Unfinished Business (17 page)

In her 2014 bestseller
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
, Jennifer Senior points to the confluence of several factors—Americans having fewer children, women having more control over their reproductive lives thanks to widely available contraception, and parents having children later than they did in my mother's day—as reasons why benign neglect went out of style.
From 1970 to 2006, the proportion of women having their first child after the age of thirty-five increased nearly eightfold. “
Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts,” Senior writes, “we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives.”

If I am honest with myself, the hardest emotion to work through when I heard our son call for Andy rather than for me was not guilt but envy. Even with all the rewards of my career, I would still like for them to call for me first. As the psychiatrist Andras Angyal writes, “
We ourselves want to be needed. We do not only have needs, we are also strongly motivated by
neededness
.” Mothers have gotten that special rush for years when a child reaches for us and says no one else will do; the question is whether we really want or are willing to share that role with others.

Katrin Bennhold is a young journalist whom I met over a decade ago. I was immediately impressed with her intelligence and drive; I then followed her columns in the
International Herald Tribune
and agreed to occasional interviews on foreign policy issues. Over the years she married and had two daughters. A year after I published my
Atlantic
article I was delighted but not surprised to read her reflections on exactly the question of who gets to be the most needed parent.

Bennhold won a Nieman fellowship at Harvard, one of journalism's most prestigious honors, which allows the recipient to
spend nine months in Cambridge. Nieman fellows include a wide roster of the world's top journalists in their ranks; traditionally a male journalist would pack up his wife and children, if he had them, and head for Harvard's ivy-covered halls. In Bennhold's case, however, her husband had a job in London that he could not leave, nor could she manage to care for their two daughters on her own in Cambridge. So she did what I did when I went to Washington: she moved for her job and left her husband as primary caregiver back in London.

On her trips back home, she found that her husband understood the challenges of parenting in a new way, including the “leaden fatigue” of staying up all night with a child and then going to work the next day. “But he also gets the power of being The One—of being the ultimate source of comfort for a child.” She, in turn, now knows “the sting of rejection when a child strains to be soothed by the other parent.”

Bennhold also knows, as I do, the power of being liberated to pursue your career goals full-time, “the freedom of not being responsible on a day-to-day basis, of being the scarce parent, the fun-time parent rather than the one in charge of brushing teeth or disciplining.” She is honest enough to admit that she used to think “that because I gave birth, the bond with my children was something my husband—always a very involved father—could not quite match.” She has now concluded that “responsibility and time, not gender, determine the depth of the bond with a child.” In addition, she and her husband “have become more equal” by each “slipping into the opposite gender's role.”

I would agree on both counts. It is still unquestionably important to me that our sons turn to me first on some things; I specialize in emotional issues and moral dilemmas. My personal balance between competition and care meant that I came home from D.C. so that I could still be part of our sons' lives enough to
know when and how I could help. That's simply part of what makes me whole, just as it is important to me to be there for my own parents, my siblings, and my close friends.

Overall, however, I have to accept that if I'm going to travel as much as my career often demands, then Andy is going to be the anchor parent at home. I remind myself that my father was often gone when I was growing up, yet he and I are very close. But I also tell myself that our sons are lucky to have close relationships with both of us and that I am privileged to have both a career and a family I love.

My experience, like Katrin Bennhold's, can't be said to reflect a universal truth. But being needed
is
a universal desire and the traditional coin in which mothers have been compensated. If we accept that trade-offs are necessary for women if they want to reach the top of their careers, even if they have money and choices, and if we're prepared to let men be equal caregivers just as we insist on being equal competitors, then we have to be very honest about our deepest needs and desires. It is one thing to let go of the housekeeping. Quite another to relinquish being the center of your children's universe.

S
HORTLY AFTER MY ARTICLE IN
The Atlantic
came out, I met a young woman outside the CNN studios in New York who recognized me and thanked me for launching a conversation about work and family. We talked briefly about the importance of having an equal partner, but she then wrinkled her nose at the idea of a “house husband, a man doing the dishes.” Her reaction cuts to the heart of the continuing inequality between men and women.
A woman can drop out of the workforce and remain an attractive partner. For men, that is still a risky choice. Though we may be more welcoming to stay-at-home dads than we used to be, we're certainly not at full equality yet.
In 2010, when Pew Research asked respondents if it's very important for a man to be a good provider, 64 percent of women said yes; when they asked the same question about women, only 39 percent of women said yes.

Young men are keenly aware of the gap between what many women say they want and what they choose. In
The End of Men
, Hanna Rosin quotes David, a twenty-nine-year-old with a master's degree, talking about the idea of a stay-at-home dad: “
Yeah, he haunts me. It doesn't matter how Brooklyn-progressive we (urban, educated men born after 1980) are, we still think he's pitifully emasculated. I'm progressive and enlightened, and on an ideological political level I believe in that guy. I want that guy to exist. I just don't want to
be
that guy.”

Guy Raz, the host of NPR's
TED Radio Hour
, who doesn't work the normal Monday to Friday nine to five, notes that he is often shut down by moms at the playground, where he is usually the only dad among mothers and nannies. “
Even in the most open-minded communities, there's always the snickering and the ‘Mr. Mom' jokes,” Raz writes.

Women define the nature of masculinity as much as other men do. If
they
are going to change,
we
have to find and embrace an image of a man who can care for children; earn less than we do; have his own ideas about how to organize kitchens, lessons, and trips; and still be fully sexy and attractive as a man.

