All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (9 page)

Another woman from ECFE:

“It’s funny: my husband has been asking me for quickies lately—it’s been a couple weeks. And I was like,
I cannot give to another person.
And he is the one, unfortunately, that has to make the sacrifice. He’s the one I can say no to. But I probably should give in, because it’s good for
us.
”

When forced to choose between her husband and her kids, she chose the kids.

But here’s some news that ought to reassure this mom and all others who have opted to remain in the workforce—as well as dads, for that matter, who put in very long hours: A 2001 study in the
Journal of Sex Research
, which looked at a sample of 261 women with four-year-olds, concluded that “there were no differences between homemakers and women employed part, full, or high full time for several measures of sexual functioning. Neither were there differences between husbands employed full and high full time.” (High full-time, in their estimation, was fifty-plus hours per week.) Rather, the authors found, what played the most powerful role in determining the quality of a couple’s sex life was a deceptively simple idea: the importance of the marriage to each partner’s identity. The more central each one found it, the more satisfied he or she was. Believing in marriage, at least if you’re in one, turns out to be the most powerful aphrodisiac of all.

men’s work

It’s 2:35
P.M
., and Clint, a sweet-faced fellow with a barrel chest and a serious disposition, walks quietly through the door, a carabiner of keys tinkling on his belt. He radiates dependability and patience, a quiet belief in hard work; like Angie, he looks tired—he’s been up, remember, since four—but manages to move with the speed and energy of someone who’s had a full night’s sleep. He’s wearing shirtsleeves, a tie, and black pants, which he’ll swap out in about ten minutes for a charcoal-colored soccer T-shirt and cargo shorts. Angie has just changed into her scrubs. He scoops up a child in each arm, impassively receives an update about each, and kisses his wife hello and good-bye. They all hug for a moment. Then Angie is out the door, and Clint whisks Xavier into the Bumbo baby seat on the kitchen counter. He pulls out some strawberries from the fridge, begins to cut them, and gives a few to the baby and Eli.

“Can I have a surprise snack?” asks Eli.

“You can have strawberries,” says Clint.

“Maybe that can be my surprise snack.”

“Then it’s not a surprise.”

He is warm as he says this, but very focused. Later on, I will look in my notes and see that I have written and underlined in all capital letters:
THIS MAN IS ALL BUSINESS.
Not rejecting or disengaged, it should be said, but certainly possessed of a very different style from his wife. When Angie was making lunch only a couple of hours earlier, she left a cheerful mess as she went, often getting pulled away by the boys at just the moments when she’d intended to tidy up. Whereas Clint is immaculate and methodical as he goes. He’s so brisk and efficient about washing dishes that it looks like he never dirtied them in the first place.

He opens the fridge and stares into it. “I’m going to think about getting your dinner soon. What did you have for lunch—?”

“Cheese chicken and spaghetti. It was really good, but I didn’t like the chicken.”

“Why not?”

“It was kind of spicy. I liked the spaghetti.”

Clint closes the fridge and goes to get dog food. The baby is quiet, watching and nibbling on strawberries and cereal puffs. Eli goes downstairs to watch the end of an Elmo potty-training video. Clint starts unloading the dishwasher. When he finishes, he takes Zay out of the Bumbo and joins Eli, who’s struggling downstairs with a Lego ice-cream truck. Clint relieves him. “Here, let me help ya . . . you put this thing on the back of it.” As he assembles the truck Clint plumps with life, like a diabetic who’s finally been handed a sucking candy. “I’m biased about Legos,” he says, noticing me noticing him and reading my thoughts. “They’re what I played with when I was little.” He lines up a few animals on a Lego platform for Zay.

This old-school play goes on for a lovely while. Clint explains that he always coordinates a group activity before dinner, so that the kids don’t zone out in front of the television; he describes his preference for toys you can build with over chiming plastic geegaws. Play gives him obvious pleasure. But then he glances over at Zay and looks at his phone. “I’m checking the time,” he explains. “Trying to figure out when to plan dinner, before The Meltdown.”

