The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (16 page)

There is a round of sympathetic nods and no sign of surprise. “It’s alright to take time off to baby a client, just so long as it’s not your
own
child,” says a divorced mother of two. Another mother tells about the time her boss invited her and her husband for dinner: “I asked if I could bring my daughter, explaining she was quiet and would probably sleep. He said no. He has a teenage daughter himself; he should know what it’s like to have a child. But I think his former wife brought her up.” Heads shook as if to say, “Boy, what a world.” After a pause, one woman observed, “I think they hand-pick management for their antifamily attitudes.”

When I visited Ann at home, I met the Myersons’ oldest daughter, three-year-old Elizabeth, an outgoing child dressed in a ruffly skirt, with long red curls and a bad cold. She quickly recruited me to a game of cooking chicken paprika. The Myersons’ second child, Nora, a twelve-month-old, was wide-eyed and fuzzy-haired, toddling, falling, and squealing with delight at her new walking legs. The phone rang: it was a woman who worked for Ann at the office. When Ann hung up she commented, “That woman calls almost every other day, around dinnertime, or on Sundays, about something to do with work. Or else she catches me at work at five-thirty just when I’m packing up to leave. She’ll say: ‘Oh, I forgot you have to take care of your kids.’ She’s thirty. She’s single, no kids. I’ve asked her to stop calling me at home but she won’t. Maybe she
can’t.
It’s annoying but it’s also sad.” Looking at her two young children, Ann said with feeling, “I wouldn’t trade my problems for hers.”

At the same time, caring for two small children and working full time has become an unbearable strain. When I visited Ann at home one evening, Robert was away on a trip, as he usually was two or
three days a week. Ann had raced in the door at 5:58, “because my baby-sitter turns into a witch at six.” Ann explained, “Sometimes I bargain with her, ‘I’ll ask for sick leave on Thursday if you let me come home half an hour late this week.’ But she works an elevenhour day as it is, I’ve had a series of disastrous baby-sitters, and I need to hold on to her.”

As Ann prepared dinner, she patiently addressed a series of slightly anxious requests from Elizabeth: “I need Kleenex. I want to take my leotards off. I’ve pooped in my pants.” Since the last baby-sitter left, Elizabeth has begun acting like a baby again, soiling herself and waking at night. Ann said, “Last night I counted eight times. And the baby wakes up twice a night too.” Utterly exhausted at the end of her day, Ann only answered Elizabeth’s requests without initiating much play or talk. The more Elizabeth sensed this, the more she thought of something to ask for: “I need a drink. This isn’t the right book.”

Ann was a gentle, loving mother and right now she was doing her best. But for the moment, she was only giving Elizabeth a promissory note of better things to come later. Their request-answer conversation reminded me of other end-of-the-day, emotionally thinned-out times when a tired mother hurried her eager children through their bath—“Quick. Quick. Let’s see who’s the first out!” Such moments reveal the emotional cost of fitting family life into a second shift in an era of social transition. Ann was looking for a way to avoid this cost.

Later, when the baby was asleep and Elizabeth was getting to stay up late in her bed, listening to a story on her tape recorder, Ann reflected: “I don’t know what I did wrong, but I don’t like what’s going on at home. My husband is terrific. He’s generous. He’s cooperative. I’ve had all the help money can buy. I’ve had a fifteen-minute commute and it
still
hasn’t worked out. I feel like a failure. How do single mothers cope when someone with my advantages can’t?”

Over the past three years, Ann had tried nearly all the strategies working mothers use. She worked a 7:45 to 6:00 workday and
then kept Elizabeth up until 8:30 to spend time with her (a supermom strategy). She’d turned over a great deal of care to the baby-sitter, reducing her notion of how much time her children needed with her or her husband (redefining “needs” at home). She’d cut back her mental commitment to work (curtailing work). She cut back time with old friends, seeing them only in the friendly chaos of children’s company (redefining personal needs). Even so, life couldn’t go on like this.

Yet it wasn’t easy to quit; her career had long been basic to her identity. A brilliant and hard-driving student, Ann had worked since she was fourteen, developed an ulcer by eighteen, and worked her way through college and graduate school by twenty-six. Work had been a refuge from a lonely social life and a source of great pride. So when she had taken maternity leave to have her first child, she felt suddenly uncomfortable at home. She mused, “Even though I had a newborn, I was still ashamed not to be working. Carpenters were remodeling the house. I had boxes of my mail delivered to my house because I didn’t want the construction workers to think I was just a housewife.”

By the time I visited her a month later, Ann had quit her job without betraying to her employer that she needed time with her children. She explained: “I would lose every shred of credibility with my male colleagues if I told them. In their world, needing time with children doesn’t count as a real reason for any decision about your job. So I told them my husband got a more lucrative offer in Boston. They understood that. They said, ‘Oh, Boston. That sounds good.’”

At our first meeting at the moms’ group, Ann told the other women: “Robert easily does half the work at home, with one exception—
I plan. I like the control. But he keeps doing errands as long as I hand them to him. He’s very unusual.”

Yet when I met Robert he described their arrangement differently and, I think, more accurately: “We’ve achieved a balance—three to two in Ann’s favor, just because I work away so much of the time. But when I’m home, I do more than half the cooking.”

