by Ada Calhoun
Our table declined the offer of a third glass of wine. We put on our jackets and hugged good-bye and left the bar. Behind us, the young woman’s night was just beginning.
3
The Caregiving Rack
“It felt as though if I got up and did one thing, then I was failing with all the other things. Because there was absolutely no way to get through the checklist. No matter what I did that day, I was going to be a failure.”
Taking my son to school the other morning, I overheard a woman apologetically say, “Mommy literally has no hands.”
I raised my eyebrows at my son. Literally?
When I looked over, I saw the woman. She looked very tired, and she was holding multiple tote bags, a plastic container filled with little trains, a sippy cup, and her young son’s hand.
My hands were full, too, I realized: my laptop and books, my gym clothes, my son’s after-school bag.
The Boomers and oldest Gen Xers were the first to be described as a “sandwich” generation—squeezed by the need to care for children and aging parents and perhaps also grandparents—simultaneously.¹ But the pressure on younger Gen Xers when it comes to caregiving is especially intense. The sandwich metaphor feels far too tame. I prefer to think of it as being on a rack, wrists and ankles tied to opposite ends, with the two pulls ever strengthening.
Our generation’s delay in childbearing means that many of us find ourselves either struggling with fertility or raising little kids in our forties—at the very moment when our parents may need help, too.²
This increase in the quantity of care that we must provide coincides, awkwardly, with social agitation for enhanced quality of care.
In her book All Joy and No Fun, Jennifer Senior explains how “children went from being our employees to our bosses.”³ Gone are the days when children were routinely relied upon to do major chores around the house or on the farm, to fetch a family’s groceries. Today, parents are far more likely to see their children’s needs and desires as paramount, their own and their spouse’s as secondary.
“The new trappings of intensive parenting are largely fixtures of white, upper-middle-class American culture,” Claire Cain Miller wrote in the New York Times in 2018. “But researchers say the expectations have permeated all corners of society, whether or not parents can achieve them.”⁴
Since our own childhoods, the time parents spend caring for their children’s basic needs has risen dramatically. According to the Pew Research Center,⁵ in 1965 mothers spent nine hours a week on paid work and ten hours on child care. In 2016, mothers spent twenty-five hours on paid work and fourteen on child care. Something has to give, and it’s usually women’s leisure time or sleep. Even so, of mothers with full-time jobs, 43 percent still lament spending too little time with their children.
Meanwhile, social support for parents has dropped. Childless friends and neighbors offer less help than in the past, though there are many more of them, relatively speaking: the proportion doing any child care at all was down to about 3.7 percent in 2016 (from 4.5 percent in 2004).⁶ According to a study that examined the longitudinal data of men and women from their late twenties to their midfifties, work is good for our mental health except when there are young children at home. When the children get older, psychological benefits of work return. But in that work-and-small-children phase, mothers suffer. Men in the same circumstances show no such effect from the stages of parenthood.⁷
I asked Chrystal Evans Hurst, forty-five, of Dallas, the author of She’s Still There and a mother of five, if one moment summed up midlife for her. She described a recent morning when she felt unable to get out of bed because the second she did, she’d be behind on her to-do list. She lay there, frozen.
Generation X women keep many lists: grocery lists, chore lists, deadline lists, schools-to-apply-to lists, holiday-card lists. Some are on paper and some on smartphones or sticky notes or whiteboards, but they can also seem to loop on a scroll behind the women’s eyes.
If our generation has been told for decades that we have so much freedom, so many choices, such opportunities, the question women with young children face is: how free are we to reach for the stars in midlife if we have someone else depending on us? Especially when our concept of good parenting involves so much more brain space and such higher costs than it did for our mothers and grandmothers? And when we expect ourselves to be excellent, highly engaged parents while also being excellent, highly engaged employees?