For the moment, however, we are sending mixed messages at best. While almost 3 million people went to the
Atlantic
website to read all or part of my article and
more than 2 million people have bought
Lean In
as of March 2015,
more than 100 million
readers have bought at least one of the books in the Fifty Shades trilogy, a fantasy about a handsome billionaire who plays all sports effortlessly and owns houses, planes, cars, closets full of expensive clothing, and a playroom where he can dominate his girlfriends. He takes care of everything; the entire storyline of these books is about how the woman who will ultimately become his wife and the mother of his children pushes back, but only enough to be able to pursue a modest career of her own, to turn his lust into love, and to ensure that he's kinky enough to arouse but not really hurt her. The media certainly presumes that the readership of the trilogy and the audiences for the movie are overwhelmingly female, but the men in their lives would have had to be hermits to miss the splash it created.

As I see it,
all
of us, men and women, want to be cared for at various times; I have always said that one of the hardest things about being a mom is that when I get sick no one is there to tell me to stay in bed, to put a cooling hand on my forehead. I also certainly love the protective side of the men in my life and am more than willing to let them take charge at times. But the fantasy of a man with all the money in the world who can fix every problem and make everything all right is just that: a fantasy.

It is not surprising that we are confused, just as many men are confused. But we can at least be honest about that confusion. As much as we say we want fully equal partners at home and at work, many of us resist the obvious: if the vast majority of male CEOs with families have wives or partners who are either at home full-time during the caregiving years or whose work flexibility allows them to be the lead parent, then women CEOs are going to need the same thing. We want our own careers. We want families. We want mates who are equal (or perhaps even slightly better) than us in every way. Something has to give.

T
HE FIRST THING WE HAVE
to let go of is our insane expectations of ourselves. University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan show in a time-use study that
women who outearn their husbands do more housework than women who do not. This sounds crazy until we consider the psychological factors. In
Power Through Partnership: How Women Lead Better Together
, Betsy Polk and Maggie Ellis Chotas write:

Consider the women you know. How many are struggling to squeeze even more into already packed lives? How many are saying yes too often and no all too rarely? How many are trying to convince themselves that perfection is just beyond the horizon? All they have to do is work harder, sleep less, push more, smile wider, be tougher, and, then, maybe, they will get there, somehow, someday.

These women—and Polk and Chotas count their past selves among them—“
are striving to be superwomen, summoning up all their energy to reach a mirage of perfection, trying to scale mountains of exalted expectations (their own and those of others) as they struggle to lean in deeper and deeper.”

It is this same superwoman perfectionism that led Debora Spar to write
Wonder Women
.
She says, forthrightly, that her generation of women “made a mistake.” (Spar is only seven years younger than I am, but that means I came of age in the 1970s and she came of age in the 1980s, a crucial difference in terms of the feminist trajectory.) “
We took the struggles and victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal
perfection.” Her entire book makes a powerful and often witty case for letting go of an entire “
force field of highly unrealistic expectations” to be model mother and star employee, to “save the world and look forever like a seventeen-year-old model.”

Spar and I disagree a bit on whether men will ever be able to step up and take the reins domestically as equal or primary caregivers. And I have to say that I personally am simply not a perfectionist; I'm comfortable with the fact that I don't fit the image of the ideal mother because I always valued the side of
my
mother that painted extraordinary paintings far more than the baker of cupcakes. But to women who continually up the ante on themselves, believing that if they just got up earlier or used their time better or tried harder they would somehow be able to make it all work, I say,
Stop
. Let it go.

I
N OUR STYLIZED ACCOUNTS OF
the past, women were homemakers, confident and capable in their own sphere. Men owned the world of work, confident in theirs. Now women are rising fast at work, glorying in their ability to be all the things men used to be and to be just as good or better. A woman who manages to both “bring home the bacon and fry it up,” all while managing a calendar on the fridge that looks like an air traffic control chart, is a superwoman.
She may be completely exhausted and less happy than she was forty years ago, but at least she has that.

We need to step off our new self-created pedestals. When we are feeling overwhelmed, we need to let go and ask for help. It often takes much more strength on our part to acknowledge weakness than to pretend infinite competence.

Some readers who have already abandoned superwoman aspirations
are probably thinking at this point:
Of course! That's exactly what we
have
been asking for. We want the men in our lives to pick up the slack, to be equal partners as caregivers so that we can be equal partners as breadwinners
.

But that's exactly the final place we have to let go. We have been asking for “help.” That means we decide what needs to be done and we ask the men in our lives to help us do it. It's not going to work that way. Real equality means equality at home just as much as at work. It means a whole new domestic order.

Gro Harlem Brundtland was the first woman prime minister of Norway.
As she tells the story, when she was first asked to join the government as the environment minister in 1974, she was thirty-five with four children under thirteen. Her husband encouraged her to take the offer and said he would take care of the kids, on one condition: he would do it
his
way. She knew what he meant; they had both shared various domestic responsibilities, but she had taken the dominant role in the household. Now he was saying he would do it, but not with her telling him what to do. She recalls one of his innovations: when their kids learned to iron, they did it in pairs. He set up two ironing boards so that the kids could talk to each other as they did it, thereby making it a much less onerous task. He also put up a sign that he found in a Virginia airport:
A HOUSE MUST BE CLEAN ENOUGH TO BE HEALTHY AND DIRTY ENOUGH TO BE HAPPY
.