The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (23 page)

Parents can offer contact to the child in the very way they talk. Carol could be saying, “You have your gray pants on today,” or “Do you want your apple cut up?” Her voice conveyed a sense of welcoming attachment. She used a “primary parent voice.” Along with making one’s lap available for sitting, or rotating one’s head to keep sensing where a child is, it is this primary parent’s voice
that makes a child feel safe. Greg used it intermittently in the course of the day; Carol used it all the time.

One Tuesday, when Carol was teaching an evening class in a business school, I could hear the garage door closing, and the sound of Greg in the kitchen scraping the pizza pan in the kitchen sink. Soon Daryl came into the kitchen and the two went to watch TV. Once
Mousterpiece Theater
was over and an absorbing documentary about an expeditionary team climbing Mount Everest had caught Greg’s attention, Daryl moved to imaginative play with a car. He began to tell a long tale about a frog going “fribbit, fribbit” in the car. The documentary was now at a dramatic moment when the team had nearly reached the top. The expedition’s doctor was telling an indispensable team member that his lungs could not take the climb. Greg was listening to “fribbit, fribbit” with half an ear. He tried to draw his son’s attention to the program with fatherly explanations about yaks and snow caves, but no dice. Daryl brought out some cards and said, “Dad, let’s play.” “I don’t know how,” Greg replied. “You can read the directions,” Daryl suggested. “No,” Greg said. “Wait for your mom. She knows how.”

During the season when she was working longer hours than Greg, Carol said, “There have been nights when I’ve come home and Daryl’s dinner was popcorn.” “Does he do that as a treat for Daryl?” I asked. “No, just lazy,” she said with a laugh.

Greg was a very good helper, but he was not a primary parent. Many of his interactions with Daryl took the form of inspiring fear and then making a joke of it. For example, one evening when Daryl had finished dipping his dessert candies into his milk, and was waiting to be taken out of his high chair with milky hands, Greg playfully wiped his hands with a cloth, took the boy out of his high chair, and held him upside down. “I’m going to wash you off in the dishwasher.” “No!” “Yes! You’re going to be shut inside to get all cleaned off.” “Haah.” The boy half-realized his father was joking, and was half-afraid. Only when a sound of alarm continued in Daryl’s voice did Greg turn him right side up and end the joke. Again, when Greg was fixing the water bed with some
pliers, he held the pliers up to Daryl. “These are good for taking off eyelashes.” “No!” “Yes, they are!” Only when the boy took the pliers and held them toward the father’s eye, did Greg say, “That’s dangerous.”

There were safer jokes that Daryl always got. “Daddy’s going to take off Daryl’s nose and eat it.” Or, “I’m going to throw your nose down the garbage disposal.” But another often-repeated joke was a less sure bet: “Ow. You kicked me. I’m going to kick you back.” As often as not there was a scuffle, serious protest from Daryl, and serious explanation from his father that it was “just a joke.” All these were gestures unconsciously designed, perhaps, to “toughen” him up, to inoculate him against fear, to make him into a soldierly little man.

Carol warned me early on that “some people think Greg has a disquieting sense of humor.” When I talked to him alone, Greg said spontaneously, “Sometimes Carol doesn’t understand my sense of humor. Daryl doesn’t either. But it’s how I am.” Greg’s “humor” was unusual among the families I studied, but only in degree. Fathers tended toward “toughening” jokes more than mothers did.

Some fathers answered children’s cries less readily, and with a different mental set. One father worked at home in a study looking out on the living room where a sitter tended his nine-month-old son. When asked whether his son’s cries disturbed his work, he said, “No problem, I actually want him to fall and bang himself, to get hurt a little. I don’t want him to have a fail-safe world.” When we’d finished the interview, the husband asked his wife (who also works at home) how she would have answered the same question. She said immediately, “I hate to hear him cry.”

Many parents seem to enter a cycle, whereby the father passes on the “warrior training” he received as a boy, knowing his wife will fulfill the child’s more basic need for warmth and attachment. Knowing she’s there, he doesn’t need to change. At the same time, since the husband is rougher on the children, the wife doesn’t feel comfortable leaving them with him more, and so the cycle continues. Greg carried this warrior training further than most
fathers, but the cycle was nearly obscured by the overall arrangement whereby Greg and Carol “shared” the second shift.

Primary parenting has to do with forging a strong, consistent trusting attachment to a child. For small children, a steady diet of “toughening” is probably not good primary parenting. But Greg could afford his “jokes,” because Carol would come forward with her warm, outreaching voice and watchful eye, to neutralize their effect.

Ironically, Greg felt more confident about his parenting than Carol felt about hers. For Greg compared himself to his father, who was less expressive than he, while Carol compared herself to the baby-sitter, whom she thought more patient and motherly. Neither drew a comparison to the other.

The main strategy that either Carol or Greg pursued was Carol’s quitting her full-time job, and this had important consequences for her. As she explained: “After Daryl was born, I stayed home for six months, and I discovered how much of my self-esteem was wrapped up in money. Being out of work, I felt really inferior. When I went out to the supermarket in the morning, I felt fat [she hadn’t lost the weight from her pregnancy] and dumb. I wanted to go up to the people in the aisles and say, ‘I have an MBA! I have an MBA!’ I didn’t want to be classified as a dumb housewife.”

Like an urbanized peasant might feel returning to a land he had ambivalently left behind, Carol now felt a mixture of scorn, envy, and compassion for the housewives shopping in the market. She mused: “I learned not to judge. Whereas before, if I saw a woman with a kid, I would think, ‘What is she
doing?
Why isn’t she doing something productive with her life?’ I think I was partly jealous, too. You go into the store in the middle of the day, there are all these thirty-year-olds shopping. I mean, where do they get
the money? It made me wonder if there’s some easier way to do this.”

