How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids Read online

  Meanwhile, I have, through careful maneuvering, carved out a part-time job as a freelance writer. During the six hours my daughter is at school, I park myself in front of the computer and industriously write about beauty and health for magazines such as Vogue (even if, in my limp ponytail and frayed yoga pants, I am easily the fashion bible’s least glamorous employee). During those hours, I barely rise from my chair—but the payoff is that when school is out at 3, I close my computer for the day and transform into a stay-at-home mom. Because I’m so demonically focused, my work output roughly equals that of my former job as a music writer at Rolling Stone magazine—I may have spent nine hours daily in the office, but a full third of it was dedicated to web-surfing, gossiping with coworkers, and debating what to have for lunch (if we weren’t on deadline, twenty minutes could be devoted to the topic of will Mexican food make us too drowsy?).

  These days, a delightfully surreal workday might involve dropping my daughter at school—a three-minute walk through a leafy park—hopping on the F train to Manhattan to meet up with Jennifer Lopez, and then heading back to Brooklyn in time for school pickup. Whenever I interview celebrities, I often warm them up with a softball question in which I have them describe for me the happiest time of their lives. If they are parents, their inevitable answer is this: Oh, the period of time when my children were small, no question. I am fully aware that this should be a golden era for me and Tom—we have our health, fulfilling jobs, the child we have longed for. And we are squandering it.

  Our situation is certainly not unique: this simmering resentment dominates mom blogs. Get a group of mothers together, uncork a bottle or three of sauvignon blanc, and the scattered sniping will soon rise to a thunderous crescendo of complaint as everyone clamors to share their stories:

  My husband works all week, so on weekends, he tells me he doesn’t want to “deal with” our sons. I’m amazed that he doesn’t notice that I’m basically radiating hatred all the time.

  I’m emptying the dishwasher and Brian starts grabbing my boobs. I’ve had kids pawing me all day long, so that’s not hot. If you want some action, help me unload the dishes, idiot.

  My husband tries to get out of changing diapers by saying I’m the “expert.”

  I’m so tired of asking Andrew to do things around the house. No one has to ask me. You know why? Because I just get on with it.

  I’d divorce Jason, but he drops off the kids at school in the mornings.

  A friend just wrote me this: “I’m running on 5 hrs sleep and irrational anger at Adam while cortisol pumps itself into my breast milk. He just asked me what I wanted for our anniversary, and I tell him a weekend at a hotel, alone. I wasn’t kidding. The words ‘weekend alone’ feel like porn to me.”

  Perhaps the single most widely cited piece of research on marriage and children comes from eminent couples therapists Julie and John Gottman. They found that 67 percent of couples see their marital satisfaction plummet after having a baby. No surprise there: your bundle of joy brings a boatload of additional stresses such as hormonal zigzagging, work schedule upheavals, money worries (the cost of diapers alone is panic-inducing), a sex drought, and, as one paper I read pointed out, “increased interactions with medical professionals.”

  And the significance of chronic sleep deprivation on a new parent’s temper cannot be overestimated. Lack of sleep makes us focus on negative experiences, pick fights, and become irrational. Research shows that after sleep deprivation, the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala, is much more reactive. Normally, the more rational prefrontal cortex works to put everything into context, but when your brain is sleep deprived, this relationship breaks down—and often, so do you. Suddenly, your responses are way less controlled—and you rip your husband a new one when he unthinkingly slams a door after you’ve just gotten the baby to nap.

  When people miss sleep for one night, they feel the effects the next day—but one study shows that if sleep loss continues, people report that they actually feel just fine: I got this! You know what? I don’t even need sleep! When I chat with Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, he compares this mind-set to that of stubbornly confident drunk drivers. “After five drinks, they may think they’re fine to drive home, but they’re markedly impaired in their brain function,” he says. “The same is true of sleep: when people regularly get less than seven hours, we can measure significant cognitive impairment.”

  Before I had a baby, I would roll my eyes when I’d hear a new mom lamenting that she didn’t have time to shower for days on end. Please, I’d think. Doesn’t a newborn sleep all the time? Drama! Now that I’m a mother, I roll my eyes when I hear the oft-repeated advice urging moms to “nap when the baby naps.” The effort required to keep a tiny new being alive is bizarrely immense—and, at least when it comes to childcare and housework, women are bearing the brunt of it. Over a quarter century ago, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this disparity the “stalled revolution,” and it still holds true: while the lives of women, who now make up almost half of the US labor force, have radically changed, the behavior of their mates has not changed quite as much.

  Working mothers are now the top earners in a record 40 percent of families with kids—yet a University of Maryland study found that married mothers are still doing nearly three and a half times as much housework as married fathers. And when you’ve been picking up nonstop after a two-year-old, your husband’s formerly innocuous habit of shedding his socks into a bounceable ball shape—within view of the hamper—is suddenly deeply irritating.

  Comedian Dena Blizzard, a New Jersey mom, says she would bristle when her husband would return home from work, look around at the chaos wrought by their three children, and ask her, “What happened here? Who pulled all this stuff out?” “Every day, he would say it,” she tells me. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this? Yeah, I pulled all this shit out. I was really bored today, so I thought I’d throw everything on the floor.’”

  Then he would follow with the question dreaded by stay-at-home mothers worldwide: What did you do all day? “I did a hundred things, but none of them added up to anything,” Blizzard says. “I vacuumed, I called Poison Control because my son ate a plant, and I think I took a shower. I’d tell him, ‘We have three kids. This is as far as we got.’ He would always be surprised. It was hard not to want to punch him in the face.”

  Sociologist Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities (yes, this exists) at Stony Brook University, says that men tend to pitch in more with childcare than with housework—but as with housework, they’re selective about the kind of childcare that they will do. “What happens in a lot of middle-class families is that Dad becomes the Fun Parent,” Kimmel tells me. “So Dad takes the kids to the park on Saturday mornings to play soccer, and Mom cleans the breakfast dishes, makes the beds, does the laundry, makes lunch. Then the kids come home at noon and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we had such a great time with Dad in the park—he’s awesome!’”

  This unfair dynamic is neatly summed up in an article from the satirical online newspaper the Onion: “Mom Spends Beach Vacation Assuming All Household Duties in Closer Proximity to Ocean.” As the “mom” puts it, “I just love that I can be scrubbing the bathroom, look out the window, and see the tide coming in. We should do this every year!”

  And even though fathers have stepped up considerably in sharing childcare duties—since the 1960s, nearly tripling the time they spend with their children—mothers still devote about twice as much time to their kids as fathers do. Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the US government’s American Time Use Survey, women reported feeling significantly more fatigued than fathers in all four major life categories—work, housework, leisure, and childcare. (I read these statistics and think of Tina Fey’s tip in Bossypants for carving out “me time” after a baby: “Say you’re going to look for the diaper cream and then go into your child’s room and just stand there, until your spouse comes in and
curtly says, ‘What are you doing?’”)

  When journalist Josh Katz crunched the numbers from the most current Time Use Survey, he found that even when men didn’t have jobs, they still did half the amount of housework and childcare that women did. A large survey of US mothers by NBC’s Today program revealed that for nearly half of them, their husbands were a bigger source of stress than their children. Some of them commented that the fathers acted more like kids than equal partners.

  “If I let my husband and baby have their way, I’d never pee, brush my teeth, shower, or eat again,” says Leyla, a friend of a friend. When she went out one night for an hour-long meeting, she soon received a text from her husband about their daughter that read, ominously: Witching hour just began but don’t worry. Moments later, a more urgent message arrived: This is the worst I’ve ever heard it. “Seconds later my phone beeps,” she says. “He has sent an iPhone recording of the baby screaming bloody murder.” Leyla quickly said her good-byes and hurried out the door. The iPhone, alas, is every parent’s electronic parole bracelet—and in life, there is no “airplane mode.”

  I certainly feel like Tom’s mother when I have to nag him to do a task—especially when he treats it as an option by saying, “In a minute,” or simply ignores me completely. (At least he doesn’t do what my friend’s husband does: salute and shout, “Aye-aye, sir,” to make their kids laugh. At her.) Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, explains to me that couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.

  My friend Jenny, mother of two, recalls one Saturday morning when it became clear that the baby had a dirty diaper. “My husband chirped, ‘Your turn—I did the last one,’” she says. “As a stay-at-home mom, I was up a ballpark three thousand lifetime diaper changes on this guy. I think my head rotated 360 degrees.”

  When men do help around the house, says Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan (with the very term help, she says, indicating that we have quite a way to go), they often choose chores with a “leisure component.” This would include yard work, driving to the store to pick up something, or busily reordering the family Netflix queue—quasi-discretionary activities that have a more flexible timetable than more urgent jobs such as hustling the kids out the door for school or making dinner (and often, many of those “leisure component” chores involve getting out of the house).

  Smock, a leading expert on the changing American family, who is equally at home discussing gender inequality as she is true crime novels and ’70s rock bands, says that on top of basic duties such as cooking and cleaning, women do countless invisible tasks. This is the time-gobbling labor that will likely never show up on any sort of time use study. One is “kin work,” which Smock defines to me as “giving emotional support to relatives, buying presents and sending cards, handling holiday celebrations, things like that.” (Which is why a certain page in the gift book Porn for New Moms always gets a laugh: a smiling, hunky man sits at a desk and says, I’ll be right there, hon. I’m just finishing the last of the baby shower thank-you cards.)

  Then there’s “emotion work,” the constant checking on the wellbeing of everyone in the household: Is your tween still feeling excluded in the school cafeteria? The dog seems under the weather—is it time to get his kidney medication refilled? Did your husband hash out that issue with his boss? Yet another kind of invisible work is called “consumption labor”—buying the kids’ underwear and school supplies, researching the car seat and the high chair. “This often falls to the woman,” says Smock, “unless you’re talking about big-ticket items like a large-screen TV and the refrigerator.”

  Let us not forget the schlepping: a study in the journal Transportation found that women shoulder most of the load in the drearily named “average daily household support travel time” category (the school run, grocery shopping, hauling kids to piano lessons). Women do this an average of eleven minutes more per day than men—even when both spouses are breadwinners.

  Perhaps the least visible but most pervasive job is that of household manager. “That one is constant,” Smock says. “It’s the person who remembers everything: that Joey needs to have a dentist appointment, what foods each child likes, that a babysitter needs to be hired for the weekend. If a mother is handing her husband a grocery list, he is given credit for going shopping, but she has done the work of constructing the list. Giving direction to the husband is labor. It’s in every area in terms of childcare, and it’s always going on in your brain, even if you’re not aware of it.”

  And mothers resent it, says New York psychotherapist Jean Fitzpatrick. “What I hear most often from women,” she says, “is ‘I do not want to be the boss here, I do not want him coming to me and asking me. I want him to take ownership.’”

  My friend Marea says that this is a constant struggle in her house. “Oh, if I don’t mention it, it doesn’t happen,” she says. “Our daughter is seven, and it’s like my husband still doesn’t know the flow. If I happen to be doing something for myself near her bedtime, unless prompted, he won’t get her ready for bed. And having to prompt—and prompt—raises my stress level.”

  After my chat with Smock, I start toting up all the invisible work I do as I go about my day. It’s maddening. If Tom takes our daughter to swim lessons, I remind them when it’s time to go, pack her bag, empty her bag when they return, dry her wet clothes, and give her a snack and a bath while Tom collapses on the couch. Invisible work stays hidden until it’s illuminated—even Smock wasn’t aware that her own mother did virtually everything in their household until she was in graduate school. “Looking back, I think, ‘Oh my god, how could she have done her job teaching all day, and then come home to a second job and handled everything?’ No wonder she would go to the bedroom and lie down for a while. How could it have been so invisible to me, even?” I ask Smock which jobs her father did around the house and she laughs. “My dad did car stuff, and stuff with the dog,” she says. “Oh, and he liked to put wallpaper up.”

  For all my complaints that I want Tom to be more involved, he counters that I jump in and micromanage when he does—for instance, I would hurriedly check after he had changed a loaded diaper for what is colorfully known in my circle of moms as “butt rust.” I must admit that when it comes to kid-related tasks, I feel I do a more conscientious job.

  You can’t have it both ways, says Chris Routly, a blogger from Portland, Oregon, and full-time caregiver dad (a term he prefers to stay-at-home dad). He says that he understands why women are hesitant to hand over power in an area where they have traditionally held more control. “But if we are going to have equality in parenting, it is going to mean that women are going to be mindful of letting go of that,” says the father of two, who wears a “Dads Don’t Babysit” T-shirt and posts impressive shots of the Ninjago cake he baked for his son’s birthday on Instagram. “We’re all figuring it out as we go along, so I think this idea that women have this built-in superpower where they just know how to take care of children is a lie. We need to do away with it.”

  He is right. There have been plenty of times I’ve waved Tom away when he tries to get involved, because I get a distinct thrill out of being in charge, as I capably knock down one kid-related task after another. Pediatric dentist appointment—check! Permission slips signed—check! I enjoy the constant buzz of organizing, researching, scheduling—a point I bond over with feminist icon Caitlin Moran, mother of two and author of How to Be a Woman.

  Give a mother a sleeping child for an hour, and she can achieve ten times more than a childless person, she tells me when we meet before her book reading in Philadelphia. “Motherhood is really like being in an action movie that goes on for your whole life—but with all the boring, everyday bits left in,�
� she says. “Mothers have to do a poo in four parts because a child will cry, and then they try and finish off but the child needs them again! A new mother will work far harder, more creatively, and more effectively than people who don’t have children—because she has to.”

  But I can pinpoint the precise moment that my careful, complex balancing act blew up in my face. It occurred when Sylvie was in preschool. She was running a fever, so I kept her home. She was thrilled, and happily binge-watched Martha Speaks in her pajamas while I prepared for my phone interview with Jennifer Hudson for the cover story of a major magazine. I informed Tom that I would tend to Sylvie all day except from 5 to 6 p.m., when I had to chat with Jennifer. “I just need that hour,” I told him, as I, ever the household manager, arranged a snack tray for Sylvie and pulled out a board game for them to play.

  At 4:45, Tom and Sylvie were peacefully immersed in a game of Enchanted Forest as I crept upstairs to our office, where I had attached my tape recorder to the phone. Jennifer, whom I had interviewed a few times before, was delightful, as usual—charming and down to earth.

  When I do phone interviews, I am intently focused so that I can quickly cover all the questions I need to get to during my allotted time—generally forty-five minutes to an hour. We had just moved on to dieting tips when Sylvie suddenly appeared next to me.

  Poo, she breathed. At three, she was in the midst of potty training, and preferred that I finish the job. We had one bathroom, and it was downstairs.