by Jancee Dunn
I waved her away. Where’s Daddy? I whispered.
“—my biggest thing is banana pudding, but it’s the devil!” said Jennifer. “So no one is allowed to bring it into my house.”
Poo.
“I’ll say, ‘It’s not on my Weight Watchers radar,’” said Jennifer. I laughed too heartily while frantically waving Sylvie away. Have Daddy do it, I mouthed. “It’s not tolerated! It will be thrown away! Because I can’t control myself. So why put it in my domain?”
“Exactly!” I nearly screamed, as sweat pooled in my bra.
I have to poo. I have to poo now.
Desperately, I took off my shoe and threw it downstairs to catch Tom’s attention.
Daddy will do it, I whispered.
Poo. Poo. Poo. Poo. Poo.
Finally I asked the Academy Award and Grammy–winning star if she could hold for “just a quick sec.”
I grabbed Sylvie’s hand and raced downstairs, passing Tom on the couch. His blank eyes were bathed in the soft glow of his smartphone. He quickly knotted his forehead in a feigned look of earnest importance, as if he was attending to some pressing work matter. But I knew exactly what he was doing. He was playing SocialChess with some guy in the Philippines. I was just playing for a minute, he tells me later. During our fight.
Of course, when parents battle repeatedly, no one emerges unscathed—including, depressingly, babies.
Even when they are asleep, infants as young as six months react negatively to angry, argumentative voices, as University of Oregon researchers discovered by measuring brain activity of babies in the presence of steadily rising voices. Babies raised by unhappily married parents have been shown to have a host of developmental problems, from delayed speech and potty training to a reduced ability to self-soothe.
The longer marital fighting goes on, the worse it is for kids. At ages three to six, say the Gottmans, children assume they are the cause of the fight. By ages six to eight, they tend to side (as my daughter does) with one parent. Notre Dame University psychologist E. Mark Cummings found that kindergartners whose parents fought frequently were more likely to struggle with depression, anxiety, and behavior issues by the time they reached seventh grade. Cummings likened children to emotional Geiger counters who pay close attention to their parents’ emotions to ascertain how safe they are in their family. He cautioned that he was not recommending that parents never fight—if kids are never exposed to conflict, they might not develop the coping skills to handle it themselves. They just have to work it out in a fair and healthy way. You know, like grown-ups.
There is no way around it: the quality of your marriage is closely tied to the bond you have with your child. Consider the surprising finding from psychologists at Southern Methodist University that when parents battle, it is the father’s relationship with his kids that takes a major hit. They found that the day after a parental skirmish, most moms were able to compartmentalize and reported a quick recovery, and even an improved relationship with their child. But fathers had a much greater tendency to let the negative marital tension spill over into the rest of the family. Insidiously, the conflict from these parental fights would resurface on the first or even second day after the fight, in the form of friction between father and child.
When I tell Alan Kazdin, a Yale University psychology professor and director of the Yale Parenting Center, that Sylvie jumps between us when we fight, his reaction is sobering. “Well, it puts children in a horrible situation, because they see their stability being threatened,” he says. As I describe the escalating tension between Tom and me, Kazdin drops his professional demeanor. “Look,” he breaks in gently. “You’re not asking for my opinion, but I’m going to give it. You sound like a nice person. Life is unpredictably short, and you and the person you have chosen to be with for the rest of your life are arguing about housework. It’s not worth it.” He pauses. “Am I lecturing too much?”
Not at all, I tell him.
“Then I’ll tell you that you don’t want that in your life,” he says. “And that’s better for your child, too.”
Enough. It is time to set the bar higher—for myself, for our daughter, and for our marriage. It is impossible to stuff the genie back into the bottle after you have children, and go back to the way you used to be. Life has changed, and we have to change with it. Denying this reality courts misery, and even disaster. It is alarming that I no longer think it is insane to tell myself, “When we’re not fighting, we get along great!” I want to fully enjoy the family I have been yearning for all my life, and to take active notice of the many good things that my husband does. Our home should be a place of safety and comfort for all of us.