Generation X is downwardly mobile as living costs climb, but we’re working hard to give our children advantages we didn’t have. According to the USDA’s “Cost of Raising a Child” report, families with incomes over $107,400 will now spend $454,770, adjusted for inflation, to raise a baby born in 2015 to the age of seventeen.⁸ One friend of mine told me the other day: “I grew up an ‘at-risk youth.’ My Barbie clothes were all made of scraps of leftover fabric. My daughter goes to French immersion school.”
Some of the stress on parents we can chalk up to an objectively more competitive educational landscape. I applied to exactly one high school. I took my SATs hungover and still got scholarships. Now, I have friends who can’t get their kids into the public elementary school across the street from their apartment because too many parents want their kids to go there. I know young people who have 4.0 GPAs and long résumés with clubs and sports and service hours who struggle with college admissions. According to a 2019 Wall Street Journal article, last year all but one Ivy League school accepted less than 10 percent of applicants.⁹
But there’s a new internal calculus, too. Once, when pressed about having another baby, I said that we couldn’t afford it. This was an absurd answer. I know people who have successfully raised more children on less money. It still felt true because so many nonnecessities seem necessary to me: books, camps, after-school programs, travel—above all, the freedom to give them my attention.
According to a 2015 Gallup poll, no less than 56 percent of working mothers would prefer to stay home.¹⁰ That is a huge number, but I can’t imagine anyone who has worked with a baby at home—including the 39 percent of dissenters—being shocked by it.
The question of whether we’d rather be home with our new baby or not usually is academic. Few families today can get by on one income; and few employers will grant employees significant time off.
When I had my baby, I didn’t let myself ask the question of what I wanted to do, because I had no real choice. I was the breadwinner in an expensive city. I did want a career and it had been made clear to me that my bosses were being very generous giving me six weeks of leave and a day or two a week of working at home, plus freedom to pump in the company restroom.
And I was lucky. I received more concessions than other women I know did after they gave birth. On my return to the office, I splurged on the Medela Pump in Style with Metro Bag in pastel blue. It looked like overnight luggage, so whenever I picked it up and headed to the staff bathrooms, my deputy wisecracked, “Another weekend in the country?”
Our parents’ generation, on the whole, did not struggle with exactly the same pressures. If our mothers worked, they often held jobs in which they could clock in and clock out. They weren’t getting pinged from 7:00 a.m. to midnight every day.
Expectations of parental attention, too, were lower. If a 1970s mother had to work or go out, there was no shame in leaving school-age kids home alone, watching TV.
One Gen X woman tells me that her Boomer mother comes to visit and is mystified. “Why do you play with them?” her mother asks. “We never played with you.”
That is a common sort of exchange between Gen X parents and their elders.
When it comes to parenting, X has as a generation probably done too much. And I am not basing this only on a Gen X Facebook post that I saw recently: “Toddler game suggestion: Play archaeologist! Give her a dry paintbrush, and lie down on the couch. Tell her you are a dinosaur fossil, and she has to gently and painstakingly excavate you.”
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sp; In the Boomer-parenting year of 1975, Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons published the wildly popular book The Mother’s Almanac, seeking to “deescalate the idea that you have to be an expert to raise a child.”
Gen X has been issued the opposite message. Many of the parenting books now in vogue encourage new parents to breastfeed for at least a year and not to sleep-train—two things that usually entail sleep deprivation for mothers. Subject to fierce internal pressure to give our children advantages we never had, we are the perfect consumers of baby swings, Gymboree classes, and $200 wooden balance bikes for toddlers—whether or not we can afford them.
Millennials who don’t have kids yet may find this debate perplexing: Who’s right, the hands-off Boomers or the hands-on Gen Xers? They may have an opportunity here to see how Gen X parents have overcorrected for their own childhoods and to take a sensible middle path. I dearly hope they remember how frazzled we were and will vow never, ever to make their own baby food.
