The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (27 page)

Michael had yelled at Adrienne for withdrawing from the children, but had dissuaded her from falling into a swoon of maternal guilt and retreating into sculpture and flower arranging. He had hung in there. If a sharing showdown had shocked Michael into a strange journey toward equality, now he was discovering who he could be as a father and husband when he wasn’t being the showcase kid. He was growing into it. Michael’s salary was higher than Adrienne’s, but this wage gap—the same issue that loomed so large for others—didn’t come up in the Shermans’ interviews until I raised it, and then neither had much to say about it. Neither job came first; both came second.

Michael did not struggle with Adrienne; both now struggled against the pressures of their careers. Twins or no, their professional worlds spun on; colleagues wrote books, won prizes, got promotions. Both loved their work, and it took discipline to moderate their ambition. Adrienne was now also part of the tiny world of women professors busily scurrying from one committee (“It’s an all-male committee, we really need a woman, could you … ?”) to another, addressing the endless student demand for attention from “concerned” teachers, and finally settling down at night with
a cup of tea to the “real” work of writing. Some of these women had children, many were waiting. All were overworked and some generated a workaholic subculture of their own, which put pressure on all of them in turn.

If the Shermans had a “family myth,” it was perhaps that Michael’s transformation involved little sacrifice. The twins were one surprise after another. It was so much fun, he didn’t want them growing up so fast. At the same time, it was hard for a straight-A showcase kid, carrier of the Sherman line, to backpedal his scientific career while others around him were making a run for it, like Seth Stein. Holding back at work was a sacrifice. Changing his view of manhood midstream was a sacrifice. These were sacrifices other men—men like Evan Holt, Peter Tanagawa, Seth Stein—did not make, and in the eyes of women like Adrienne, this made Michael rare and precious. In the present-day relational marketplace, his market value was higher than hers. They were off the “marital market,” because they couldn’t imagine life apart; this shielded Adrienne from the unfavorable market realities. But she also felt deeply indebted to Michael for his sacrifices. If there was just a tiny bit of unresolved tension beneath their family myth, it centered on just how grateful Adrienne should feel to Michael for getting a “fair deal” in the second shift.

Meanwhile, both gave up the spectacular career success they might have had for the respectable careers their attention to family allowed. To some colleagues, Adrienne’s half-time schedule made her seem like a dilettante. To half-disapproving, half-threatened neighboring housewives she was one of those briefcase-and-bow-tie women. By working short hours in a long-hours profession, by taking odd times of the day off to be with his kids, Michael was even more anomalous. Both felt morally isolated from their conventional relatives in upstate New York, who continued to write puzzled letters and from many of Michael’s male colleagues who ran through more wives but seemed to get more work done. Neither the old world of family nor their new world of work fit them easily. But they fit each other, and pulled together against the social tide.

During my last meeting with the Shermans, they took turns laughing and telling me this story. The previous summer when they were visiting Michael’s parents, Michael began clearing the dishes off the dining-room table. His mother, who now approved of their arrangement, remarked to his father, “Look how Michael clears the table. Why didn’t
you
ever do anything like that?” Michael’s father replied solemnly, “Adrienne is turning Michael into a homosexual.” “Oh, Jacob,” Mrs. Sherman cried, “don’t be ridiculous!” Adrienne and Michael looked on, laughing and incredulous as Michael’s mother began a sharing showdown of her own.

Art Winfield, a thirty-five-year-old laboratory assistant with a high school education, had only the barest acquaintance with the women’s movement, and, unlike Adrienne Sherman, his wife had never pressed him to do more at home. But Art has a natural interest in children and a passion for being with his five-year-old adopted son, Adam. Art is not the self-consciously celebrated New Man; he is a gentle, easygoing, black man, the New Man disguised as an ordinary fellow.

He was taking night classes twice a week in lab technology mainly at his wife’s urging; she had hoped these classes might motivate him to search out more interesting work. But as he drove to and from his lab, Art’s mind would wander from his job to the bright smile that would light his son’s face when he greeted him at the day-care center door. “My son gets only three-and-a-half hours of my time a day,” Art explained, “so the time I’m with him is very important to me.” Sometimes when he came to fetch Adam at day care, Art lingered for half an hour or so to see a secret hideout, climb a favorite tree, or organize a relay race. During several months when he was on leave from the lab, he stayed longer.

The Winfields needed two salaries to live, no question about it, so Adam had to be in day care. But Art’s feelings about it are
mixed: “Adam’s best buddy, his number-one main man is there [at the day-care center]. But sometimes he gets tired of being there. It’s real hard for a five-year-old kid to spend eight hours away from home. Sometimes I’ll take the day off and take him out of day care and spend the day with him.”

