All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (11 page)

Clint may also fail to jump in and offer his time because he has mixed feelings about giving it up. The day before, for example, when Clint walked through the door, he
was
a bit miffed to discover that the kids weren’t napping. “They should be sleeping right now,” he told me after Angie had gone, looking slightly defeated. That pressure Angie feels to give Clint his free time is not imagined.

Though he may be unaware of it, Clint is exploiting Angie’s guilt, or at the very least recognizes he benefits from it. On their mutual days off, he admits, “I’m more quick to say, ‘I want to do something.’ Whereas she’s less quick to do that.” But if he
knows
he’s more aggressive about claiming his leisure time, and he
knows
that Angie is perpetually exhausted, why doesn’t he yield some of his leisure time to his wife?

This is a strange moment for fatherdom. There’s increasing pressure for men to be actively involved in the affairs of the home, but there’s no precise standard for how much involvement is enough. In his parenting memoir
Home Game,
Michael Lewis shrewdly notes that all it takes for a couple to start fighting, really, is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose domestic division of labor is slightly different from their own. “In these putatively private matters, people constantly reference public standards,” he writes. “They don’t care if they’re getting a raw deal so long as everyone is getting the same deal.” The problem with modern parenting, he says, is that “there are no standards and it’s possible that there never again will be.”

Going into fatherhood, men know they’re supposed to engage. But once they’re in the thick of it, many are caught off-guard, just as their wives are, by the all-consuming nature of the job. And if the standard is to do as much as their wives do . . . Lord, that bar is as high as a bird’s nest. Women spend more intensive time with their children today than they have in the last fifty years.

Pamela Druckerman’s solution to these excesses is to emulate the French. In
Bringing Up Bébé,
she marvels at how French parents, mothers especially, resist what William Doherty calls (in his own book about marriage) “consumer parenting,” that insidious style of American child-rearing that makes it possible for a kid to lay claim to a mother’s or father’s attention twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The French, she argues, have no qualms about firmly asserting their leisure prerogatives and protecting their adult needs (like peace and quiet, for instance, or uninterrupted conversation with other adults).

That’s a constructive message. But since few American women have French mothers sitting around their homes, ready to show them the way, they may do better to take their cues from a model that’s more readily available: the good fathers they know. Who may in fact be their own husbands. Because odds are, these men have something valuable to teach.

Here’s why: unencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgments over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge themselves less harshly, bring less anguished perfectionism to parenting their children (“Sit in this Bumbo while I unload the dishwasher, would ya?”), and—at least while their kids are young—more aggressively protect their free time. None of this means they love their children any less than their wives do. None of this means they care any less about their children’s fates.

Mothers may not, of course, be fully able to follow their husbands’ examples. If women make more forceful claims on their husbands’ free time, their husbands could well push back. This is also, admittedly, a private solution to something that in a civilized world would be a public problem, as Judith Warner argues so fiercely in
Perfect Madness.
It would be far better if the government kicked in the support that parents needed. But considering that the last Republican presidential primary was briefly derailed by a debate over the legitimacy of birth control—
birth control!—
our politics hardly seem inclined in this direction. At least not yet.

For now, talking helps, especially early on. In their work, the Cowans found that the couples who had hashed out divisions of labor during pregnancy rather than after the baby came along fared much better than those who had never discussed it at all. In fact, the men who had gone through specific interventions to clarify these divisions were actually unhappy that they weren’t doing
more.

But redistributing the load is only one challenge. Another is redefining attitudes. That’s what captivates me about Clint. He’s so . . . forgiving of himself. Self-scrutiny and insecurity know no gender, obviously; plenty of fathers say they’re terrified they’re screwing things up. But I somehow think that their anguish is not the same. When I first spoke to Angie, she told me that she normally found home much harder than work—and her work involves schizophrenic and psychotic inpatients, often in the midst of violent outbreaks. Whereas Clint, who works at a desk, says he finds work more challenging. “I had to learn how to be a manager,” he says. “I’m held to someone else’s standard. Whereas here at home, I
am
the standard. I feel like I do it the way it should be done.”