It’s still too early to say for sure, but it looks as though Millennials might be swinging the pendulum back toward a more relaxed mode of parenting. One 2013 marketing study found that most Millennial parents see the value of unstructured playtime and think of themselves not as helicopter parents but as drones—near enough to swoop in when needed but otherwise content to linger in the clouds.¹¹ In a Pew Research Center study, more than half of Millennial mothers surveyed said they thought they were doing a very good job as parents.¹²
Perhaps they’ll excel, too, at being partnered while raising little kids. In his 2017 book, The All-or-Nothing Marriage, psychologist Eli J. Finkel points to research which found that, compared with 1975, spouses were spending far less time alone together—fewer date nights, less seeing friends—but doing almost three times as much shared parenting.¹³ Maybe that’s why Gen X parents often complain that midlife marriage can feel like running a daycare center with someone you used to date.¹⁴
Even some advocates of lower parenting standards sound judgmental: An article in Live Science, “Why Supermoms Should Chill,” is one example.¹⁵ Lead sentence: “Trying to have it all could be bad for your mental health.” In my experience, there is only one thing worse for a woman’s mental health than trying to be a superhero, and that is being told to “chill”—especially since any efforts to do so incur swift blowback.
When a lawyer I met in New York had her first baby, her traditional African mother told her she had to stay in the house for three months. After a few weeks she was getting stir-crazy, so she called her doctor for a second opinion. The doctor said: “You can take her out. Just don’t have her around a lot of people, and make sure you wash your hands.”
A new store had opened nearby, so this lawyer took her baby there.
“First of all, that’s just sad,” she said. “That’s my big outing: ‘Let’s go to Target!’ And while we’re there my daughter starts screaming. Not crying but wailing as if something was wrong. I was in the beauty aisle and a bunch of people started hounding me: ‘How young is that baby?’ ‘Why is she even out of the house?’
“I go up to the register, pull out my credit card, and everything goes flying. And I start crying. For real. My daughter’s screaming. I’m screaming. Everything’s everywhere … One person said, ‘I know how you feel. It’s okay. Here’s your wallet. She’s fine. Congratulations on your baby.’”
That was the only person this new mother encountered that day who she felt wasn’t judging her. “It’s like you’re supposed to know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “And we’re not going to help. We’re going to surround you and stare at you and worry about your baby. You don’t exist here, unless we’re pointing out what you’re not doing.”
Most of our mothers did not face this level of scrutiny. My mother cooked more than most mothers I knew, but we still ate Swanson Hungry-Man fried chicken TV dinners regularly and Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts for breakfast.
The food of the 1970s and ’80s was barely food at all. Anna Pallai, of the 2018 book 70s Dinner Party told me that a fancy salad then was often “vegetables in lime gelatin and lots of mayonnaise.”¹⁶ The most ’70s party meal in Pallai’s estimation? “The Sandwich Loaf: a loaf of bread cut horizontally, into which you put various fillings, like salmon, cheese, egg, chicken. The whole thing is frosted in a green- or yellow-tinted cream cheese-and-mayo spread—perhaps decorated with edible flowers.”
It sounds terrible.
“Oh,” she said. “It is.”
Like many Gen Xers, I rode around in cars with no seat belt, was left in the back while adults went into stores, and bounced around in the beds of speeding pickups. My cousin and I routinely spent trips goofing in the back of my aunt and uncle’s Volvo. While the car was moving at sixty miles an hour, we would pull down the back seats, crawl into the trunk, and then pull the seats back up after us. The trunk!
If today’s social norms were applied to any of the generations of parents who preceded us, there wouldn’t be enough Child Protective Services agents in the world to handle it. The stack of neglect reports would reach to the moon. That goes for all parents before us. Boomers were practically feral as children, just like us. The difference: we were far more likely to grow up in divorced homes, among neighbors we didn’t know, and in places with high crime rates.
