Although the difficulties of re-entry should not be underestimated, intelligent, motivated women can succeed at work even if they have spent several years at home. Volunteer work, part-time or contract work, and attending local networking meetings are ways that at-home mothers can stay connected in their fields. These activities may be unappealing or unfeasible in the first year or two, but some new mothers like to do them early on, “to not feel swallowed up by motherhood,” as some women put it. (See “Resources, in Appendix 2 for organizations that help you with these issues.)
As you consider options open to you as a working mother, be flexible. You can’t be absolutely certain which choice will be right for you. What is perfect in January may be intolerable by June. So don’t paint yourself into a corner by saying, “I’d never dream of going back to work before the baby enters school,” or, “I’ll never stay home.”
Who’s Changing the Diapers—Parents as Partners
Many women have found the solution to their problems as overburdened working mothers in the person of their partner. Having it all is much easier if your partner is willing to assume an equal share of the household and child-care responsibilities.
Unfortunately, change happens very slowly. In The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, author Arlie Hochschild documents that working mothers still do more housework and child care than their partners. Both parents and children will be better off if we can change this. If they are sharing the burden, mothers will be less physically tired and more emotionally content. There would be less conflict and more time to enjoy family life.
Below, I offer some guidelines for making parenthood workloads more equitable.
Guidelines for Shared Parenting
1. Tackle the obstacles to changing gender roles for an ideal work/family balance for all parents. We tend to think we’re so sophisticated and liberated that we can slither out of our old sex roles as easily as a snake sheds its skin. But humans are more like snails than snakes. Role-changing is a slow and painful process.
Many couples who had an equal relationship pre-parenthood revert to more traditional patterns after the baby’s birth. The main reason is that children strike a deeper cord in us than careers do. If they were raised in a traditional, heterosexual home, Dad brought home the bacon and Mom cooked it. Sometimes when you become a parent, you identify with your own same-sex parent more intensely than previously, and you may unwittingly slip into your parents’ behavior patterns. But you can step out of these patterns if you’re aware of them and if you’re willing to try new ones.
The dynamics will be different if you were raised by a single parent or a gay couple, but you can still benefit from thinking about this issue. As you step into your new parent role, do you find yourself saying or doing things that your parent would have done? Which parent, if you had two? Do you remember any arguments about sharing the workload at home?
a. Have a chair dialogue with your mother/father (see Chapter 2, “Secret Doors.”) You won’t do this with your parent present. To discover some of the ways you’re following in your parents’ footsteps, pretend to tell your imaginary same-sex parent the ways in which you would like to emulate them. Then mention how you would like to parent differently. Explain how your friends, nonsexist beliefs, and psychological knowledge have influenced your parenting goals.
Suggest that your partner try the same exercise, having an imaginary conversation with his same-sex parent. You might also try a variation to broaden both your perspectives: Ask him to take your role while you play your mother or father, then take his role while he plays one of his parents. Stepping into each other’s shoes in this fashion can be a playful, nonthreatening, maybe even fun way to discover some of the attitudes that may be blocking a smooth transition to shared parenthood. And you’ll learn a lot about each other in the process.
b. Discuss this issue with your partner. Your family history influences not only your expectations of yourself as a parent but also your expectations of your partner. Just as a man may unconsciously slip into his father’s patterns, he may also expect his wife to emulate his mother’s. In fact, by taking his father’s role, he may unconsciously even force his wife to step into his mother’s role.
For example, Joel’s father was overly stern with him and his brothers, and in reaction, his mother became overly indulgent. When Joel became a father, he was so strict that his wife, also in reaction, wound up being indulgent, too.
It’s also possible to misinterpret your partner’s behavior because you may react to him as if he were your opposite sex parent. When Dale let Tessie play in the backyard mud puddles, Janet was horrified. She associated Dale’s lack of concern for the dirt with her stepfather’s lack of concern for her. But when she realized that Tessie was having a great time and that Dale planned to bathe her afterward and change her clothes, she was able to able to distinguish her easygoing husband from her neglectful stepfather.
The point is that we tend to forget how deeply ingrained and how complex role behavior and expectations may be. Remember that your husband didn’t invent sexism. Like you, he is merely a product of a sexist society. Because he’s nearby, it may be tempting to put him on trial for all the ills men have perpetrated on womankind through the centuries. And it may be equally tempting to sentence him to hard labor. But he’s more likely to participate enthusiastically as a partner than as a prisoner.
c. Seek out couples who are sharing parenthood successfully and use them as role models. Ask them for help and suggestions.
