by Jancee Dunn
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Jancee Dunn
Cover illustration by Michael Kirkham
Author photograph by Elena Seibert
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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ISBN 978-0-316-26711-3
E3-20170203-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Introduction: Maters Gonna Hate
When it was just the two of us, my husband and I, both peaceable writers, rarely fought. Then we had a baby.
Mothers, Fathers, Issues
Enough. With the help of psychologists, parenting experts, neuroscientists, and fellow parents, I craft a plan to restore harmony to our marriage.
“Get off Your Ass and Help Out!”: Our Harrowing Encounter with the Man from Boston
Our plan to draw down mutual hostilities begins with our first-ever visit to a marriage counselor—but not just any marriage counselor. I also solicit advice from the former longtime chief of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit.
Rage Against the Washing Machine: How to Divvy Up Chores
Research shows that when men take on their fair share of chores, women are less prone to depression and divorce rates are lower.
Rules of Fight Club
Of course, you’re going to fight—just do it fairly.
TGIM: How Not to Hate Your Weekends After Kids
Why is it that the people you waited all week to spend time with become the very ones you want to escape?
Guess What? Your Kids Can Fold Their Own Laundry
It’s an issue that’s hardly ever addressed in the ongoing “chore wars” debate: God forbid we ask our kids to pitch in and lighten Mom’s load.
Bone of Contention
We attempt to revive our sex life using fresh, realistic advice (no pretending he’s a stranger in a bar, no naughty nurse outfits).
Kids: Your New Budget Deficit
An exploration of how the very particular anxiety that children introduce around money can leave even a solid marriage in tatters (starting with the fact that it costs a quarter million to raise one child, not including college).
Hot Mess: Less Clutter, Fewer Fights
Clutter stresses out mothers in particular, so I convince a well-known professional organizer who normally straightens the closets of wealthy Upp er East Siders to pare down my sister’s house.
Know That Eventually It’s Going to Be Just the Two of You Again—Well, Unless Another Recession Hits
It may not be sexy, but the undeniable reality is that a solid marriage takes work, focus, and constant negotiation.
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jancee Dunn
Newsletters
You carry all the ingredients
To turn your existence into joy
Mix them, mix
Them!
—HAFIZ
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS BOOK is written for parents and partners who define their marriages as “good” or “satisfactory” but feel they could be better. However, if you are experiencing problems in your marriage that arise from serious issues such as mental illness, physical altercations, or substance abuse, seek professional help.
I have changed all the names of the friends I have interviewed for this book to protect their privacy.
Introduction:
Maters Gonna Hate
When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was.
—NORA EPHRON
When I was six months pregnant with my daughter, I had lunch with a group of friends, all of whom were eager to pass along their hard-won scraps of parental wisdom. In the quiet café they noisily threw them down, with much gesturing, like street-corner dice players on a hot streak. There were so many tips flying at me that I was forced to write them on a napkin. Bring flip-flops for nasty shower at hospital, I scribbled. Huggies wipes are nice, thick. Freeze maxi pads in water for postpartum ’roid-sicles.
“Oh, and get ready to hate your husband,” said my friend Lauren. I looked up from writing If gas, pump baby’s legs like bicycle. Wrong, I told her calmly. I listed various reasons why our relationship was solid: We had been together for nearly a decade. We were heading toward middle age, and squabbling requires siphoning precious energy from waning reserves. Most important, we were peaceable, semi-hermetic writers who startled at loud noises, running madly away like panicked antelope.
I looked around at my friends’ carefully composed faces as they tried not to smirk. Over the course of a few months, I had already been privy to hundreds of parental decrees: Say good-bye to a good night’s sleep. You’ll never have sex again, and trust me, it will be a relief. Natural childbirth? You’ll beg for that epidural, especially if your pelvis separates like mine did.
My favorite edict was supplied by my friend Justin, father of three. “Better see all the movies you can now,” he said, shaking his head mournfully. “When the baby comes? Not gonna happen.”
I squinted at him. Parenthood was so overwhelming that I wouldn’t be able to sit on my couch and watch a movie? Ever?
As it turns out, my friend Justin was wrong—I was watching movies the week after I gave birth.
But my friend Lauren was right.
Soon after the baby was born, my husband and I had our first screaming fight as new parents. To be more precise, it was I who screamed.
What set me off was embarrassingly trivial, yet the source of a baffling amount of conflict in the first few weeks of parenthood: whose turn it was to empty the Diaper Genie. On that day, it was Tom’s. The coiled bag had grown to the size of a Burmese python, and was about to spring like the snake-in-a-nut-can gag. The stench enveloped our small Brooklyn apartment.
“Please empty that thing,” I called to him as I sat on the couch, breastfeeding the baby. “The fumes are making me dizzy.”