Today, our streets are safer than ever. Still: no, I have not let my son, who is now twelve, go out into the world alone as much as I did as a child. It’s not rational. Independence evangelizers like Lenore Skenazy of the movement Free-Range Kids are entirely correct that we should give our kids more freedom. I have a theory about why we don’t: Gen Xers helicopter over our kids because we have too-vivid memories of what happened—or could have happened—to us when our parents didn’t hover. That visceral sense of danger is hard to reason with.
Still: how much more work could I have done over the past five years if I’d kicked my son out of the house when I had a deadline and told him to be back before dark? The mind boggles.
“I had no supervision when I was a kid,” comedian John Mulaney said in his Netflix stand-up special. “We were free to do what we wanted. But also, with that, no one cared about kids. I grew up before children were special.”¹⁷
So many things that seemed normal when I was young now seem bizarre. When my son was little, Sesame Street issued DVDs of episodes from the 1970s with a warning label: “These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”¹⁸
I laughed. Then I watched them. Kids jump on box springs left on the sidewalk. They run through construction sites. They roam, helmetless, through grimy neighborhoods with minimal supervision. I felt a mix of nostalgia for my childhood and horror at my son’s being exposed to that alternate universe.
Gen X mothers typically do not let their kids jump on box springs. They are more likely to serve at cupcake-decoration tables, pumpkin-carving stations, face-painting booths. My son’s elementary school used the scheduling site SignUpGenius. In my head, I always heard this phrase as sarcastic: “Yeah, go ahead and sign up, genius. You definitely should spend four hours on Saturday morning supervising the sand-art activity at the Spring Garden Party instead of resting or cleaning your house, genius.”
Once you’re in the system, you can try to get out, but your school family will keep pulling you back in, like the Mafia.
From: Angela
To: Graciela, Debbie, Kavita, Laura, Jasmine, and 35 more
Subject: Lice
Hi all. Just wanted to let you know Ivy’s got lice … Just what I need at the moment … So, I know we circulated some tips last year … Listerine, Pantene, tea tree oil?? What were they????
I thought I’d let ya know so you can spend the weekend checking. They also have been playing “hair salon” at school—so no more of that! I will notify the school on Monday.
From: Jasmine
Sorry to hear this news! People have rec’d Listerine/mouth-wash t
o dry them out or heavy conditioner/mayonnaise to suffocate them. Do either of these things along with putting a plastic bag or shower cap on for a couple of hours. Comb out with a fine-tooth lice/nit comb.
Prevention … Aqua Net hair spray to coat the hair. Some kids find this too stiff or uncomfortable on a daily basis. (Whatever! Like itching nonstop is comfortable?)
From: Syd
Hey guys. I only wash the kids’ hair once a week and I rub oil (blend of coconut, ylang-ylang, rosemary, and anise) into their hair every day before I send them to school, which is why my kids always have greasy hair. It has been great at preventing the kids from getting reinfected. Good luck. Shaving heads will also probably nail it.
These emails are a few of the dozens in this thread—itself just one of dozens in my School email folder. Other threads include: Gift Basket for Gala, Science Exploratorium, Wonderful Wednesday, Holiday gift for Ms. Campos, Can you help on Family Portrait Day, lost toy, enterovirus, mindfulness, playground dynamics, summer camp, babysitting help today, International Night, lock-down drill, book fair, fund-raising committee, bake sale.
Each email will cc twenty to forty women. These women have jobs. One is a teacher. One is an event planner. One runs a restaurant. It’s not as though they have tons of free time. And yet, I’ve noticed that men are rarely, if ever, copied. I’ve tried to loop my husband in on some of these chains—just so he can share in the joy, of course—but somehow his name never sticks on the list.
One year I was at a meeting where the PTA moms were trying to come up with auction items for the annual fundraiser. My usual recommendation that they offer a romantic weekend in Vermont with Mr. Matt was once again rejected, so I suggested a get-out-of-jail-free card that would entitle the winner to a full school year without a single email about anything school related.