Even this description slightly misrepresented the extent to which Ann carried the second shift. Robert was a handsome man of medium height who walked briskly and talked with gusto. When I met him (I was on the floor by the playhouse making “chicken paprika” again with Elizabeth), he thrust his hands in the pockets of his green trousers, rolled back on his heels with a proprietary air, and said, “How about some chocolate sauce on that chicken?” After the morning errands, and a moment of rest, he explained to me:

Robert spent longer hours at work than Ann, and his work mattered more to them both. Ann did more at home. Each contributed to the overall well-being of the family, but in different ways. Robert found more time for model trains and exercise than Ann and read more. “Sometimes,” Ann said, “Robert gets into a
good book, takes it into the bathroom, and emerges forty-five minutes later, unable to put it down.” Ann had a list of books she had no time to read. But she did not in the least begrudge Robert his good book—at least not on her good days.

Ann thought that one reason she took primary responsibility in the home was because she naturally noticed things:

Though Ann and Robert had lived in this two-story ivy-covered house for two years, it looked like they’d moved in last week. Few pictures hung on the walls. The living room was bare of lamps, chairs, plants. They’d bought no furniture—the couch and two chairs were borrowed. “It bothers me but it doesn’t bother Robert,” Ann explained. Yet Ann was so preoccupied with the children and her job, she’d ordered such things as curtains but hadn’t kept after the person from whom she ordered them. The house told a story of Robert’s friendly detachment and Ann’s continual overload. Having moved a great deal as a child, Ann wanted a “homey” house that she could live in a long time. She even referred to this nearly empty house as their “retirement home.” She guarded her sense of a real home, real meals, almost the way an ethnic group in danger of assimilating to the dominant culture protects a language or cuisine in danger of disappearing. A mobile, urban life and demanding career system was fast beating that old-fashioned female culture into retreat. In the meantime, the Myersons intended to move into their house—to claim it, to hang a hat, to make a home—when Ann got time.

Their arrangement was a common and honorable one, but it didn’t involve sharing the second shift. I began to wonder why Ann so genuinely felt she and her husband did share this shift. The picture of their domestic life didn’t seem unusual to me—only the fact that Ann
thought
Robert shared.

Ann’s belief that Robert shared was a minor and commonly shared myth, not on the order of Nancy and Evan Holt’s myth of the equitable “upstairs-downstairs” arrangement, but a myth all the same. Ann believed her husband shared because she wanted to be part of the “vanguard” of couples liberated from tradition. But she also felt it was “natural” that, as a woman, she manage the house, and suffer a greater conflict between work and family than her husband did.

Despite the fact that Robert had the time Ann herself lacked for model trains and reading, Ann genuinely
felt
that Robert shared the second shift for another reason: her deep gratitude for the many
other
ways Robert was more “advanced” than other men out there.

For one thing, when Robert was home and not tired, he participated wholeheartedly. One Saturday, I went along with the Myerson family as they shopped for a baby jogger, a bureau, and jogging shoes for Robert. I watched as they danced in their bare living room to “Rock Me Amadeus,” made espresso in the kitchen, played in the park, and had dinner with close friends who had young children. Throughout this round of activity, Robert chatted exuberantly to each child. As he drove their Jeep from errand to errand, he reached back a hand to pat the baby each time the car stopped at a red light. Throughout the day he hugged them, petted them, and engaged them in a warm, energetic way. When Ann said Robert did 50 percent, one thing she meant was that when he was there, he was fully there.

Of the two parents, Robert was also more indulgent, perhaps because he was away so much. When he was waiting in line to pay for his shoes, Elizabeth dashed excitedly around a rack of skirts. At first he was amused, then for a while slightly anxious as others
in the checkout line began to notice a little girl ducking in and out of the hanging clothes. Only when customers began to openly stare did he run after her. When they returned, he confessed, “She wouldn’t do that with her mother.”

Parenthetically, Robert also exhibited a slightly different style of parenting. When they were buying a bureau, he joked to Nora, “I’m going to shut you in this drawer and leave you there.” When Elizabeth started to climb a ladder to get to a tent set atop a bunk bed (they shopped in stores with children’s play areas, so that they could combine errands with fun), Robert unzipped the tent and joked, “We’ll lock you in!” Ann was the one who reminded Elizabeth to take her shoes off, smiled at her in the tent, price-checked the bureaus, and decided which to buy. Later, when they visited their friends, Robert went exploring in the backyard with Elizabeth, while it was Ann who noticed that a neighbor’s child—who had wandered into their friend’s home to join the children’s play—had chicken pox.

Another reason Ann probably felt Robert shared the second shift was that he was more progressive than such men as Evan Holt or Peter Tanagawa about women’s entrance into the upper reaches of the workplace and took pride in not being a “typical male.” When his wife earned more than he, he prided himself on that fact—and was pleased he did. As he said with a twinkle:

Robert was very proud of his wife’s career. “Now that I’ve quit my job,” Ann confided in our third interview, “I’m worried Robert
won’t like it. He doesn’t want me to be a typical wife. I’m convinced that when we get to Boston, he’s going to introduce me by saying, ‘This is my wife. She’s not working
now
but she
used
to be vice president of a large electronics company, and before that …’”