“In a minute, hon,” he said from the bedroom, his robotic voice a tip-off that he was playing chess on his computer. He has a handful of programmed responses on call, like tugging the string on an action doll: That’s interesting; Huh, really? and Oh wow, sounds great (his response when I told him I had a suspicious growth on my leg).
In seconds, I was flooded with molten rage. I carefully put the baby down, barged i
nto the bedroom, and seared him with contemptible, juvenile invective, terms that had not crossed my lips since I was a New Jersey teen in the ’80s. Dickwad. Asshole. Piece-a-shit. The force of my anger surprised both of us. Almost immediately, I was filled with shame. True, I was reeling from hormones, sleep deprivation, and a sudden quadrupling of cleanup and laundry. But I love my husband—enough to have had him impregnate me in the first place. I knew within two weeks of meeting him that I wanted to marry him; he was the most interesting person I had ever met. I was charmed by the way he would blush and stammer when we talked, prompting me to lean in more closely just for the fun of making everything worse. During our tranquil nights at home in the early days of our marriage, I was often reminded of Christopher Isherwood’s description of a couple reading: “the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.”
I’m not sure what a dickwad is, exactly—but I know Tom isn’t one. He’s a sweet, caring spouse and father who spends hours with our daughter, Sylvie, patiently playing an eighth round of Go Fish. He refuses her nothing: when she begs him to ride bikes at dawn on a freezing Saturday, his standard response is what I’ve termed nokay. “No.” (Five seconds elapse.) “Okay.” He is almost comically protective of his only child. One day at our local playground, an older girl was taunting Sylvie as Tom watched grimly from the sidelines.
Older girl: You can’t do the monkey bars! You’re too small. You’re not strong enough, like me!
Sylvie does not answer, so the girl continues in a singsong voice: You can’t do it, you can’t do it!
Tom materializes next to the older child, who squints up at his six three frame. Right. Let’s see you do it, then.
The child swings through three bars, falls, then hastily jumps back on.
Tom, with Vulcan calm: You fell off. Which is cheating. You’re the one who can’t do the monkey bars. Older child backs away.
Playground disputes aside, Tom finds fighting physically unbearable: the moment my voice begins to rise, he turns light gray and retracts into himself like a stunned gastropod. While I have threatened divorce and called him every name in the book, he has never—I mean never—done the same to me. It gives me no satisfaction to holler at a kind, gentle chess player who enjoys reading and bird-watching in his spare time.
And did the Diaper Genie actually need to be emptied right away? Were we really ready to haul out the HazMat suits? It could have waited until Tom had finished his game. But from that day on, my resentment has been on a constant lochia-like drip. Our daughter is now six, and Tom and I still have endless, draining fights. Why do I have the world’s tiniest fuse when it comes to the division of childcare and household labor?
I am baffled that things have turned out this way. I fully assumed that my very evolved husband and I, both freelance writers who work from home, would naturally be in tune. When we were a duo, he handled all the cooking while I did most of the housework; we grocery shopped and did laundry à deux. When I became pregnant, he confidently informed me he was ready for diaper duty.
Surely, we would figure everything out organically, as we always had.
I had read the encouraging news that modern men, unlike the distant breadwinners of previous generations, are more invested in their children than ever before. A Pew Research Center study shows that today’s working dads are as likely as working moms to say they would prefer to be home with their kids. We live in an era in which fathers-to-be throw all-male “man showers” for their babies (according to one party-gear designer, a popular theme is “barbecue, babies, and beer”). Websites aimed solely at dads are on the rise, such as Fatherly.com, which features, alongside more standard content (an illustrated guide to high fives, tips from a Navy SEAL on how to dominate hide-and-seek), numerous articles on how to raise strong daughters—a response, said the site’s founders, to reader demand.
Fathers’ attitudes about housework are changing, too. The same Pew study found that since 1965, the time that fathers spend doing household chores has more than doubled—from about four hours a week to roughly ten. Men, though, are selective about the ones they will do, according to sociologist Scott Coltrane. He has said that of the “big five” household tasks—cooking, meal cleanup, grocery shopping, housework, and laundry—men are more apt to balk at housework and laundry and more likely to go for cooking, meal cleanup, and grocery shopping.
Since Tom and I had already established fairly clear roles in our household—our generation is, arguably, the first to have expectations of splitting up the work—I assumed we would simply fashion new ones. But after our baby was born, we soon slid backward into the traditional roles we’d grown up seeing, which were clearly more ingrained than I’d thought (we’re just a grandma and grandpa away from the old model, after all). It wasn’t by any grand design; it just sort of happened. I was making food for the baby, so I started doing all the family cooking and food shopping. I did the baby’s laundry, so I began to throw in our clothes, too. When she was small, I stayed at home with her during the day and, out of habit, my caregiver duties gradually extended into the evening.
