get irritated.”

“And that’s the part that I get irritated with,” says Clint. “All you had to do was ask.
You could have just told me.
”

He is right. But asking is easier said than done. Angie experiences home as a video game, a never-ending quest to ward off flying debris. She’s starting at a much higher level of stress. If you’re feeling that stress, it’s hard to believe that others aren’t experiencing the same situation in the exact same way.