Eli points to a bus he made out of an egg carton. “Want to make another one with me, Daddy?”

Clint chuckles and gets up. “How ’bout we make dinner first, okay?” His eyes are already on the kitchen. There’s dinner to be made, a meltdown to be averted, a nighttime routine to be rallied through. He’s on a schedule now. He’s all business again.

WATCHING CLINT GO ABOUT
his afternoon and evening routine, it is hard not to notice the stylistic differences between him and his wife—and the different responses the children have to each of them. Zay, for one, could hardly tolerate being put on the ground by Angie that morning. The second she tried it, he bawled. She could have taken a stand, sure, and left him there to tough it out; Clint would say, albeit gently, that Angie has had a hand in creating this predicament, because she allows herself to be manipulated by Zay’s distress. (“Zay’s not
expecting
me to pick him up the moment he whimpers,” Clint notes.) But to leave Zay to cry would only compound Angie’s terrible sense that she’s not doing all she can do for him, and she feels bad enough going off to work three or four nights a week—the second the kids catch sight of her in her scrubs, they start to cling. So while she’s at home, she doesn’t put Zay on the ground or in the Bumbo. Instead, she works one-armed and lopsided, straining her back and making the awkward progress of a contestant in an egg toss.

“What I think are the hurdles, Clint often doesn’t,” Angie told me, not long before she left. “He thinks I cause some of the worry unnecessarily. I think the worst is when he feels helpless.” By “helpless,” Angie doesn’t mean that Clint himself feels overwhelmed. She means that Clint thinks
she’s
overwhelmed and there’s nothing he can do to soothe her. “When he thinks I can’t do something he thinks is simple,” she explains.

But of course Angie can do simple things. What’s really happening in the moments when Angie seems overwhelmed is that she’s fracturing her time. (
Toss.
“Where’s Zay?”
Fold.
Toss.
“Where’s Zay?”
Fold
. . . .) Whereas Clint, both by habit and temperament, is quite clearly the kind of fellow who optimizes his time and probably was doing so even before the kids were born. Parenthood has simply completed his transformation into an efficiency-seeking Scud missile. He acknowledges as much. “Whereas Angie may view something from the feeling aspect, or the enriching aspect—‘The kids have to go to the park! They have to spend time doing something different!’—I’m looking at it more from a time-efficiency point of view,” he says.

This time-efficiency point of view can be mistaken for a kind of Vulcan-ness. But that’s not what it is. It’s really the difference between method acting and more classical techniques for getting into a role. Angie approaches parenting intuitively, from the inside out, while Clint approaches it from the outside in. “She just
knows
what needs to get done,” says Clint. “Whereas I stumble across it.” He thinks about this. “I mean, it’s not like if the baby has a poopy diaper, I say, ‘Here, you do it!’ ” He mimes handing off a soiled baby in revulsion. “It’s that, if she sees it happen and I don’t see it at the same time, she gets upset.” He thinks some more. “She’s so in tune with the baby monitor, she’ll wake up seconds before they do.”

I hear this a lot from parents. One—usually the mother—is more alive to the emotional undercurrents of the household. (In
A Home at the End of the World,
Michael Cunningham writes: “She knows something is up. Her nerves run through the house.”) The result is that the more-intuitive parent—in this case Angie—sometimes feels like the other parent is not doing his or her fair share, while the other parent—in this case Clint—feels like the intuitive parent is excessively emotional. When really, what may be going on is that the couple is experiencing time differently, because each person is paying attention to different things. When Angie hears the baby monitor or sees that Zay’s diaper needs a change, she jumps. Those are time-sensitive tasks, and she’s the first responder in the house. Which makes her feel, to use her word, “overwhelmed.”

Clint acknowledges this difference. “The way that I come at it is not in real time, for lack of a better term,” he says. “I look at the whole picture. I say, if I’m doing 100 percent of the snow removal, the yard work, the maintenance, the dishes, and the meals, you’ll have to pick up more slack on the kids’ end.” He adds that Angie doesn’t always appreciate the less time-sensitive contributions he routinely makes. “Maybe she doesn’t care about that stuff as much until the dishwasher
breaks,
” he says (which it recently did). “Then
I’m
the one to figure out how to fix it, because she wants those dishes washed.”