There are a lot of hardships that this pioneering generation of involved fathers has to endure. But comparing themselves to an unattainable ideal—whether it’s Donna Reed in Hilldale or the “Tiger Mom” of a best-selling book—is not one of them.
I am the standard.
“Personally,” says Clint, “I think having my parents separate when I was seven was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Clint saw little of his father after that. “I didn’t have anyone saying to me, ‘This is how good you need to be.’ ”

Angie, meanwhile, says she never knows if she’s doing things the way they ought to be done. When asked if she’s a good mother, her answer is one word: “Sometimes.”

She’s wrong. Angie’s a great mother. If she could just say, “I am the standard,” maybe she would breathe.

chapter three

simple gifts

He loves to see his son’s wit in the house, how it surprises him constantly, going beyond even his and his wife’s knowledge and humor—the way he treats dogs on the streets, imitating their stroll, their look. He loves the fact that this boy can almost guess the wishes of dogs from the variety of expressions at a dog’s disposal.

—Michael Ondaatje,
The English Patient
(1992)

THE FIRST TIME I
was in a room with Sharon Bartlett, it took a long time for me to notice her, even though she was older than almost everyone around us by a factor of two. Unassuming and unadorned, she chose a place at the far end of a long table in her ECFE class, and she said nothing until the last ten minutes of the discussion, at which point it finally became clear that she was raising her three-year-old grandson, Cameron, alone. Even then, she didn’t say much, but what she said was so moving that it prompted me to write her a note a few weeks later, just as I had written to Jessie and Angie and Clint, to ask if I could come visit.

“Sure,” she wrote back, the very same day. “I have no problem talking about parenting my grandson. I think there are many of us grandparents parenting the children of our deceased children, and while it is not the aging plan we had in mind, it has its joys and sorrows.”

In a phone call shortly after, I learned that Sharon hadn’t just lost Cameron’s mother. Decades earlier, she’d also lost her son, Mike, who’d taken his life at sixteen. Sharon still has another daughter to whom she’s quite close—forty years old, living out of state, happy and thriving.

On a sticky morning in late July, I find myself on Sharon’s doorstep. Her beautiful century-old home is in a North Minneapolis neighborhood that’s largely African American, though she herself is white. She greets me at the door, coffee mug in hand and gray hair thrown loosely into a ponytail. Cam peers out from behind her legs.

“Keep playing, Cam,” she tells him as she takes a seat in an oversized green chair in her living room. “I have to finish my coffee. And after, we can read five books. Go pick ’em.”

Cam nods and walks over to the bookshelf. He’s one of those delectable kids, all noodle arms and dewy lips. “Be sure they’re different from the books we read yesterday,” Sharon adds. She settles into her chair, trying to buy herself a few more moments’ rest. Then she notices that Cam is squirming. She sighs and gets up again. “C’mon, Cam. Let’s go to the potty. I can tell you have to go.”

A couple of minutes later, they return. Sharon sinks back into her chair. Cam climbs onto the coffee table and gingerly navigates around his train collection.

“Cam?”

No answer.

“Cam Bear.”

Still nothing.

“Camembert—?”

He turns around.

“Cam, that’s not a step. Get down please.”

And so it goes for the rest of the morning, with Sharon and Cam negotiating the vast space between a senior citizen and a preschooler. Sharon reads Cam five stories by Richard Scarry; Cam makes a bid to play helicopters afterward, which she declines. Sharon phones her church to organize a visit to do some volunteering; Cam runs around with a towel over his head, pretending to be a ghost. Sharon hangs up and proposes they go to the water park; Cam refuses to change into his bathing suit until she counts to three, even though it’s one hundred degrees outside and the city is an airborne swamp. She is patient through most of his testing and shenanigans, and when the former schoolteacher in her gets a chance to teach Cam something, she visibly comes alive. (“Look, he’s making a mad face in this picture. Can I see
your
mad face?”) But she also looks tired, almost painfully tired, and there are moments when her tension heaves to the surface—as when Cam accidentally smashes into her head after putting on his Crocs. “Oh,
Cam,
” she says, clearly more sharply than she’d intended. “That was
not
acceptable. Say you’re sorry for banging into my glasses.”

“I’m sorry for banging into your glasses.”

She will later tell me she feels horrible at moments like this, but I already knew. When we were chatting on the phone a few weeks earlier, she’d mentioned that she marks it on her calendar whenever she yells at Cam too much, hoping she’ll one day be able to detect a pattern to her moods. Sure enough, when I go into her kitchen to refill my coffee mug this morning, I see that July 8 has been filled in with a reproachful little inscription: “Yelling Day.”

All that morning, I fret for Sharon. The task of raising a toddler requires so much energy, even for the young and able-bodied. But for someone who’s sixty-seven, who’s already raised three children, who’s living on a fixed income all by herself . . . these are hardly ideal circumstances for a parent. Most social science studies would predict that a person in Sharon’s situation would be far happier without a child.

But there are things social science captures well, and there are things it does not. And one of the things it would have a hard time fully capturing, on this particular day, is what happens when we go to the splash pad.

The Manor Park Splash Pad is just a dinky patch of concrete, painted in primary colors and studded with a modest sprinkler system and some swirling gizmos. But it is heaven for a child, and on this hundred-degree day it’s heaven for an adult too. The moment we arrive, Cam starts bobbing and weaving between the water jets, and Sharon, to my amazement, follows right behind him. There’s a huge smile on her face, one that doesn’t disappear the entire time she’s there, in spite of her fatigue, her bad knees, her sixty-seven years. I think unbidden of the opening scene in the book
Immortality,
in which the narrator watches an older woman wave gaily to a lifeguard, managing for one heartbreaking instant to completely transcend her age. As Sharon stands beneath a nest of buckets, giggling while a stream of water rains down on her head, the same could be said of her. She is as unencumbered as a twenty-year-old, a picture of girlish bliss. “There is a certain part of all of us,” Milan Kundera writes, “that lives outside of time.”

YOUNG CHILDREN MAY BE
grueling, young children may be vexing, and young children may bust and redraw the contours of their parents’ professional and marital lives. But they bring joy too. Everyone knows this (hence: “bundles of joy”). But it’s worth considering some of the reasons why. It’s not just because they’re soft and sweet and smell like perfection. They also create wormholes in time, transporting their mothers and fathers back to feelings and sensations they haven’t had since they themselves were young. The dirty secret about adulthood is the sameness of it, its tireless adherence to routines and customs and norms. Small children may intensify this sense of repetition and rigidity by virtue of the new routines they establish. But they liberate their parents from their ruts too.

All of us crave liberation from those ruts. More to the point, all of us crave liberation from our adult selves, at least from time to time. I’m not just talking about the selves with public roles to play and daily obligations to meet. (We can find relief from those people simply by going on vacation, or for that matter, by pouring ourselves a stiff drink.) I’m talking about the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies; who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited by how it could work or should; who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love. Unless, that is, they have small children.

The most shameful part of adult life is how blinkered it makes us, how brittle and ungenerous in our judgments. It often takes a much bigger project to make adults look outward, to make them “boundless and unwearied in giving,” as the novelist and philosopher C. S. Lewis writes in
The Four Loves.
Young children can go a long way toward yanking grown-ups out of their silly preoccupations and cramped little mazes of self-interest—not just relieving their parents of their egos, but helping them aspire to something better.

mad in the best sense of the word

After the splash pad, Sharon and Cam make their way to a playground. Cam eyes a ladder to climb. Very tempting.

“Need a boost?” Sharon asks.

“I only have two legs.”

“I know you only have two legs. Give me your foot.” She cups her hands, and her face turns red as he steps into them to climb the ladder. “Want to climb the next one?” she asks.

“I can’t.”

“Are you sure?” She picks him up and hangs him from it.

Cam looks excited and terrified. “I need to go down.”

“How do you ask?”

“Please put me down?”

She does. He wanders over to another ladder with more reachable rungs. He grabs them and starts to swing. “I’m hanging from the ladder!” She keeps her distance and watches. Then he eyes a more challenging climb. “Want to hang from there too?” she asks again.

He nods.

She hoists him up. He hangs for a moment, then they move on. Sharon slips off to the side and watches. She’s in no hurry. She’s not looking at a watch, her cell, other moms. Nothing but Cam.

