All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (5 page)

One could still make the case that smart phones and living room WiFi have been a boon to today’s middle-class parents, because they allow mothers and fathers the flexibility to work from home. The difficulty, in the words of Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, is that they allow “many professionals with children to work from home
all the time.
” The result, he writes in his book
Elsewhere USA,
is that “work becomes the engine and the person the caboose, despite all this so-called freedom and efficiency.” A wired home lulls us into the belief that maintaining our old work habits while caring for our children is still possible.

The problems with this arrangement are obvious. As Jessie observed, trying to do two things at once doesn’t work so well. Humans may pride themselves on their ability to swing from one task to another and then back again, but task-switching isn’t really a specialty of our species, as reams of studies have shown. According to Mary Czerwinski, another attention expert at Microsoft Corporation, we don’t process information as thoroughly when we task-switch, which means that information doesn’t sink into our long-term memories as deeply or spur us toward our most intelligent choices and associations. We also lose time whenever we switch tasks, because it takes a while to intellectually relax into a project and build a head of steam.

And that’s just at the office. It’s likely that our work suffers even more acutely when we’re attempting to do it from home. Disruptions at the office—say, an email from a colleague inquiring about a memo—usually generate little emotional heat. Disruptions from children, on the other hand, often generate plenty of it, and strong emotions aren’t easy to subdue. “There’s a warm-up period,” explains David E. Meyer, an expert on multitasking at the University of Michigan. “And then there’s a calming-down period that happens subsequently. And both take extra time away from getting a task done. The hormones that happen after an emotion linger in the bloodstream for hours, sometimes days.” Especially if the emotion is a negative one. “If the interlude involves anger or sadness,” he says, “or the kinds of emotions Buddhists refer to as ‘destructive,’ they’re going to have a much more negative impact on something you were doing that was emotionally neutral.”

So imagine your child is having a meltdown while you’re working. Or he’s hungry, or skins his knee, or is fighting with his sister. We
physically
experience these disruptions differently. “This is over and above the stuff that happens when you switch between two different windows that are neutral in nature,” says Meyer. “This is emotional task-switching. I don’t know if anyone’s ever used that term, but it has an additional layer to it.”

The result, almost no matter where you cut this deck, is guilt. Guilt over neglecting the children. Guilt over neglecting work. Working parents feel plenty of guilt as it is. But in the wired age, to paraphrase Dalton Conley, parents are able to feel that guilt
all the time.
There’s always something they’re neglecting.

I am now watching this conflict unspool in real time in Jessie’s home office. About thirty minutes after she’s helped Bella set up the movie, Bella walks back in. “Mom? It’s not doing that
brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr—
” She rolls her
r
’s, attempting to imitate the sound of a whirring videotape. They still use a VCR.

“It’s not rewinding?”

“No, it’s not rewinding, and I want to watch Barney again.”

Jessie gets up from her desk and goes to the family room with Bella, giving her a brief tutorial on how to rewind the tape. Then, for a third time, she returns to her office and tries to focus on her work, adjusting the light on an image that won’t cooperate. She still hates it. “I’m afraid this looks over-Photoshopped.”

Bella comes back through the door, this time with tears in her eyes. “It’s still not working!”

Jessie looks intently at her daughter. “Is it worth crying over?” Her daughter, wearing a denim skirt with two hearts on the rear pockets, seems to consider this question. “Take a breath. A breath, please. Okay? Calm down.” Jessie walks into the TV room. “See this?” She points to the VCR and then looks at Bella. “This button makes it go back to the beginning. And then you press Play.”

She goes back to her office a fourth time and takes her seat. She has not spent more than thirty consecutive minutes in front of her computer since she started, and her husband won’t be home until dinner. “Sometimes I notice that when the kids are really overwhelming me, work is a
big
release,” she says. “But at this moment, I’m not trying to get away. I have a real deadline.” She looks up. “I think I hear a baby.” She does. William’s awake. “Crap. I haven’t gotten enough done.” She fiddles with an image onscreen. “This job is very mental,” she says. “When I’m doing a shoot, I’m thinking about light and background and wardrobe and props. When I’m editing, I’m trying to make the pictures look magical without looking over-Photoshopped.” But then she gets lost in what she’s doing, and the kids start to beckon. Like now. A few minutes go by. “See?” she looks up at me, waiting for me to notice what she’s noticing. I give her a look indicating that I don’t. “I keep telling myself,
I just want to edit this set I have open in Photoshop, and then I’ll get William.
” She points upstairs. It’s dead quiet. What she’s noticed is an absence. We were both so absorbed in the photographs that we didn’t realize William had stopped crying.

missing out?