Wherever people found Adam on a weekend—bicycling, visiting a favorite uncle, collecting rocks—they found Art. Friends and relatives called them “the twins.” Basking in the subject of his tie to his son, Art reflected: “We’re affectionate toward each other. Sometimes I wonder if I overdo it. But I think a father-son relationship happens pretty easily.”

Some fathers reach out more easily to a son than to a daughter, but this didn’t seem true for Art. He and his wife, Julia, who is white, are trying to have a child of their own, and when I asked him how he felt about a daughter, he replied:

Art also enjoys children who are not his own, and they flock to him. Tough teenage boys drop by the Winfields’ home in a rough neighborhood of East Oakland to show off their pit bull dogs, and talk. When there’s trouble in the neighborhood, they protect the Winfields’ home. One disturbed boy showed up regularly on Art’s porch. As Art recalled:

Art’s wife, Julia, feels she lacks Art’s gift with children:

Art focuses on children. About tending house he simply feels that “sharing is fair.” As he puts it:

Art does the laundry, vacuuming, yard work, and half the cooking. Julia, a plump, good-natured woman of thirty, appreciates the help. But she also wishes that Art loved his work more. It seems to make her a bit anxious to be more engrossed in her own job as a legal secretary than Art is in his. She doesn’t care about money; between
them she feels they have plenty. It was more a matter of her wanting him to be drawn to his job—because it is good for people to like their work, maybe especially if they are men.

For his part, Art feels that $25,000 is pretty good pay, and that the center of a man’s life ought to be his family. He wonders at Julia’s ambitions for him. Does it mean there is something wrong with him? Does he seem inadequate? He explained to me in confidence that he thought her anxiety might be due to her desire to please her older brother, a conventional man who had never approved of her interracial marriage, or of their house in East Oakland. Art talked the matter over privately with his mother by phone, and finally agreed, without enthusiasm, to let Julia type out a résumé for him and apply for an evening course in laboratory technology.

I asked Art why he thought his bond with his son was so warm, relaxed, and strong. He began his answer with his early childhood. His mother had raised his brother and himself by working as a cook in a child-care center. As he put it, “I could give you the whole black saga—living in a dingy apartment, sleeping in bed with my brother and my mother, rats jumping over it at night.” From time to time, his father would appear at their apartment, argue bitterly with his mother, then disappear. “I think my father helped me know what kind of man I
didn’t
want to be,” Art said. He continued: “He was my biological father. And from the time I was born until I was nine, he was all I had as a father. We didn’t really have the fatherly thing when I was coming up. Because my mother was a very strong force, I didn’t realize I was missing a father.”

When Art was nine, his mother married a longshoreman, a strong, gentle, kindly man with no children of his own. He worked the evening shift and was home days, waiting for Art when he came barreling in the door after school. Coming to trust and love this man was the most important event in Art’s life:

Art spoke of his stepfather with great softness:

Vacations at his grandmother’s farm in Arkansas were vacations “with my father.” As he spoke about this his eyes dampened, as if it was
still
hard for him to believe his stepfather loved him. “I hate to keep saying this,” he said, “but it’s true, he’s a
very
warm man.”

Perhaps Art’s double legacy—a father he did
not
want to be like and a stepfather he
did
want to be like—prompted his gift with children. In his bond with his own adopted son he may be consolidating his own great boyhood victory.

Neither Michael Sherman nor Art Winfield told “pliers” jokes like Greg Alston or waited until the end of a wail of a nine-month-old who’s tumbled. They had their own styles of hands-on parenting.
Michael Sherman and Art Winfield differ in how they arrived at a comfort with it. Michael backed in, starting with housework and moving to child-rearing. Art stepped forward into it, starting with his feeling for Adam and quietly extending a principle of justice to housework. Fifty-fifty meant slightly different things to each; for Michael it was a way to “be fair to Adrienne,” for Art it was a way of “being a number-one Dad to Adam.” The results differ too: Michael is as much the primary parent to the twins as his wife; Art seems slightly more involved than his.

Certain motives forged in boyhood made them want to be the “New Man.” Both had grown up in largely female worlds; both had reacted against “bad” fathers, and neither had grown up as what they imagined to be a typical male. Even as a teenager, Art had been unusually good with small kids, which past a certain age among teenagers in East Oakland was unusual. Michael had never felt like a “typical boy.” He didn’t reject things masculine; he got along with the guys at school. But he didn’t feel the most interesting things went on in the male world or that the most interesting people were there. In truth, Michael hadn’t outgrown a traditional male identity; he’d never had one. In his high school gym class and later during basic training in the army, much of the time he felt he was acting the male role. It was as if he had grown up speaking a foreign language, fluently and without a noticeable accent, but a language not quite his own. As he put it, “I was always the guy hanging around the edge of the football field.” Different motives animate a way of seeing manhood and these private motives animated theirs. So when the door of history opened, when the culture lit the way, when the demands of two-job life called out, they wanted to walk in.