The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (19 page)

Why the sudden ungrammatical English? Did he mean to make a joke? To mock himself? Or perhaps he was conveying a feeling there was something
wrong
with him for wanting what he wanted. With a neat little acronym—MCP (male chauvinist pig)—he was summing up the accusations he felt Jessica might throw at him for insisting on his terms of appreciation, his view of manhood.

From time to time, Seth fantasized about having the “right” kind of wife—Jessica without the career motivation. When I asked him, later in our interview, if he ever wished that Jessica didn’t work, he shot back: “Yes!” Did he feel guilty for wishing that, I asked. “No!” He wanted Jessica the person, and he felt willing and able to appreciate her enormously, on his terms.

In the meantime, each one felt unappreciated and angry: Seth’s acquiescence to career demands that left no emotional energy for his children angered Jessica. Jessica’s withholding of nurturance angered Seth. Now they avoided each other because they were so angry. The less Seth was around, the less they would face their anger.

Eventually Jessica accepted Seth’s long hours and more wholeheartedly colluded in the idea that he was the helpless captive of his profession and neurotic personality. This was her cover story. But as she did this, she made another emotional move—away from the marriage and family. She did not bolt from motherhood into a workaholism of her own, as some women I interviewed did. But neither did she embrace motherhood. Instead, she wore it lightly. She bought new educational games for Walter and she helped Victor with his piano lessons. But there was a certain mildness in her manner, an absence of talk about the children, an animation when she spoke of times she was away from them that suggested this “solution” of halfheartedness.

If Seth’s unconscious move was to remove himself in body and spirit from his children, Jessica’s move was to be there in body, but not much in spirit. She would accommodate his strategy on the surface but limit her emotional offerings underneath—give some nurturance to the children, little to Seth, and save the rest for her-self, her separate life.

This took some arranging. Jessica had had a history of bad experience with help. First she’d hired a nanny who was a wonderful baby-sitter but refused to do anything else, like pick up toys or occasionally wash breakfast dishes. So Jessica hired a housekeeper to do the housecleaning. Then the two began to quarrel, each calling her at work to complain about the other. At first, Jessica tried to unravel the problem, but she ended up firing the housekeeper. Then she hired a wonderful but overqualified woman for the job, who left after three months. Now she had Carmelita, an El Salvadoran mother of two, who worked at two jobs in order to support her family and send money back home to her aging parents. Carmelita did this by arranging for her sixteen-year-old daughter, Filipa, to cover for her mornings in the Stein household while Carmelita worked her other job.

Because neither Carmelita nor Filipa could drive a car, Jessica hired Martha, an old high school friend, as an “extra driver-housekeeper.” Martha shopped, took Victor to classes, and did Jessica’s typing and bookkeeping. Jessica also hired a gardener. Beyond that, she hired another “helper,” Bill, a nineteen-year-old student at a local junior college, as a “father substitute.” He played ball with Victor, age five, and in general did “daddy-type things.” Jessica felt this was necessary for Victor because “Victor suffers the most from Seth’s absence.” Bill, a cheerful and reasonable young man, had a cheerful and reasonable girlfriend who sometimes stayed overnight. It was Bill’s barbells that Seth tripped over in the hallway and Bill’s girlfriend’s sweater that sometimes lay on the kitchen table. Sensing that Bill was a “bought father,” Victor chose to treat him “just like my brother. He can go with us everywhere.” On Saturday afternoons, Jessica wrote checks to pay Carmelita and Filipa; Martha; Bill; the gardener; and other occasional helpers such as plumbers, tree trimmers, and tax accountants.

When I remarked to Jessica that she seemed to have quite a bit of help, she replied, “Well if you want to have children and have a career, I can’t think of any other way to do it except to live in a foreign country and have tons of people taking care of you.”

In many ways, she had as many servants as a British colonial officer’s wife in prewar India but still she was missing something. As she explained in a flat monotone:

Jessica had hired many parts of the attentive suburban mother; but she could not hire the soul of that person—the planner, the empathizer, the mother herself. Nor could she hire someone to nurture her.

Jessica had now given up on Seth. Indeed, three years after our first interview, when I asked her again how she felt about Seth’s being home so little, she answered with assurance: “Partly it works out so well for me this way because Seth doesn’t demand much from me. I don’t have to do anything for him. He takes care of himself. Other husbands might do more for the kids, but they would also ask more of me.” When I asked what she wanted from her husband, she seemed surprise: “What do I want from him? I think he should let me do what I want to do. Go to New York, Washington, conferences.”

A politics of emotional absenteeism had set in. Jessica had stripped down her needs, retracted her demands. Seth should let her “do what she wants.” And she offered little in return: “just
enough” mothering of the children and very little mothering of him. In a dejected tone, she explained: “Last year, I started being home less and less myself. I still shop and tell Carmelita what to make for dinner, but then if I go away for a conference or somewhere else, I don’t pay any attention to it. Seth has to do it.” Jessica also created for herself a separate world of interest and leisure, where she found nurture for herself:

With this “perfect day” to make up for the rest of the week, Jessica no longer found Seth’s absence so oppressive. After all, Bill was taking Victor to his piano lessons, and Filipa was playing hide-and-seek with Walter. In the past, when problems with Seth came up, she pried them open, worked on them. Now she’d resigned from that job and withdrawn to another world of perfect days.