Jessie could defer her professional dreams until her children are older. It’s a trade-off plenty of women make. She could forgo the money, forgo the satisfaction. In so doing, she could at least find relief in consolidating her time and energy into one main project—her kids—and focus on that alone, rather than feel dogged all the time by a sense of guilt.

Or Jessie could make a different choice: she could scale up her business and get out of the house entirely. If she’s going to contribute to the family economy and realize her full professional capabilities, she may as well go all out, right? Then, during work hours, she’s doing work. Not rewinding Barney, not mopping yogurt off the dining room table. Of course, it’s a costly proposition and may simply not be feasible: she’d have to take out a loan to make her business bigger. But it would afford her a better chance to experience flow. She’d be a photographer at work and a mother at home. Sure, the smart phone would still chirp and the inbox would still brim. But at least she’d have a formal division in place.

Jessie has instead chosen the hardest path. She’s trying to do both, improvising all day long as she juggles her dual responsibilities, never knowing when her kids will require attention or when a work deadline will crop up.

It’s a heady question, how women balance these concerns. Recently, the question has found its way back to the center of a contentious and very emotional debate. If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of
Lean In,
you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants. If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for
The Atlantic
in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required.

There’s truth to both arguments. They’re hardly mutually exclusive. Yet this question tends to get framed, rather tiresomely, as one of how and whether women can “have it all,” when the fact of the matter is that most women—and men, for that matter—are simply trying to keep body and soul together. The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in
Missing Out,
is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.

JUST A FEW GENERATIONS
ago, most people didn’t wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest. Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper—these kinds of freedoms were not, until very recently, built into our private universes of anticipation. It’s important to remember that. If most of us don’t know what to do with our abundant choices and the pressures we feel to make the most of them, it may simply be because they’re so new.

The sociologist Andrew Cherlin makes this quite clear in his very readable 2009 book
The Marriage-Go-Round.
In the New England colonies, he notes, individual family members hardly expected time to themselves to pursue their own interests. There were too many children running around to allow anyone much peace and quiet (families in Plymouth averaged seven or eight kids each), and the architecture of the typical Puritan home conspired against solitary endeavors, with most activities concentrated in one main room. “Personal privacy,” he writes, “one of the taken-for-granted aspects of modern individualism, was in short supply.” From the moment of birth, people were enmeshed in a complex web of obligations and formal roles, and throughout their lives, they were expected to follow scripts that helped fulfill them.

It wasn’t until industrialization—and by extension, urbanization—that people began to have more control over their fates. For the first time, droves of young men left the orbit of their homes to find work in the factories of the expanding cities, meaning that they got to choose
both
their vocations and their wives. Women, too, gained a bit more control over their lives as the twentieth century progressed. People are often surprised to hear this, assuming that women had no agency at all until the late 1960s, with the blooming of the women’s movement. But in
The Way We Never Were,
the historian Stephanie Coontz shows that women worked outside the home steadily, and in increasing numbers, throughout the twentieth century. The 1950s, putatively the golden age of the family, were the real anomaly: the median age of women at first marriage fell to twenty (in 1940, it was twenty-three); birth rates increased (the number of women with three or more children doubled over twenty years); and women started dropping out of college at a much faster rate than men.

But by the 1960s, the college dropout rate between the sexes had evened out again, better positioning women for more opportunities in the workplace. The 1960s also brought the Pill, which gave women unprecedented freedom to plan their families (and choose their husbands, for that matter, by allowing them to avoid marriages forced by unwanted pregnancies). Then came the more liberal divorce laws of the 1970s, allowing women the economic freedom to leave marriages that made them unhappy.