2. Don’t consider your partner to be “helping” you with “your” work. After a while, according to Ellen Goodman in her Boston Globe column, “Being a Grateful Wife Means Always Having to Ask,” the partner begins to “wonder why she should say thank you when a father took care of his children and why she should say please when a husband took care of his house.” Remember, they’re his children, and it’s his house, too. You didn’t marry a boss; you married a partner.
3. Don’t divide the chore list rigidly in half. Take into consideration which tasks each of you actually likes to do; then divide up the ones neither wants. If he loves to cook and you hate it, it’s silly for each of you to cook half the meals. But it is a good idea to rotate the chores you both hate, whether weekly or monthly, so neither of you is stuck with the same ones all the time. It can be helpful to vent your frustrations, then re-negotiate or experiment with alternative ways of coping.
4. Share the power as well as the responsibility. You can’t expect to shed half the load and hang onto all the control. That means that both of you should have an equal say in housekeeping and child care.
5. Give your partner the trust and respect s/he deserves. You should not insist that everything be done exactly your way or perfectly. Nor should you confuse a legitimate difference in standards with irresponsibility or resistance on your husband’s part. Have faith in his ability to learn. If he doesn’t tape the diaper tightly enough, he’ll learn quickly! As Nancy Press Hawley says in Ourselves and Our Children, “Mothers who want to share parenthood often need to hold their tongues.”
Caryl Rivers, Rosalind Barnett, and Grace Baruch, suggest in Beyond Sugar and Spice that one way to deal with a wife’s typically superior knowledge of domestic practices is for her to serve as a consultant. In a consultant-client relationship, the consultant provides information, but the client is free to decide whether and how to act on that information. This approach may work for some couples who would otherwise become hopelessly entangled in power struggles.
Father Power
Fathers are increasingly involved with their children, and researchers and society are more fully understanding the powerful influence they have on their offspring. Ideally you will both share the excitement and anticipation throughout the pregnancy, from the positive test, through both the miracle and ordeal of childbirth. The father’s hand on the mother’s belly when he feels the first kick is a favorite memory for many. Share your feelings during pregna
ncy, not only the joy but also the darker moments of anxiety and ambivalence. Take childbirth classes and read parenting books together. Spend bonding time, “skin to skin” (e.g., baby’s bare chest held against the father’s chest) with the baby immediately after birth.
Writer David Steinberg in The Future of the Family described the joys of fatherhood, and the growth that comes from taking on a new role:
As a man, it’s easy to always be in situations that call for aggressive, rational manipulative perspectives and skills. With Dylan I move out of that more completely than I ever have before. As a result, I feel myself growing in all kinds of new ways. The clear importance of these new skills in caring for Dylan helps me respect and value them as they develop.
Steinberg describes some of the special delights for fathers and their children now available, that were absent in the days when fathers worked long hours and were only minimally involved with their children. He enjoys discovering nurturing skills he didn’t know he had as well as the pleasurable experience of dealing with Dylan.
Finding Your Own Path to Shared Parenthood
Nancy Press Hawley, in Ourselves and Our Children points out that “The ‘ideal’ of shared parenthood is not for everyone and should not be seen as yet another pressure on parents to perform.” Some women seem to feel that the Feminist Bureau of Investigation is going to send Betty or Gloria over to charge that your husband resists too much and that you do not insist enough. But pressure to conform to the new stereotype of the absolutely equal couple is as counterproductive as pressure to conform to the old traditional role divisions.
For example, consider Renata, an engineer, who is being pressured by her husband Leonard to have a baby. Her response: “I tell him I’m just not cut out to stay home. And I can’t see leaving a baby in day care. He says he would stay home with the baby and just work part-time. But I couldn’t stand his doing that. How could I respect a husband who stayed home and changed diapers? What would people say about us?”
Although many career women would jump at such an offer, Renata won’t take Leonard up on it. Despite her nontraditional career choice, she has very traditional attitudes toward motherhood.
Or look at Melissa, an ardent feminist, who has trouble finding time to paint because of her hectic schedule as a commercial artist. She and her husband Will are working on the baby decision. Will has suggested that she quit her more-than-full-time job to spend half her time with the baby and the other half in her studio. But Melissa won’t even consider it. “If I had a baby, I’d have to work full-time. I can’t stand the idea of Will’s supporting me.” While it is a challenge to maintain identity and a sense of autonomy if one doesn’t have a job, there are ways to do so. Melissa’s rigidity if preventing her from enjoying her art, and her good fortune to not be obligated to work full time.
