The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (24 page)

To understand why Carol and Greg Alston’s approach to parenthood is different from that of other couples, we need to take account of other kinds of motives—Carol’s desire to be different from her own mother, unfused with her, joined instead with Greg. It is probably true that, for better or worse, Carol’s mother was a more important figure to her than her father. She criticized her mother. She didn’t like her. But she talked about her mother far more, and with greater feeling, than she talked about her father. So, in that respect Carol fits Chodorow’s theory. But because this fusion was problematic for Carol, she had invested a great deal of energy in her early adulthood avoiding motherhood. Now that she was trying it out, it was not so easy for Carol to become a mother-not-like-her-mother; it was frightening. Every bit of Greg’s support helped; and perhaps that was why she wanted Greg by her side at home and believed in 50-50 parenting.

By happily sharing the job of earning money, by not caring much about material things, she freed Greg from worry about being the provider. By expressing gratitude for all he did around the home, she encouraged him to do more. Consciously or not, Carol pursued a strategy of bringing Greg to her side to support her in the task of being a mother-not-like-her-mom.

To understand Carol and Greg, we need something else missing from Chodorow’s theory: culture. Carol’s mother didn’t offer a good example of mothering, but even as a small child Carol had some idea about what “regular” mothers do; there was a culture of motherhood outside her home, and she grew up in it. For some periods of Greg’s boyhood, Greg’s father was a primary parent to him—and thus an exception to Chodorow’s theory—but a primary parent
who could hug his son only in a boxer’s clench. This way of being a dad surely has much to do with Greg’s father’s notion of manhood.

Although the cultural shifts and opportunities of the 1980s had led Carol and Greg to a life ideologically and financially removed from patriarchy, that older, entrenched system influenced them anyway. Because conditions were worse for women in general than for men in general, Carol felt more grateful to Greg than he did to her. The love ran both ways, but the gratitude ran more from Carol to Greg. Although Carol had for years earned more money than Greg and taken most of the heat off the second shift, Greg did not spontaneously talk about being grateful for this.

Carol had catalogued a series of “miserable boyfriends” she’d met in college whose laundry she’d washed and whose weekend dinners she’d cooked. Compared to these other possible men, Greg was wonderful. Greg hadn’t washed any girlfriend’s laundry; for him the pickings weren’t so slim. Again, Carol explained: “My God, these single mothers whose husbands don’t see the kids or pay child support. I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t. Being a single mother is the worst thing that can happen to you, next to cancer.” Greg would never leave; Carol was grateful for that. But Greg didn’t feel haunted by a dread of abandonment, by the sense “that could happen to
me.
” He didn’t picture himself as a single dad. The general supply of male commitment to shared responsibility was far lower than the female demand for it. Through this fact in the
wider
society, patriarchy tipped the scales
inside
the Alston marriage. It evoked Carol’s extra thanks.

And her extra thanks inhibited her from making further demands on Greg, who was already doing comparatively so much. Carol had a “wish list” on which sharing primary parenting was probably fourth or fifth after the desire that Greg be healthy, faithful, mentally sound, and able to help provide. Greg had a wish list too, with many of the same wishes. But given the generally worse lot for women, Carol’s extra sense of gratitude and of debt inhibited her from going as far down her wish list as Greg went in his. In this different rate of climb up each wish list, Carol
and Greg were like nearly every couple I met. Greg really was unusual, and given the scarcity of such men, Carol was “right” to be grateful. She had fewer options. Equal as they felt they were, the burden of the second shift fell mainly on Carol’s shoulders. And it was the larger, societal support of inequity between the sexes, a system outside of their stable, happy marriage, that indirectly maintained the “his” and “hers” of sharing.

CHAPTER
11

No Time Together: Barbara and John Livingston

C
ONSUELA
finally opens the door a crack, looks me over, and lets me in. She leads me up to the second floor of the Livingstons’ friendly, weather-worn Victorian home to a family room with overstuffed chairs, family photos, and an excitable parrot in a large cage, all of which seem to face the cluster of toys on a blanket in the middle of the room on which Cary, two and a half, sits drawing trolls.

Mary Poppins
is on the video machine, and has been all day. Just now, Mary Poppins, the nanny, is announcing dinner to the upper-middle-class British Mr. and Mrs. Banks and their children, all primly seated at the dinner table. As I settle in, start drawing trolls with Cary, and talk with Consuela the baby-sitter, Barbara Livingston returns from work. She asks Cary for a kiss, then changes into jeans. Half an hour later, John Livingston returns from work, gets a big running hug from Cary, and sits down to chat. In a while, he rises to drive Consuela home, saying to his wife, “On my way back should I pick up some carry-out?”

Unlike Mary Poppins, so free and—at least symbolically—“on the rise,” Consuela, at twenty-two, has a seven-year-old child of her own living in El Salvador with Consuela’s mother. As Barbara explained to me later, the baby-sitter shared a small two-bedroom apartment with two workers and her husband, a salad waiter at the Toreador Restaurant. As an undocumented worker, Consuela fears the immigration authorities. “She never goes to
the park with Cary because she’s afraid they’ll find her.” Unlike Mrs. Banks on the video screen, Barbara has just returned from a ten-hour day at the office, and unlike Mr. Banks, John is picking up carry-out from the deli down the street. Consuela’s life and the Livingstons’ in the United States today seem at least as far apart as those of Mary Poppins and the Banks family a hundred years ago in England. If anything, Consuela’s life is more different from the Livingstons’. Social class differences seem to have lived on, while relations between men and women slowly change for both Consuela and Barbara, but here I tell Barbara’s story.