The culmination of all these developments was a culture abundant in choice, with middle-class American men and women at liberty to chart the course of their lives in all sorts of ways that historically had been unthinkable. And the liberalization of the 1970s was nothing compared to today’s emphasis on self-realization. “Regardless of their educational level, Americans face a situation in which lifestyle choices, which were limited and optional a half century ago, are now mandatory,” writes Cherlin. “You
must
[emphasis his] choose, again and again. The result is an ongoing self-appraisal of how your personal life is going, like having a continual readout of your emotional heart rate.”

Few of us would want to reverse the historical advance that gave us our newfound freedoms. They’re the hard-won products of economic prosperity, technological progress, and the expansion of women’s rights. My mother had to marry at twenty in order to get out of her parents’ house and into a world of her own. The triumph of the women of her generation was to rewrite this rule—“get un-married and be free,” as Claire Dederer puts it in her beautiful memoir,
Poser
—which made it possible for their daughters to rent apartments, settle into careers, marry later, and even leave those marriages if they didn’t work out.

But these gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.”

If this is how you conceive of liberty—as freedom
from
obligation—then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.

Which leads back to Jessie’s fantasy of getting in the car, pulling onto the highway, and continuing to drive. She can’t, naturally, and never would. That itinerary exists only in her mind. No matter how perfect our circumstances, most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, “learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.” The hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life—no life worth living anyway—is free of constraints.

chapter two

marriage

My wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. “You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”

—Barack Obama,
The Audacity of Hope
(2006)

JESSIE THOMPSON’S ECFE CLASS
was small and intense. Angelina Holder’s, on the other hand, was big and raucous. The women spoke with the ease of those who’d already heard each other’s life stories and conflicts (as in: “You saw what I was like a couple months ago—I didn’t want to be married anymore”). By turns, they encouraged and cut one another off, hoping to build on what previous speakers had said. The energy and goodwill of this group was partly a fluke, I’m sure, but also a by-product of living in the suburbs: these women described more social isolation than their peers who lived in denser areas, and they seemed more grateful to have a regularly scheduled social outlet.

This particular ECFE class included a lawyer, a police dispatcher, a women’s basketball coach, a computer scientist, and a Kohl’s part-time employee. Just over half of the women had temporarily given up their jobs to care full-time for their infants and toddlers; the others worked part-time, trying to balance work and home, which in almost every retelling was like trying to stand on top of a bowling ball.

At twenty-nine, Angie, whom you met in the introduction, was one of the youngest women in the group. She was also one of the few whose husband, Clint, sometimes attended the class, though it met during the day. “Can I go first?” she asked. “These last two weeks have been the worst two weeks of my life. “Eli”—short for Elijah, her older child, three years old—“had the stomach flu, and he hasn’t been sleeping, and I’ve had the brunt of
everything.
I’m the one getting up with the kids, getting them ready, still working, not sleeping, housecleaning.” Her voice quavered a little. “Me and my husband, the relationship is just
horrible
now. He doesn’t understand I’m at my breaking point. Yesterday he had this little stomachache, but I had to do everything still. And I was like,
really?
” Her voice broke. “I mean, okay, you have a stomachache. But who cares?”

She started to cry. “And I’m a nurse!”

It was a deliberate punch line, designed to alleviate her self-consciousness, and it worked. Several women burst out laughing. She joined them and briskly wiped away her tears. “He thinks that just because he works five days a week, from five in the morning until two, and because he takes out the garbage—”

“He takes out the garbage?” interrupted one of the women. “Awesome!”

“—or because he does the snow removal or takes care of the water softener,” she continued, “that I should take care of the kids more than he does.”

“And does he say, ‘Oh, it’s because they’re begging for Mommy anyway?’ ” asked another woman. “Because my husband says, ‘They won’t let me help,’ and I’m like,
If you’ll take the time to do it. . . .”

“My husband has the ‘I make the money, you should do everything else’ complex,” said yet another. “He’s like, ‘I’ve worked all day,’ and I’m like,
Gee, I wonder what I’ve done.
”

“Just, the resentment builds up,” said Angie. “And then I’ll talk to him about it, and he’s like, ‘Well, you need to do this and this and this, and then maybe I’ll feel better, and I’ll take more responsibility for the kids.’ ”

“Does he know it’s not a barter system?” asked a fourth.