After a while, Carol began to feel an affinity with women who didn’t work outside the home:

Meanwhile, Greg’s routine didn’t change much, nor did his perspective.

Carol would have preferred for Greg to go light on the “pliers jokes,” the “you-hit-me” jokes, the fatherhood of toughening. She would have preferred that Greg give Daryl something more than popcorn for dinner. In short, Carol wanted Greg to act more like a primary parent. But she didn’t press him to change his ways. She was grateful that he woke up with Daryl Saturday mornings, and worked the second shift as hard as he did.

Carol and Greg present a certain paradox. Both believed in sharing both housework and child care. This is the first side of the paradox. On the other hand, in the psychological fabric of home life Carol was far more central. Each side of this paradox poses a
question. First, why did they believe in sharing? After all, the Delacortes, the Tanagawas, and indeed 40 percent of the women and three-quarters of the men in this study did
not
believe in it.

In Carol’s background was hidden an important experience that may have fueled her strong desire to be an independent career woman, and to adopt the view of sharing that, in the late 1980s in her professional circle, went with it. Carol remembers her mother—a navy wife left alone for six months at a time to care for two small children—as an example of womanhood to avoid. As Carol realized: “I remember her dressed all day in her nightgown, sighing. My sister says our mother was suicidal. I don’t remember that. But she did try to leave us. My sister and I were into normal mischief and wouldn’t go to bed. My mother said, ‘Well, I’m leaving.’ And she walked out the door. I can remember telling my sister, ‘Don’t worry. I know how to make soup.’”

Through her early twenties she had few thoughts of marriage or children, and Greg won her heart only by gallantly declining a big job offer in another city in order to be with her. (Many happily married women described some early gesture of sacrifice that convinced them this was the right man for them.) “I was strong-minded,” she said, “and I wanted a man who would never let me down.” Part of “never letting her down” was probably connected to Greg’s continued involvement at home.

For his part, Greg wanted Carol to work and to share the second shift. Carol speculated that it was because Greg’s mother had worked full time from when he was five years old. “I thank Meg [Greg’s mother] for setting him an example of how independent a woman can be.” After Greg was five, his father retired from the army, got a teaching credential, taught math and wood shop in middle school, and was home when Greg returned from school. His mother worked overtime as a secretary in order to make ends meet and his father shared the second shift.

The other side of the paradox is that, despite their modern belief in sharng work at home, Carol and Greg implemented this belief in a traditional way. Some traditional men such as Peter
Tanagawa actually parented their children in a more “motherly” way than Greg did. Again, why? Greg commented:

Perhaps Greg’s awkward way of holding his daughter and his aggressive joking with his son expressed a fear of getting close. Perhaps his jokes were a verbal stand-in for the old boxing matches. But time had brought change.

Greg would plant many small kisses on Daryl’s cheek each night, and from time to time hug Daryl in the course of tussling with him. Greg was, he felt, far more physically affectionate with Daryl than his father had been with him.

Greg was not as much a primary parent as were some men nor was Carol as ardently committed to getting him to become one as some women were. Part of the reason seemed to be that Carol discovered she enjoyed parenting. After all, she had completely put off thoughts of children until her thirties, and a few months after her son was born, she’d put him in the care of a baby-sitter for ten hours a day. (Even now she urged Greg’s mother to live near them in Little Creek to help “raise the kids.”) Unlike some women, Carol had not been attached to the idea of being the main parent until her second child was born. Now parenting was more important, perhaps because she found in it a way to reparent herself.

The greater importance of parenthood for Carol may illustrate the theory Nancy Chodorow offers in her book
The Reproduction of Mothering.
¹
Chodorow argues that women develop a greater
desire to be a mother than men do to be fathers. This is because as children most boys and girls are both brought up by mothers. Socially speaking, this need not be; after a child is born, fathers can care for children as well as mothers, she argues. But as long as it is
women
who mother, boys and girls will develop different “gender personalities,” which alter their later motives and capacities. Both girls and boys first fuse with the mother. But when girls grow up, they seek to recapitulate this early fusion with the mother by becoming mothers themselves. When boys grow up, they try to recapitulate that early fusion by finding a woman “like mother.” The reason girls and boys recapitulate this early fusion in different ways is that girls are females, like their mothers, and can more readily identify with her than boys can. According to Chodorow, because mothers are the object of the child’s earliest attachment, boys and girls differ in another aspect of “gender personality.” Girls are more empathic, more able to know how others feel than boys, though they are less able than boys to maintain a clear boundary between themselves and others.

Chodorow’s theory deals with the familial origins of men’s and women’s motives for becoming parents. By her mid-thirties, motherhood was a more central identity to Carol than fatherhood was to Greg, and perhaps this was one reason why.

But in Chodorow’s theory, all women come out pretty much alike. Her theory doesn’t explain why some women like Adrienne Sherman felt no urge to be the primary parent, while Carmen Delacorte had always felt a strong urge, and Carol Alston only came to feel it in her middle thirties. Carol didn’t want her husband involved at home as ardently as Nancy Holt did, but she clearly didn’t want to “protect” her husband from the burden of parenthood like Ann Myerson, nor did she want him in the picture mainly to exert authority, as did Carmen Delacorte. Clearly women’s motives
differ
enormously because of other things.

In Chodorow’s theory, all men are pretty much alike too. So we don’t know why Evan Holt and Seth Stein are so disinterested in fatherhood while Art Winfield and Michael Sherman have immersed
themselves so passionately in it. Clearly, other factors—the quality of a person’s early bonds with their mother and father, and broader cultural messages about manhood and womanhood—enter in. The concept of gender strategy adds to Chodorow’s theory an interpretation of the remarkable differences we find between some men and other men, and between some women and other women.