When I entered the Livingstons’ home, I noticed a half-empty trellis standing ready to support a frail, outreaching bougainvillea with leaves of brilliant crimson. A window was cracked. The paint was peeling. As Barbara said, “We haven’t had time for the house.” It occurred to me later that the house was a little like their marriage, the last entry on a long list of things to fix up. At the moment, they were negotiating with a workman to refloor the kitchen. The dining-room table was heaped with lamps separated from their shades, stacks of books, piles of linen. Only Cary’s room looked finished. John and Barbara had painted it themselves, green walls carefully edged with red, yellow, blue, and orange hearts at the top, which matched the hearts decorating Cary’s pillow cover. A hat collection hung behind her bed, next to a clown puppet. Their bedroom, the living room—these awaited attention. With ten-hour workdays and Saturday fractured into a dozen errands, many things had to wait, but not Cary, not Cary’s room.

At thirty-four, Barbara is a youthful, lively woman with soft brown eyes, short, dark hair, and—considering the eight times the phone rang that evening—a consistently friendly telephone voice. She manages a large health club and beauty shop in Daly City. John is thirty-seven, tall, thin, with sandy hair; his crinkly eyes betray the quiet sense of humor that has recently gotten him through tough times at work and home. He works in the billing department of a plastics wholesale company.

Both began their interviews by describing hard times in their childhoods. Barbara described growing up in a gaggle of girls in a working-class Catholic family in Wisconsin, an alcoholic father, and a strong mother who died when Barbara was fifteen. John told me about a taciturn father who moved away to an empty room of the house when company came. For as long as John can recall, his mother worked as a waitress, even taking an extra job selling ice cream on weekends. “All I can remember is their criticizing me,” he said. “It made me a quiet person myself.” For most couples, marriage is a chance to heal and restore each other emotionally, but for the Livingstons this healing was vital. They had been married for nine years.

In strategy, Barbara was a supermom, and to a lesser degree, John was a superdad. Barbara left the house at 7:45, returned at 5:30. (The last four months had been unusually busy in her office: “I’ve eaten dinner and gone back to the office for two or three more hours, and worked ten hours a day on Saturdays.”) What made Barbara a supermom was not her long hours at work but the four hours of concentrated time she devoted to Cary after work. She encouraged Cary to take two-and-a-half-hour naps during the afternoon so that she could stay up until 9:30 or 10:00 (according to Barbara), 10:00 or 11:00 (according to John), to play with her parents in the evenings. Also, as John explained, “Cary doesn’t sleep on weekends. She makes up the sleep on weekday afternoons.” These days, Cary often woke up two or three times a night, and usually Barbara got up to “march her back to bed.” This meant Barbara subsisted on an interrupted seven hours of sleep a night, although, as she explained with a laugh, “I’m not one of those people who feel just fine with five hours a night.”

Barbara split the housework and child care 50-50 with John and had not struggled for this. John had always shared in the sense Greg Alston had shared the second shift—in time but not in responsibility. Consuela helped with some of the cleaning, and Barbara was the organizer and Cary’s primary parent. As John noted, “On weekends, Barbara mainly takes care of Cary. I would if she’d
ask me, but she doesn’t.” One evening at dinner, as John moved his chair closer to Cary’s feeding table, just as Cary slithered down from it, Cary’s toe accidentally got caught under John’s chair and she cried hard. John took her in his lap, soothed her with soft, explanatory talk, and cradled her warmly. But Barbara stood up to lift Cary out of her daddy’s lap and to comfort her in the same way, herself. John handed her over.

Like many couples, Barbara and John also cut back on housework. On the cooking, John declared, “About forty percent of the time we buy take-out, eat out, or don’t eat.” They cut back on clothes shopping: “Except for Cary’s things, we don’t shop. We don’t need anything,” Barbara said. They no longer walked their nine-month-old German Shepherd, Daisy, but left her to pace their small backyard. Guilty over neglecting Daisy, they were wondering whether to give her away. They also cut back on letter-writing. (“Five years ago we found our Christmas cards in the glove compartment of our car in June. They’d never been mailed, and we haven’t sent any since.”)

John told me that Barbara’s job “matters as much as mine,” and Barbara agreed. As with the Alstons, neither spouse had much leisure, but the responsibility for the home was mainly Barbara’s. She decided what needed doing and asked John to do errands, which in a considerate spirit he always did. Although John was often “on board” as much as Barbara, as fully interested in Cary and as fully skilled in primary parenting, Barbara wanted to be more primary to Cary. She, not John, had stayed home on “parental leave,” and that had seemed to set a pattern they both allowed to remain.

They felt the problem was not their
division
of labor. It was the huge amount of time that housework, Cary, and careers were taking from their
marriage.
Barbara commented with a sigh, “I can’t remember the last time we went out alone.” And she found it hard to talk about their marriage.

In fact, Barbara had talked for nearly two hours in a relaxed way about how her father had remarried, to a wonderful woman,
but was living in a trailer now, watching TV all day and drinking heavily. She had chatted about the day-to-day events of working and raising Cary, when she came upon the fact that she and John were “seeing a counselor….” Suddenly she burst into tears, paused, then continued softly, “Because we felt like our marriage wasn’t working out.”

There are certain ways during an interview that a husband and wife show how they are related. They will sigh or gesture together. (This evening Barbara and John had spontaneously laughed together at John’s microwaving Daisy’s meat bones.) When I interview one, he or she will spontaneously talk at length about the other. And this will be because when I ask a question about one spouse’s feelings about work or children, the response will naturally reflect a bond with the other. Often the answers to the housework checklist (who cleans the dishes, makes the beds, etc.) reflect the telltale “both … both … both….” The interviews will describe different lives but reflect experience in common and genuine empathy for any experience that remains unshared. All of this was true of Barbara and John. Whatever problems they had, I felt, were in spite of the fact they loved each other very much.