SMALL CHILDREN COME WITH
a built-in paradox. The same developmental phenomena that make them so frustrating—namely, their immature prefrontal cortexes, which insist on living in the here and now—are what can also make them so freeing to be around. Most of us live by a schedule, with places to be and chores to do. But looking at Sharon, who doesn’t have a day job or a husband or other small children to attend to, you begin to see how it would look if we all unshackled ourselves from the clock. Sharon doesn’t bother taking her cell phone to the park when she’s out with Cam (though she adores email and texting); at home she doesn’t have a television. “I don’t let the world intrude on me,” she says. “It can only come in when I want it to.” When she’s with Cam, she fully surrenders to kid-time, letting the day unfold.

Few of us have that glorious flexibility all of the time. In my chapter about Jessie, the photographer and mother of three, I in fact focused on how little flexibility we have, detailing the ways in which life with a small child so often conspires against living in the permanent present. It’s much easier to savor time if you’re retired, as Sharon is. But not all emails need answering; sometimes deadlines exist more in our minds than they do on the ground. Spending time with Sharon is a reminder that it’s easier to let time unfold than we think it is and that, in the right circumstances and frame of mind, carving out time in the permanent present is a worthy goal. It’s possible to join children in their futureless worlds for even ten minutes, if that’s all we’ve got to spare.

In Jessie’s chapter, I mentioned another disadvantage to spending time in the company of creatures with immature prefrontal cortexes: they have trouble regulating their feelings, which requires an extra dose of willpower on a parent’s part. But this, too, has a positive side: children lack self-consciousness. They embrace the ludicrous. They think nothing of having conversations with inanimate objects or racing buck-naked across a room.

“Usually psychologists act as if this childish uninhibitedness is a defect,” writes Alison Gopnik in
The Philosophical Baby.
“And, of course, if your agenda is to figure out how to get along well in the everyday world—how to actually do things effectively—it is a defect.” (Someone has to steer.) “But if your agenda is simply to explore both the actual world and all the possible worlds,” she concluded, “this apparent defect may be a great asset. Pretend play is notably uninhibited.”

It’s amazing how many parents at ECFE talked about the joys of shedding their grown-up inhibitions, if only for a few minutes each day. For women, it tended to come out around singing and dancing: Kenya talked about watching her kid bounce and howl to Katy Perry’s “Firework” in the backseat of their car; another woman talked about going to outdoor concerts. (“No one looks at you if you dance like crazy with your kid.”) And then there was Jessie, who so loved her dance parties. The second time I visited her home—an evening this time, with her husband, Luke, and all three kids romping around—she showed us a new dance move Abe had done in his underpants earlier that day. Her impersonation was dead-on, wild, ridiculous, communicated in a private shorthand that her husband seemed better than anyone in the room to understand; the two oldest kids spontaneously joined in, forming a conga line as Estelle’s “American Boy” boomed in the background. When a sudden hissing sound issued from the kitchen, Luke assured Abe, who seemed concerned, that it was just the potatoes on the stove coming to a boil.

“They’re screaming, ‘ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH,’ ” cried Luke, waggling his hands in the air. “ ‘You’re going to EAT US UP.’ ”

Only a four-year-old child gives you permission to imitate a despairing potato.

And these antics from Luke seemed pretty typical of the joys that the ECFE fathers described: with small kids around, they were given license to forget the gray-flannel-suit imperatives of their lives and just do what small kids do. One talked about going to the Minneapolis zoo, where he hadn’t been in over fifteen years; another reveled in “watching the kids run around outside, eyeballs shining, just all teeth” (an unconscious echo, I later realized, of the refrain from
Where the Wild Things Are:
“ . . . and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes . . .”). Then there was the dad who put it most succinctly: “I like that I can act like an idiot out in public.”

Sometimes the transcendent joys of toddler-dom aren’t about
trans
cendence at all, but about how far we can
des
cend. These joys give us a reprieve from etiquette, let us shelve our inhibitions, make it possible for our self-conscious, rule-observing selves to be tucked away. For a few blessed moments, we’re streaming, uncorked ids.

It’s hard to know what kind of psychic price we pay for keeping those ids bottled and sealed. Adam Phillips has always had a keen interest in this question. In one of his essays, he notes that “writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens,” have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. “Without this first madness,” he writes, “without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods—to our most passionate selves—our lives can begin to feel futile.”