Since I make a living delving into research, why not try it on my own relationship? I decide to plunge into self-help books and speak directly to those who make scientific findings. I will quiz psychologists, parenting experts, neuroscientists, and fellow parents. I’ll try anything. I will bring—okay, drag—Tom to couples therapists. We will test every strategy we can find to restore harmony to our marriage and, by extension, our family life.
Sylvie has just turned six. There is still time to fix this.
Mothers, Fathers, Issues
The weekend after I craft my plan to mutually draw down our hostilities, Tom, Sylvie, and I are at my parents’ house in New Jersey, joined by my two younger sisters and their families. Dinah, a book editor, is the sort of generous, kind person who says troublesome tasks are no trouble and always totes a treat in her purse—for the adults. Her husband, Patrick, a boisterous, burly Marine veteran and school chef, can be counted on to get silly if an unhappy child needs distracting.
Heather, the youngest, loyal and thoughtful, was the most sought-after babysitter in our neighborhood and is now a beloved elementary school teacher whose students hang on her like baby possums. Standing nearby is her husband, Rob, a chef—a tattooed cool guy on the outside, inwardly a sweetly easygoing dad prone to halting, sentimental family announcements after a beer or two.
As usual, we are all bunched in the kitchen. Various nieces and nephews wander in, rummage through my parents’ fridge or pantry, then furtively race-walk out of the kitchen with elaborately casual expressions, clutching jars of expired Marshmallow Fluff and boxes of ancient Pop-Tarts.
My parents’ pantry doubles as a food museum, because my father, ever alert to scams “they” won’t tell you about, claims that expiration dates are “bunk.” Dad is a retired J. C. Penney manager whose name happens to be J. C.; his father, J. C. Senior, was also a J. C. Penney manager who once hosted the Great Man himself for lunch. I trust I need not mention where my cousin Penny worked.
Along with the unreliability of food expiration dates, my father will bring up at least a few of the following topics at every family gathering: the hidden costs buried in phone bills (“Consumer Reports did a big feature on it—I have it on file”), the ten-day forecast, tarps, People Are Nuts and They’re Only Getting Worse, the superiority of Costco gin (he funnels it into a Beefeater bottle, claiming guests can’t tell the difference), the mandatory retiree-dad family genealogy project he’s “definitely going to get to one of these days,” and fluctuating gas prices.
After you arrive at my parents’ house, the first thing my father will inquire about is the traffic (“How was Route 80? Bad? Well, they’re doing construction—it’s terrible.”). Of course he hopes we have had an easy ride from “the City,” but it’s so much more exciting when he can offer theories about the traffic jam we have endured. Then, after a decent interval of niceties, my dad, an exemplar of preparedness, will reliably bring up a disturbing news story and relate it to our own safety. “You probably read about that family in West Orange? A real shame.” Mournful head shake. “Of course, it wouldn’t have happened if they just had a radon detector/proper snow tires/an emergency survival rescue blanket/electrical outlet covers.”
My father has one setting, and it is Dad Mode. He sees everything through a fatherly lens. If a child clamors
for an expensive toy, he will helpfully offer that the money would be better spent buying stock in said toy company. If he is standing in front of any man-made wonder—the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal—he can be relied upon to immediately speculate on the cost of maintenance. When my father beheld the Château de Versailles, his imagination skipped past the Sun King’s dazzling vision and landed squarely on the palace’s heating bills (“Just look at all those windows! Guaranteed they’re leaching heat.”).
Viewing the world through a Dad lens means turning any request from a child into a useful, practical action. Like my father, Tom has now adopted this habit with our daughter.
SYLVIE: Daddy, can we wrestle?
TOM: How about wrestling into those pajamas?
SYLVIE: I wish I could be invisible and spy on people!
TOM: Why don’t you work on making that sandwich disappear?
For fathers like mine, the world teems with danger, so they are mindful at all times of an emergency escape plan. The first thing my father does at a movie theater, aside from pulling out a bag of microwave popcorn that he has made at home (“I just saved myself five dollars”), is to find a seat closest to the emergency exits and scan the room for sprinklers. (“You laugh, but you won’t laugh when your lungs are full of smoke and you can’t find a means of egress.”) The trunk of his car is a mobile panic room, loaded with flares, blankets, and energy bars. On airplanes, there is no need to remind my father that “the nearest emergency exit may be behind you.” He already knows.
My dad has been married for fifty-four years to my mother; at this point they are entwined like the braided ficus tree that grows in their living room. All phone conversations are conducted jointly. If my father answers the phone, he will order me not to say anything until my mother can run upstairs and pick up the extension; we wait in silence until we hear her voice. They share an email account as well, prompting me to address the both of them as a general “you,” as in “Do you want ham for Easter brunch?”
My mother, Judy, a classic steel magnolia, is a former head cheerleader and beauty pageant winner who reigned as 1960’s Oil Queen of Citronelle, Alabama (as crude oil was one of the area’s natural resources, a small oil derrick was affixed to her crown). My mother is regal to this day, sending waiters scurrying with the command that her coffee be scalding hot, please. She is always beautifully put together: makeup is applied directly after waking, and never once have I seen her slop around the house in pajamas, even if she is sick.
My mother introduced many whimsical Southern phrases to the baffled kids in our New Jersey suburb, among them the threat to “slap me upside the wall.” She raised her three girls with Southern propriety; we were instructed to answer the phone with “Dunn residence, Jancee speaking”; after dinner we were told to announce, “I enjoyed it; excuse me, please.” Her grandkids are astonished to hear these historical facts about their fun, silly Gran, who sprays whipped cream into their open mouths and will happily draw a mustache and goatee on her face with Magic Marker (“Ooh, kids, here comes the UPS man! Let’s freak him out!”).
When it’s time for the grandchildren to leave after a visit, they can hardly wait for my mother to produce what she calls Gran’s Bag of Swag. She dumps it out with a flourish: Technicolor cheese balls, beef jerky, econo-size slabs of licorice, tubs of taffy. There’s everything but a jar of corn syrup for swigging. My sisters and I call it Gran’s Bag of Petroleum and Animal By-Products.
“Gran sure loves her Scotch,” Sylvie likes to say admiringly. Before dinner, her favorite ritual is to sit placidly between my parents on their couch, her with a cup of milk, them with sizable tumblers of Scotch, all mechanically and contentedly munching Goldfish crackers.
While Tom looks on in what I hope is assent, I tell the elders of our extended clan about my venture. It immediately sets off an impassioned discussion. Heather’s voice rises above the din as she describes her most recent fight with Rob. It was a Saturday morning before their sons’ daylong soccer tournament, and the two boys were rampaging through the house. Laundry moldered in the hamper, the kitchen counter and stovetop were coated with a gritty film of pancake batter, and a stack of bills teetered on the kitchen table.
“That’s when Rob decided to watch a movie on his iPad,” Heather says. “He just plopped down on the couch, doo-de-doo.” (Doo-de-doo is the universal sound effect for a happy-go-lucky person.)
As with everything that happens in my family—people who can generate gigabytes of “reply all” email on topics such as should Dinah get quartz countertops?—Heather’s tale prompts an energetic round-robin:
MY FATHER: Heather, why can’t you give Rob a break?
MY MOTHER: But when are they supposed to get everything done? These things don’t happen on their own! You have to plan them.
MY FATHER: We raised three girls and managed to get things done, but we still had plenty of time to relax.
MY MOTHER (HOTLY): “We”? You were gone on business trips half the time! I was the one who managed to get things done! Make no mistake! Note: my mother is getting angry about events that took place nearly a half century ago.
ROB: My feeling is, do we have to be working all the time? The laundry can wait until the next day. I swear, I feel like I’m an employee at a big-box store, and I have to be jumping up and straightening the merchandise at all times or I’m going to be fired. Can’t we just rest on a Saturday? Even for a few hours?
PATRICK: Not for nothing, but I think that’s reasonable.
ROB: Honestly, I’m just so beat sometimes that doing chores is the last thing I’m thinking about.
DINAH: On the other hand, it’s not like the laundry disappears when you put it off. It’s just added to your chore list the next day—a list that has just gotten bigger.
TOM: I think that women might get bothered by different things. For me, the laundry is ready when the bag is too heavy to carry, or there is literally nothing to wear. She gets anxious when the bag is two-thirds full.
ME: No, the laundry is “ready” for you to do when it turns to mulch. Or it actually liquidates. Or, if enough time passes, it forms into shale.
TOM: Jancee will leave a bag of trash by the door, and I don’t see it.
HEATHER: Rob doesn’t see it, either!
TOM: It’s top-down processing, where you see what the brain has been primed to see. There’s a famous example of this sort of bitterly fought football game, and each team’s fans thought the other team played unfairly. Neither saw the same objective game. Or that famous image of the duck and the rabbit—some see a duck, some see a rabbit. And I’m never primed to see garbage. Note: Tom writes about science and technology, so he frequently talks like this.
DINAH: But do you feel like you get some sort of pass just because you didn’t see it?
ROB: It sounds like The Matrix. Our wives want us to take the red pill so we can escape from the Matrix and into the real world. But we like the blue pill world.
TOM (CACKLING): “Do you believe in fate, Neo?”
MY MOTHER: Maybe you should just put the bag of garbage in your bed.
Everyone resumes talking at once; my father mumbles something about fixing a pipe and quietly escapes to the basement.
Our debate, which continues at an animated pitch through dinner and dessert, inspires me to ask the new mothers and fathers I know to share the most inflammatory parenting issues they have with their mates. Then I enlist experts to help me decode their behavior to see if there is any sort of gender-based psychological, social, or even evolutionary explanation. Perhaps the knowledge that certain behaviors are in some sense hardwired in your spouse—rather than a conscious choice to stick it to you—will help dial down the frustration.
Of course, it’s slippery to generalize, to reach for easy Mars/Venus stereotypes and downplay the overwhelming role culture has in “naturalizing” gender differences. Nevertheless, after some raucous conversations I have with parents on the playground, at school pickup, and on social media
(I focus primarily on straight couples, about which there is a much larger body of research), I notice that a few domestically divisive issues come up with striking frequency. The most common problems are the ones none of us seem to have solved—and the ones for which we mostly desperately need answers.
Why doesn’t my husband wake up at night when the baby cries? If I hear the smallest whimper, I shoot out of bed like a Delta Force commando given the “go” signal for a nighttime raid. Meanwhile, my husband snores peacefully. Unless he’s faking it. He’s faking it, right?
This is not an idle playground gripe. The American Time Use Survey found that mothers in dual-earning households are three times as likely to have their sleep interrupted by children as fathers are.
As it happens, men really might be oblivious. Researchers from the UK’s Mindlab International measured subconscious brain activity in sleeping men and women and found that while a baby’s crying was the number one nighttime sound most likely to wake up a woman, it didn’t even figure into the male top ten—lagging behind car alarms. And strong wind.
They theorized that these differing sensitivities might have an evolutionary basis: women were more attuned to potential threats to their offspring, while men were more responsive to disturbances that posed larger threats to the whole clan. And women, as biological anthropologist Helen Fisher points out to me, not only have a keener sense of hearing, but they are better at seeing in the dark (while men are better at seeing in the light). Knowing all of this might make it at least a little easier to haul yourself out of bed when your baby starts to sob.
Then again, it could just be selective hearing. As my friend Jenny, mother of two, says, “I feel like most men seem to possess a remarkable self-preserving ability to compartmentalize tasks and ignore excess stimuli—the kind often produced by young children.” She recalls one weekend in which she went to the bedroom for a brief lie-down, which was thwarted when she overheard her husband ignore twenty attention-seeking pleas of Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. In exasperation she yelled, “Don’t you hear the kid?”