While Renata felt that motherhood was possible only within a traditional framework, Melissa felt that it was possible only within a nontraditional one. And both women are victims of their own rigid thinking. Neither can ask, “What’s best for me and for us?”
The moral of these stories: try to be flexible in considering options. That way you’ll have more options to consider. All couples have to find their own unique solutions to the problems of parenthood and family life.
Day Care? Where?—Mother’s Dream or Nightmare?
Before you start searching for day care, let’s take stock of your thoughts on day care. You may have nothing but positive feelings about day care if you have friends whose children have thrived in centers or with nannies. These friends may tell you how comfortable they are at work knowing that their child is well-cared for. These arrangements can make children more confident, knowing that their parents aren’t the only people who can take care of them. Socializing with other children and learning new skills may be additional benefits that your friends have reported. You may even have noticed, for instance, that a friend’s child who used to cling to his parents is more relaxed and independent since he started day care.
But what if even with some of the above information in mind, you have some negative feelings about day care? See if you can relate to any of these feelings.
Guilt
You’re afraid your child will suffer emotional damage because you aren’t there all the time. Study after study (see the Bibliography, Appendix 1) has shown that children of working mothers are no more unhappy or emotionally scarred than those whose mothers are in the home. However, it is clear to mental health professionals that children of frustrated mothers often have emotional problems. If you would be frustrated at home, your child is much better off sharing a happy mother with the folks at the office than having a miserable mommy all to herself.
But even if you’ve read the studies, your guilt won’t magically disappear. If your mother stayed home with you and you both enjoyed that, you may worry that a different choice may not work as well for you and your child. With time and conversations with other working mothers, you will be able to enjoy work as well as your child.
Jealousy
You may already be jealous of a potential day care teacher before you’ve even made the first phone call. Perhaps you’re worried that your child won’t know who her mother is. You’re afraid she’ll love the caregiver more. You want to be the most special person in your child’s world. Will you earn that place if you don’t spend most of your time together?
Rest assured that children save a special place in their hearts for their mothers and fathers. There’s room in their lives and affections for two parents and a day care provider or nanny. Research and my own experience both as an infant day care worker and a day care consumer show that children know who their parents are, right from the first month. They feel the intensity of your love, sense the familiarity of your face and body, and respond accordingly.
Anger
It’s only natural to feel anger about the incredible burden of arranging care for a child any time you’re not going to be around. What a switch from being childfree! Some of your anger at day care may really be anger at the injustice of being on duty around the clock. And if your partner is not participating in the child care search, your sense of resentment may intensify.
I’ve been struck by the number of super competent women who don’t bat an eyelash at all kinds of complicated arrangements at work but who feel completely incapable of finding a day care placement. While some women don’t know where to begin, there can be psychological impediments. Common fears include not being able to find a good placement, fear their child won’t be comfortable in day care, and fear of going back to work after the baby is born. Get help from your partner, friends, mothers’ groups, or professionals so you won’t feel so alone and you’ll have perspective on any emotional obstacles in your way.
Now that you have sorted out your emotions, let’s talk about day care logistics.
Choosing the Right Kind of Day Care
There are three main sources of child care for working parents:
1. Day care providers who care for a small number of children in their own homes
2. Day care centers that have infant sections (not all do). Some centers care for only infants and toddlers, and don’t have preschoolers.
3. Babysitters or nannies who come to your home.
Day Care Homes
Advantages:
Your child is cared for by an experienced parent.
Your child may receive more individual attention than in a center.
The environment is more homelike, and the experience more nearly approximates the mother-child relationship you would have at home.
Your child has other children to play with.
Disadvantages:
Your child may not get as much intellectual stimulation as he or she would at a center.
The day care mother may not be as well-educated or as thoroughly trained as a day care teacher.
Day Care Center
Advantages:
The center provides a program o
f education and stimulation. A good infant program includes indoor and outdoor activity, sensory and language activities, massage and physical exercise.
The center provides a sense of stability. If the day care teacher quits, you still have a placement for your child, provided, of course, that you and your child like the new infant care employee.
A center has knowledgeable teachers. Day care workers usually have a fair amount of college course work and/or training in early childhood education.
Disadvantages:
The child may not get enough attention if the center is understaffed.
There may be high staff turnover. Try to find out about this.
Your child will probably have to be sent home if moderately ill, whereas a home-based day care might still keep him.
In-Home Care
The main advantage of in-home care is convenience. It’s wonderful not to have to transport the baby to day care, especially in a snowstorm or downpour. It’s also great for the child to be in familiar, comfortable territory. Many people are able to cut the costs of having a nanny by sharing the hours and costs with another household.
The Baby Decision Page 26