Our scenario is not uncommon: an Ohio State study of working couples who became first-time parents found that men did a fairly equal share of housework—until, that is, they became dads. By the time their baby had reached nine months, the women had picked up an average of thirty-seven hours of childcare and housework per week, while the men did twenty-four hours—even as both parents clocked in the same number of hours at work. When it came to childcare, moreover, dads did more of the fun stuff like reading stories, rather than decidedly less festive tasks such as diaper duty (not to mention that they did five fewer hours of housework per week after the baby arrived).
To their credit, the new fathers seemed to be clueless that they weren’t keeping up with the burgeoning workload, says study coauthor Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan. “We were surprised at the inaccuracies,” she tells me. “Both parents feel like they are doing a ton more work after the baby is born, but for men, that perception is especially inaccurate.”
These days, Tom does around 10 percent of our household chores. He maintains that he is consistent: as a bachelor, he did 10 percent of his household chores. (I can vouch for that: in our early days of dating, upon my first visit to his apartment, the only thing I found in his refrigerator was a furred 64-ounce jar of salsa from Chi-Chi’s, a brand I was not even aware still existed).
I wish his 10 percent effort was enough, but it isn’t. I feel like he’s a guest at the hotel I’m running. I’m constantly taking a silent feminist stand to see if he’ll step up and lend a hand. The scorekeeping never ends. Adding to my resentment is that on weekends, Tom somehow manages to float around in a happy single-guy bubble. A typical Saturday for him starts with a game of soccer with his friends or a five-hour bike ride (he seemed to take up endurance sports right around the time our baby’s umbilical cord was cut, like the sound of the snip was a starter’s pistol to get the hell out of Dodge).
This is followed by a leisurely twenty-minute shower, a late breakfast, a long nap, and then a meandering perusal through a variety of periodicals. Meanwhile, I am ferrying our daughter to birthday parties and playdates. On weekend evenings, Tom doesn’t check with me before he meets friends for drinks; he just breezes out the door with the assumption that I’ll handle bath time and bed. Yet whose fault is that? In my deranged quest to Do It All, I have allowed this pattern to unfold—so is it fair of me to get angry when he ducks (or, as I view it, “skulks”) into the bedroom for a nap?
And so I fume, and then unleash the beast at the slightest provocation. A typical scenario: I am in the kitchen, simultaneously cooking dinner, checking our daughter’s homework, and emptying both her school lunch bag and the dishwasher. Tom heads into the kitchen and I brighten—Oh, good, some help!—but no, he is only wending through the typhoon in order to reach the refrigerator to pour himself a glass of wine.
TOM (OPENING FRIDGE, FROWNING): Th
ere’s no wine left?
ME (DISTRACTED): I guess not.
TOM (WITH SLIGHTLY MORE URGENCY): You didn’t get wine today?
ME: Oh, so now I manage the storerooms? My apologies, Lord Grantham! I’ll alert the staff!
TOM: No, I just meant that you were at the store earlier, and…
ME (NOW ENRAGED): I know what you meant, Dickwad!
As this little contretemps is unfolding, our daughter runs over, stands protectively in front of Tom, and tells me not to yell at Daddy. “We’re just working something out, honey,” I say quickly. In one of the many parenting books I keep piled on my bedside table, I read that if you squabble in front of children, you should make an elaborate point of making up, so that they can witness your “healthy conflict resolution.” “Here,” I tell her. “I’ll hug Daddy. We fight sometimes, but we always make up, because we love each other! You see?”
I move in for a hug. My back is toward her, so she doesn’t see that as I embrace my husband, I scowlingly give him the finger and mouth, Fuck you!
Of course, I overreacted. And Tom could have gone down to the store without an Edwardian harrumph and purchased a new bottle of wine. Instead, I’ve become this lurking harridan who waits for her husband to screw up (I suppose the legal phrase for this is “entrapment”). But when I explode—making a conscious choice to vent, rather than consider my daughter’s anxiety—is my “victory” worth it? My concern for her wellbeing turns out to be unsettlingly selective. While I carefully apply sunscreen to the back of her neck and shield her from the harms of too much sugar by scrutinizing the label of her Nature’s Path EnviroKidz Organic Lightly Frosted Amazon Flakes, I apparently feel free to trash her sense of peace by yelling horrible names at her father.
We save our best selves for our children.
What makes me especially sad about our endless bickering is that it drags down what is by all accounts a pretty wonderful life. Our daughter is goofy and easygoing (bursting with excitement over the Mother’s Day present she bought me, she says, “I’ll give you a hint—it’s soap!”). We live in a serene converted church in Brooklyn. Tom’s enviable magazine assignments barely classify as work: a mountain biking expedition to Mayan ruins where he drinks whiskey with shamans atop a pyramid, traipsing in remote Utah deserts in search of rare bird sounds, horseback riding in the pampas of Uruguay.