Certain vestiges of Jessica’s earlier strategy remained. Although she often articulated her words hesitantly, as if trying to see clearly through a dense fog, the fog vanished suddenly when she spoke of
her children’s feelings about Seth: both children felt
cheated
of time with their father. In this the Stein children differed from neighboring children whose fathers were also often gone but whose mothers had prepared them for such absences. Victor settled into a quiet, withholding resentment not so different from his mother’s. Walter reacted to his father’s absence by stirring himself into a state of agitation. When called to bed, he would suddenly shout, “I’ve got to put away my blocks!” or “I’ve got to finish the drawing!” or “I need a drink of milk!” He would run frantically from one activity to another. When Jessica tried to drag him to bed, he struggled violently. Explaining the matter as if it were entirely out of her hands, Jessica said, “He won’t go to bed for me but he will for Seth.” So Walter was allowed to stay up until Seth came home and coaxed him to bed.

Now when Seth came home, it was to Walter’s chaotic frenzy and Victor’s stone-faced disregard. With Jessica coolly withdrawn in her study, home became even more a place for Seth’s solitary recovery from work.

“I used to think of us as a couple of really bright, attractive, well-liked people,” Seth said softly, at the end of my interview with him, “but the last three years have been tense. When I’m doing an eleven-hour day, I’m sure I’m no fun. When Jessica is bummed out, she’s awful to live with.”

But at least, they felt, they had their sex life to hold them together. Both Seth and Jessica complained of lack of sexual interest, but thought it was due mostly to fatigue. In a way beyond sadness, Jessica added slowly: “I would never consider withholding sex, no matter how angry I am. I think both of us realize that if there’s no sex, there’s no marriage. There’s enough else going wrong. If I wasn’t sexual with him, he’d find somebody else and I
wouldn’t be surprised at all. I would assume he would and I would move back to Seattle.”

Something had gone terribly wrong in the Steins’ marriage. Was Seth too anxious about his self-worth to nurture Jessica, and Jessica too afraid of intimacy? If so, perhaps the Steins would have run into problems regardless of the contradictory pressures of work and family, and regardless of their views of manhood and womanhood. But Seth nurtured his clients and his ailing father (for whom he prepared a salt-free lunch each weekday for an entire year). And Jessica was able to develop a close relationship with her psychiatrist and dear friends.

Again, perhaps the marriage suffered from a clash of ethnic traditions. Seth Stein came from a closely knit, intensely emotional, first-generation Russian-Jewish family. Jessica came from cooler, more restrained, Midwestern Swedish parents who resembled the parents of Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s film
Annie Hall.
In their book
Mixed Blessings
, Paul and Rachel Cowan suggest that the Jewish man who marries a Gentile woman often seeks a wife who is less intrusive and controlling than his mother, while a Gentile woman seeks, in her husband, the warmth, intensity, and excitement of upward mobility lacking in her cool and collected father. By middle age, the Cowans suggest, the wife may find her husband full of badly expressed needs and the husband may find his wife too cool. Perhaps this happened to the Steins. But I found this pattern between workaholic husbands and professionally ambitious wives who combine other ethnic and religious traditions as well.

A third interpretation—that there was a clash of gender strategies—may tell us more. With regard to the second shift, Jessica was not a supermom; she had bought herself out of what she could, and cut back her career to do the rest herself. Seth didn’t do the “downstairs,” like Evan Holt, nor cheerlead his wife’s domesticity like Peter Tanagawa. Seth had joined that group of men at the top of much of the business and professional world, men who are married and heterosexual but to whom women and
children are not what’s basic. In a way, Jessica felt Seth had “died,” like her father.

Seth supported the idea of his wife’s career but embraced the heavy demands of his own. He should accommodate Jessica’s career, he told himself, but how could he? He should engage his children more, but how could he? The “shoulds” came up in his head on the commute home. The “can’ts” ruled the day.

To the extent that Seth was involved in his family, he expected to
receive
at home and to
give
at work. Jessica wanted Seth to
give
at home as well as at work. They differed from other couples in the early motives they attached to their gender views and in the moves—mainly outward—they made on behalf of them. If at first Seth stayed late at the office in order to become a successful man, later he stayed there to avoid conflict at home, all because, the myth went, he was a “hard-driving Type-A guy.” Under the guise of balancing motherhood and career, Jessica had withdrawn somewhat from the children, oriented their frustrations toward Seth, and withdrawn almost totally from him.

It is worth asking why Seth and Jessica didn’t sense the potential clash of these “moves”
before
they married. When Jessica met Seth, in her first year of law school, she was attracted to his look of success. He was a good-looking, surefooted, intense man on the rise. Jessica had that look of success too. Seth saw in her the elegant, beautiful, slightly restrained woman of his own dreams.

On the face of it, Seth had quickly adjusted to the prospect of Jessica’s career:

However, this was not the same Jessica whom Seth imagined would become his wife. He had a secret idea: Jessica had not really meant it. An educated woman’s commitment to her career, he felt, was like an attractive woman’s commitment to her virginity—if a man makes the right moves, she will give it up. The virgin says, “No, no, no … yes.” The career girl says over and over, “I’m serious about my career,” but ends up saying, “Really, a family comes first.”

For her part, Jessica ignored the early signs that Seth would put his career ahead of hers. She did not harbor the idea that he would change his mind, but she all along expected potentially contradictory things: that they would mainly rely on his salary, but that he would be just as involved at home as she was.