“We go back and forth on what we both need,” Angie explained. “And then it’s okay for a few days. But then we’re right back where we started.”

“You,” declared yet another woman, “have to have a ‘Come to Jesus’ with him.”

With that, the matter was settled. The judgment was definitive, coming from her. She was the police dispatcher.

NEXT TO THE ABRUPT
modification of our personal habits, perhaps the most dramatic consequence of having children is the change in our marriages. It can hardly be an accident that the first famous paper to challenge the conventional wisdom about the psychological benefits of having children, E. E. LeMasters’s 1957 “Parenthood as Crisis,” looked at couples rather than mothers or fathers individually.

LeMasters found that 83 percent of all new mothers and fathers were in “severe” crisis. If that figure sounds excessive, that’s because it probably is: no one since has posited anything quite so dire. But contemporary research on the transition to parenthood still yields some pretty sobering results. In 2009, four researchers analyzed the data of 132 couples from a larger study and found that roughly 90 percent of them experienced a decline in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child—though the change, to be fair, had mainly “a small to medium negative effect” on their functioning. In 2003, three researchers reviewed nearly 100 surveys examining the correlation between children and marital satisfaction and found that “only 38% of women with infants [had] higher than average marital satisfaction, compared with 62% of childless women.” In
When Partners Become Parents,
published in 1992, the pioneering husband-and-wife team of Carolyn and Philip Cowan reported that nearly one-quarter of the 100 or so couples in their longitudinal survey indicated that their marriage was “in some distress” when their child hit the eighteen-month mark. “Couples in our study who felt upbeat,” they wrote, “were decidedly a minority.”

The Institute for American Values points out that one is more likely to be happy raising children as part of a couple than raising them alone, and that’s true. It’s also true that most marriages tend to decline over time, children or not. But pretty much all research suggests that, on average, the marital satisfaction curve bends noticeably the moment a child is born. Some studies say that parenthood merely hastens a decline already in progress, while others say that parenthood exaggerates it. Still others suggest that levels of marital satisfaction are a function of how old the couple’s children are, with the early years being an especially challenging time, followed by a period of some relief during the elementary school years, followed by another plunge during the slings and arrows of adolescence.

Yet there’s surprisingly little discussion about
any
of these theories in mainstream parenting books, other than cloying bromides (schedule date nights!). In social science, on the other hand, a couple’s transition to parenthood is one of the rare subjects that elicits intimate details from researchers themselves. Virtually everywhere else,
When Partners Become Parents
is an academic work, a book-length exposition of years of rigorous interviews and data collection. But its opening pages are intensely personal. The Cowans describe meeting as teenagers, marrying young, and having three children in quick succession. “By the time our children were in elementary school,” they wrote, “there was no avoiding the issue: Our relationship was very strained.” A number of friends, they noticed, were struggling too:

As we listened to the pain and disenchantment that other husbands and wives described in their relationships and struggled to make sense of our own, we began to hear a common refrain. We were experiencing distress now in our relationships as couples, but almost all of us could trace the beginning of our difficulties back to those early years of becoming a family.

Before they become parents, the partners in a couple often think of children as matrimonial enhancers, imagining that introducing them into their relationship will strengthen it and give it reasons to endure. And couples with children are, in point of fact, much less apt to divorce, at least while their children are young. But they’re also much more prone to conflict. The Cowans note in their book that 92 percent of their sample couples reported more disagreements after their baby was born. (This pattern isn’t confined to heterosexual relationships either: a 2006 paper reported that lesbian couples also showed increases in conflict once their children were born.) In 2009, an elegantly designed study by a trio of psychology professors showed that children generate more arguments than any other subject—more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, sex. In another study, the same researchers found that parents also argue more intensely in front of their children, with fathers showing more hostility, mothers showing more sadness, and the fights themselves resolving with less grace.

E. Mark Cummings, one of the authors, suspects that the reason for such open conflict is fairly straightforward: “When parents are
really
angry, they don’t have the self-control to go behind closed doors.” And maybe it’s as simple as that. But I have another theory, one that’s born less of quantitative analysis than of personal experience and interviews with strangers: I suspect that parents argue more aggressively in front of their children because children are a mute, ever-present reminder of life’s stakes. A fight about a husband’s lack of professional initiative or a wife’s harsh tone with her daughter is no longer just a fight about work habits or disciplinary styles. It’s a fight about the future—about what kind of role models they are, about what kind of people they aspire to be, about who and what they want their children to become.
Do you want your son to see a father who finds the world an intimidating place and doesn’t have the gumption to ask for a raise? If your daughter turns into a screamer when she grows up, from whom do you think she’ll have learned it?

Whatever the explanation, we know there are many potential reasons for relationship conflict after the birth of a child. Increased financial tensions. A totally realigned social and sex life. The sense that the couple is struggling in this thing—
this huge thing
—alone. This chapter looks at all of these issues, but the one I’d like to start with is seemingly banal, yet nearly universal: the division of household labor. When a child comes along, the workload at home explodes exponentially, and the rules regarding who does what and how often get thrown into tense disarray. These rules are much harder to sort through than most couples realize, in part because there are so few norms about them in a culture where most women now work, but also because they stir up deep feelings that are about so much more than simple attitudes toward chores.

women’s work

The morning I show up at Angie’s home in Rosemount, Minnesota, she too is exhausted, just as Jessie was, but not because she worked the evening before. Angie spent the night alternately struggling with an ailing back and a crying one-year-old, and she had little luck soothing either one. The one-year-old in question, Xavier (“Zay”), is in her arms as she opens the door (“he’d cry if I put him down”), and Eli, her three-year-old, is eating dinosaur oatmeal on the back deck. We walk outside to join him. He’s a serious young man, thoughtful and focused and sporting an awfully spiffy crew cut. Angie rubs his head and tells him to hurry up. A few minutes later, the four of us pile into the car and head to Little Explorers, a local summer program that meets twice a week.

As was the case with Jessie, I haven’t seen Angie since her ECFE class a few months ago. And like Jessie, Angie talks about the challenges of her life candidly and without self-pity. But that’s not the reason I’m here. I’m here because Angie and her husband, Clint, both do shift work, and shift work considerably aggravates the challenges of keeping a marriage intact while raising small children. It makes each parent feel like a single parent, with each tending separately to the kids and then heading off to a job without any help from the other. The arrangement is a formula for exhaustion, and it creates a scarcity economy on days off, pitting spouses against one another over who gets the easier assignments on the to-do list and who gets the spare hour for a bike ride or a nap. Each parent is convinced that he or she has had the more difficult week. “We’re in the same family with two different lives, two different views, two different opinions,” Angie tells me. “What I think is the situation and the hard parts, he doesn’t always.” And vice versa.

What’s interesting is that many couples with young children say they’re leading separate lives, even if their schedules are synchronized: they each take different children in the mornings and evenings; on weekends, they split carpooling and chores. The difference is that it’s structurally predetermined in Angie and Clint’s case. In their situation, many couples can see the same crude outlines of their own, but magnified to the power of ten. “Right now our life is such fragile chaos,” says Angie. “If there’s something a bit over the norm—Zay not sleeping at night, the dog getting sick, my back going out—it throws everything out of whack.”

At the time of my visit, Angie was working every other night as a psychiatric nurse, leaving home at 2:30 in the afternoon and returning home around midnight. Clint, meanwhile, worked five days a week as the morning manager of the Avis and Budget locations at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. Every day, he rose at 4:00
A.M
. and every day, he returned home at roughly 2:15
P.M
. Several times a week—like today—Clint and Angie cross paths for only fifteen minutes.

Angie and I drive Eli to camp. As we’re getting into the car, I ask Angie how things have been since her ECFE class a few months earlier, when she seemed so distraught. “Last night, Clint and I got in a bit of an argument, actually,” she answers. Her blue eyes are surprisingly alert for a woman who slept only two hours the previous night. “I asked him for help with the dog,” she explains, “and he was like, ‘Don’t look at me!’ ”

The puppy, Echo, was her idea. She thought the kids would love to have a dog, and she was right. The trouble is, Clint thought house-training a new dog was crazy at this stage in their lives, and he was right too. “So I said, ‘Well, then
you
can get up at night with the kids,’ ” says Angie. And he did, for a while. “But then the baby had a screaming fit at 3:00
A.M
.,” says Angie, “and that was me.”