Yet he’s also very attuned to the strain that comes from the moment-to-moment handling of the kids. “That real-time sense that she’s doing more? I probably fail to validate that as much as I should,” he concedes. He brings up that time in the spring when I first met Angie, and he and the kids were all under the weather. He knew she was exhausted. He knew the kids were sick. He regrets not having jumped in to help. “It was,
Right here, right now, the kids are sick, I want a break,
” he says. He gets it.

At the beginning of each interview with Angie and Clint, I asked them to give a rough breakdown of their household division of labor. And their estimations, for the most part, were remarkably similar: Clint does almost all the cooking. Angie does almost all the night duty, because Clint rises for work at 4:00
A.M
. Clint does a little more cleaning; Angie a little more laundry. Angie gets a bit more of the groceries and does the lion’s share of shopping for the kids, the doctor’s appointments, the extracurricular activities. Clint does the outdoor and household maintenance and 100 percent of the bookkeeping. They each made these same assessments, independently of one another.

The only area over which they disagreed was the one that mattered to Angie the most: child care. She estimated that she does 70 percent, and not because she spends more time at home. She said she did more child care
even when Clint was around.
“If we’re just having a home day,” she told me, “I do more of the diapers. If Eli’s outside, I’m checking and making sure he’s okay. I’m keeping the TV off, I’m engaging.” Most important, Clint always manages to claim free chunks of time for himself that she never manages to locate for herself. “He can spend two or three hours in front of the computer on the weekend, doing his hobbies,” she said. “But recently, I wanted to try this ninety-day boot camp workout, and I couldn’t find the hour each day to do it.”

Clint answered differently. He said they divide the child care fifty-fifty. “It’s push-pull,” he said. “If she has a bad day, I do more of it, and if she has to work three shifts in a row, I have to do more of it.”

Fifty-fifty and seventy-thirty is a big difference—especially given how little daylight there is between Angie and Clint over everything else. Why, given how sensitive and attuned they are to one another, should this be?

BEFORE PROCEEDING ANY FURTHER,
I should pause here to note that this conversation Clint and Angie are having about who does what—this conversation that
all couples
have about who does what—happens at the expense of a more important conversation: does the state have an obligation or moral imperative to help out mothers and fathers? In America we wind up having these arguments privately because our politics allows little room for us to have them publicly. One hates to invoke Sweden at this moment—it really is the most predictable cliché—but some of the happiest parents on the globe are, in fact, in Scandinavia and the other northern European countries with large social safety nets.

In 2012, the sociologist Robin Simon and two of her colleagues measured the difference in happiness levels between parents and nonparents in twenty-two industrialized nations. The country with the greatest gap, by far, was the United States. As a rule, in fact, this difference tended to be larger in countries with less generous welfare benefits and smaller—or inverted entirely—in countries that offer the most support to families.

Arnstein Aassve, a demography professor in Milan, detected a similar pattern in 2013. After examining parental well-being levels across twenty-eight European nations, he and his colleagues concluded that “in general, the happiness that people derive from parenthood is positively associated with availability of childcare.” This was especially true in places where child care is available for children between the ages of one and three (France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia). In those parts of the world, mothers are consistently happier than nonmothers.

The relationship between access to child care and parental well-being is sometimes deceptive. We cannot necessarily assume that one is the
cause
of the other. Countries with more generous welfare benefits tend to score well on all sorts of social indices: their corruption levels are lower, their gender-parity levels are higher, they tend to offer affordable health care and higher education. To the extent that parents’ psychological strains are financial—and many of them are—countries that provide these amenities go a long way toward relieving stress on couples and single parents alike. “These countries,” Aassve tells me, “are scoring on a whole range of categories that make people feel optimistic or safe about raising children.”

In the opening pages of her 2005 book
Perfect Madness,
Judith Warner writes about what it was like to receive such improbable benefits when she lived in Paris during her early child-rearing years: