How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

  “Sometimes,” he answered.

  Why does my husband need a constant escape hatch from our family—the garage, his gizmos, the basement, his sudden obsession with training for the New York Marathon?

  The writer Alan Richman put it best: “Men don’t want to be alone, they just want to be left alone.” Indeed, UCLA researchers found that a father in a room by himself was the “person-space configuration observed most frequently” in their close study of thirty-two families at home. It may also explain why many fathers manage to finish the Sunday paper while their wives do not—they aren’t constantly leaping up to refill the umpteenth bowl of Cheerios. Fisher says there is brain evidence that when women are under stress (say, a new baby has colic), they are inclined to “tend and befriend” (become more empathetic and social), while men under stress are apt to withdraw.

  Try this experiment during any major holiday, particularly Thanksgiving: drive past your local car wash, and note the colossal line of dads who suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to get the Premium Deluxe wash, full wax, and, why not, the Showroom Finish interior and exterior detailing package.

  But even if they’re home, they can use their gizmos as a way to be physically present yet still effectively check out. In the Judd Apatow movie This Is 40, many parents laughed in recognition during the scene in which Paul Rudd’s character sits on the toilet, doing crosswords on his iPad, when his wife, played by Leslie Mann, yanks open the door of his particular person-space configuration. “This is the fourth time you’ve gone to the bathroom today,” she says. “Why is your instinct to escape?”

  “It is my instinct to come into the bathroom when I need to go to the bathroom,” he says.

  She narrows her eyes. “Then why don’t I smell anything?”

  “Because I shoved an Altoid up my ass before I came in here,” he snaps as she grabs his device and stalks off. “Don’t press enter!” he calls from the john. “I’m not sure I want to make that move!”

  When Tom disappears for a long run, or bolts for the door, announcing over his shoulder that he has to “take care of a few things,” I’ve often rationalized to myself that like most men, he needs his alone time. But is this anything more than some story men—and the culture at large—tell themselves about what it is to be male? Could there be some sort of evolutionary reason why men feel the need to escape—perhaps to scan the horizon for predators? I contact Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, to puzzle it out with me. At first, he’s too distracted by the news that Tom took up long-distance cycling after our daughter was born. “Wow,” he says. “I have three kids, and I don’t remember a bike trip, or trip of any kind, being an option. I would have gone kayaking.”

  Then he snaps into gear. “Well, cross-culturally and historically, there has been a great deal of variation in male parental investment, especially in babies,” he begins. “So I cannot think of any evolutionary approaches that might illuminate this.” He speculates that perhaps now that men are more involved as fathers, their lives change in a much more dramatic way after parenthood than those of previous generations. “So I’m thinking this kind of male sojourn might be a reaction to the life transition that now occurs for men when a baby arrives,” he says.

  Helen Fisher offers another take. “I would think that when your husband bikes upstate he is, number one, trying to get away from the stress of a job that he doesn’t feel skilled at and trying to preserve his own autonomic nervous system; two, he feels, even unconsciously, the need to build up his testosterone again because it plunges after the baby is born. And thirdly, now he’s a father, maybe he has the drive to stay fit and remain healthy and be good at his job, so he can be there to raise his kid and get her through college.”

  When she puts it that way, Tom sounds almost noble. I repeat Dr. Fisher’s evolutionary defense to Tom, which he of course enthusiastically confirms.

  My wife gets mad at me for not helping with the kids. But when I try to pitch in, she just ends up doing everything herself. I can’t win.

  Psychologists have a name for this widespread behavior—maternal gatekeeping—in which mothers can swing open the gate to encourage fatherly participation, or clang it resolutely shut by controlling or limiting Dad’s interactions with the kids. The latter behavior can range from making all decisions about school without consulting the father, to criticizing what he serves for lunch (“Hello, where are the vegetables?”), to protesting when he’s roughhousing with the kids (“Easy, let’s not send them to the emergency room!”).

  In some cases, mothers are not even consciously aware that they are doing this—but even nonverbal cues of disapproval such as eye-rolling or heavy sighing can put off a hesitant father. The result is a self-reinforcing loop: as she criticizes or takes over, he grows more and more uncertain of his abilities.

  Maternal gatekeeping, in fact, can start as soon as pregnancy, says Ohio State’s Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan. She found in her research that by the third trimester, some mothers had already made a decision to keep the gate firmly closed if the fathers-to-be reported that they didn’t feel confident about their parenting skills (despite the fact that before the baby is born, those skills are all theoretical). In another exercise, she had new parents change a baby’s clothes; one mother showed the father exactly what to do, down to pointing out the positions of the snaps on the infant’s outfit—and visibly grimaced when the father tried to play with the baby.

  Schoppe-Sullivan says that a mother’s encouragement makes a big difference in how much fathers participate in childcare. “Fathers have less confidence in their parenting than mothers do at the time of the child’s birth,” she tells me, “and this often sets up an ‘expert-apprentice’ dynamic in which fathers are looking to mothers for validation of their parenting.”

  Chris Routly, blogger and president of the National At-Home Dad Network, is one of the estimated 1.4 million (and rising) stay-at-home fathers in the United States. (Some chafe at this term and offer alternatives such as “domestic first responder.”) Routly has seen firsthand how men can be crowded out of the equation before the baby is even born. “Women have baby showers thrown for them, they join classes, they have multiple doctors, they get advice from friends and family,” he says. “So by the time that baby is born, she has been prepared as much as she can be.” But there is very little preparation for fathers, he says. “They start out on a very unequal footing.”

  Schoppe-Sullivan says fathers should be encouraged to spend time alone with their infants without maternal meddling. “Mothers can also become more conscious of their reactions to fathers’ parenting,” she says, “and bite their tongues regarding small stuff, like whether or not the baby’s clothes match.”

  I must admit that I’m frequently guilty of gatekeeping. When, for instance, I asked Tom to help Sylvie with a book report for her homework, I made myself go into the bedroom with a book so that I wouldn’t interfere. Unfortunately for Tom, I could still hear them talking as they sat at the kitchen table.

  TOM: Okay, right. So who is the main character in Clifford and the Big Storm?

  SYLVIE: Clifford.

  TOM: Yes. Great. Write that on this line here. And what did Clifford do?

  SYLVIE: Well, he went to the beach with the girl, Emily Elizabeth? To see her grandma? And he built a castle in the sand, but it was so funny because he’s so big that the castle looked like a real castle.

  TOM (GHOST VOICE): How about that.

  ME (CALLING FROM THE BEDROOM): Tom, are you on your phone?

  TOM (SOUND OF HIM HASTILY STASHING AWAY HIS PHONE): No! So, okay, write that down: Clifford built a large castle. Then what happened?

  SYLVIE: Then there was a storm, and guess what? He rescued two puppies! And at the end he made a big pile of sand in front of Grandma’s house so nothing happened to it in the storm.

  TOM: Great, write that down. Okay, I think we’re done here.

  ME (READING THE SAME PARAGRAPH THREE TIMES AN
D FINALLY CALLING): Tom? Her teacher said she has to write about how the character develops and what lessons he learns. It’s not just supposed to be “and then this happened.”

  TOM: But Clifford’s character doesn’t really develop. There is nothing described here except the plot mechanics.

  ME (THROWING DOWN THE BOOK AND MARCHING INTO THE KITCHEN): He learned that saving Grandma’s house was a good impulse and you should help people, or whatever! You know, teachable moments and all that crap!

  TOM: But if you parse the text, he doesn’t actually learn anything, it’s very external in that he…

  ME (GRABBING THE BOOK REPORT AND SHOOING TOM AWAY): Oh, for Christ’s sake!

  Looking back over that little exchange, I see that I was being ridiculous. My daughter wasn’t writing her Harvard dissertation. Most of her homework involves shakily coloring in triangles, or guessing which frog isn’t like the others. (And, for the record, Tom pretty much taught Sylvie to read by age three, with nightly story marathons and a constant Clockwork Orange barrage of sight words.)

  I swear that my husband does a—literally—crappy job of changing a diaper on purpose, hoping I’ll just take over and he can wriggle out of it.

  Ah, yes: the deliberately inept job. On the rare occasion that Tom changed an erupting diaper, I would, inevitably, hear this from the baby’s room:

  “Oh, no! It’s oozing out the sides. Do I wipe it? Where’s the diaper cream? Oh, never mind. Wait, this is ointment. Is ointment like diaper cream? Should I wrap this diaper in something before I put it in the Diaper Genie? Because it’s pretty messy. Oh no, her face is turning red. Her arms are really flapping. It’s sort of… okay, this is really alarming. Can you just—can you just come in here and help me hold her still?”

  When I’d run in to assist, the relief on his face was almost comical.

  The idea that men aren’t inherently skilled at housework and childcare is perpetuated by both males and females. Clare Lyonette of the University of Warwick in the UK says that when she and her colleagues did a study on the division of labor between parents of young children, they discovered that while the women were frustrated at doing the bulk of the housework, they were mollified by their belief in what Lyonette calls “the myth of male incompetence”—that men were lousy at it, anyway.

  “It’s definitely a myth, but women excuse their men from doing more by saying this, and men do the same,” she says. “But as my coauthor used to say, ‘Pushing a Hoover around isn’t exactly rocket science.’”

  Delving further, Lyonette and her colleagues uncovered an intriguing twist in the research: the men they studied who had lower incomes were more likely to help their partners with housework than the higher earners. (As Lyonette tartly put it at the time, the wealthier guys were “reluctant to lift a finger and appear to simply throw money at the issue by hiring a cleaner instead.”)

  But no matter what the men earned, those who did contribute tended to choose more “visible” domestic tasks. Why? “Because people can see them doing them—food shopping, cooking the Sunday roast,” she tells me, “whereas nobody wants to do the cleaning.” There are numerous Instagram shots of fathers’ homemade pancakes for the kids, but not so many of that meticulously reorganized closet.

  Feminist writer Caitlin Moran says that men who say, “You’re the expert” on childcare and running a load of laundry need to be shamed. “When they say, ‘I’m scared I’m going to shrink the clothes so you must do the washing,’” she tells me, “I recommend you just laugh at them and go, ‘Seriously? You’re a man with a degree, you drive a car, you hold a job, you’ve climbed a mountain, and you tell me you don’t know how to operate a washing machine? Go on! Go do it!’”

  Portland dad Routly agrees. “The truth is, we men treat these things like ‘Oh, I can’t—it’s just too hard for me,’ because that’s an easy excuse to get out of it,” he says. “Changing diapers is not pleasant, but it’s a skill you learn with experience. And in the larger scope of things, when you’re changing your baby’s diaper for years, you build a level of intimacy. When your kid has peed into your mouth, there’s a level of connection with that child. Whereas if anybody else in your life did that, you’d probably cut off all contact.”

  Routly and many stay-at-home fathers in his network say that they are living proof that gender is largely immaterial when it comes to caregiving—and an Israeli study backs them up. While women have long been assumed to be hardwired to nurture, protect, and worry about their children, researchers studied fathers who were primary caregivers of their firstborn, and found that certain neural pathways in their brains were actually being reshaped. In particular, the amygdala-centered network, which handles strong emotion, vigilance, and attention, was activated, which configured the dads’ brains in a similar way that pregnancy and childbirth do for mothers. The research suggests that the neural circuitry that powers the so-called maternal instinct can be developed by fathers.

  Stay-at-home dads even complain about the same things that mothers traditionally do, says Routly. “A lot of the gripes women have about their husbands have more to do with the roles that each is playing in their family, and less to do with gender,” he says. “Stay-at-home dads complain just as much about ‘Why can’t my wife load a dishwasher properly?’ My wife will come home from work and leave her Snapware containers from her lunch on the counter, rather than put them in the dishwasher.”

  “Tom does the same thing, just leaves everything near the dishwasher,” I say.

  “Right?” he says. “And it’s like, ‘Why can’t she just put it in the dishwasher?’”

  “Exactly!” I cry, wishing that he lived in Brooklyn and we could meet for playdates.

  Why is my wife so impatient if I don’t rush to do something the second she asks? If I say, “I’ll get to it soon,” she flips out.

  That’s an easy one, says New York psychotherapist Jean Fitzpatrick. “Women tend to be the ones who do the time-associated tasks that involve deadlines all through the day, like preschool pickup or night feeding,” she tells me. “Her entire day is programmed in that way—to respond instantly. So women will get furious when they say to their male partners, ‘Listen, can you fix this thing that broke in the bathroom?’ And he’ll be like, ‘Why are you bugging me?’”

  My husband didn’t do a thing all weekend to help with our baby son, and I work all week just like he does. By Sunday night, I was fuming, but I swear that he didn’t even notice. How could he be so oblivious when I’m glaring at him?

  This seemingly willful obliviousness is one of the commonest complaints that I hear. A study of heterosexual couples led by Shiri Cohen, a couples therapist and psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, revealed that women reported feeling much happier when their male partners understood that they were angry or upset. “This research bore out what I see every day with couples,” Cohen tells me. “When the man can register his wife’s negative feelings, and communicate that on some level, the wife feels better, because she knows that ‘Oh, he gets how I’m feeling.’” She points out that, conversely, men do not derive the same satisfaction in knowing that their wives are upset. “Research shows that men tend to retreat from what feels like conflict to them, because they tend to physiologically get much more negatively aroused,” she said, “so conflict feels way more intense for them.”

  What’s even more intriguing is that key to the women’s satisfaction was the perception that their mates were simply making an effort to understand where their angriness was coming from—rather than reading their emotions perfectly. “It kind of gives people a sense of encouragement that we don’t have to be 100 percent perfect and tuned in to our partner for them to know we care about them,” says Cohen.

  If you both happen to be sleep deprived from a new baby, there is also the distinct possibility that his brain truly can’t discern that you’re angry—one study measured brain activity in sleep-deprived people and found that their brains were fuzzily incapable of dist
inguishing between threatening and friendly faces.

  But even if your mate seems oblivious, he may be detecting your wrath on a subconscious level. A University of Southern California study that observed married couples over several days found that if a mother was stressed, the father’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol would also rise—that, in effect, families “sync up” stress levels. Specifically, mothers drove the fathers’ cortisol changes, while, in a dismaying trickle-down effect, fathers drove changes in their kids’ cortisol.

  “When I’m counseling couples,” says Cohen, “I’ve noticed a pattern: if I ask a broad question like ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘How was the week?’ the husband always looks at the wife to see what she’s going to say. So it’s like men sort of expect that women are the ones who are taking the temperature in the relationship.” Or, as my mother often pronounces, If Mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy.

  Why does my wife get so tense if the house looks less than perfect? Who cares?

  Because women still fear being judged, says San Francisco psychologist Joshua Coleman. “If little Shaun shows up to preschool with torn jeans and peanut butter on his face, people don’t think, ‘What is his father thinking?’” he points out. “They’re saying, ‘What is his mother thinking?’” (I cringe to recall how often, in similar circumstances, I have silently impugned a mother myself.)

  Mothering and keeping house are, like it or not, still more central to women’s identities, so if the house is dirty, women are typically more fearful that they’ll be blamed. “Which is still the legacy of these roles that we’ve inherited,” Coleman says. “So I think because generally it doesn’t mean as much to men, they have more immunity to those sorts of things. A clean house means much more to my wife. When I leave in the morning, I don’t give a shit if the cereal is all over the place.”