by Jancee Dunn
“‘Why wasn’t this done earlier?’ Like I’m an employee?”
“Like an employee,” he mirrors. “Mm-hm.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I remind him. Although it is sort of funny. “Why didn’t you jump in and help us find the paper towel rolls?” He pauses here, which gives me a second to reflect on the fact that I am raging about paper towel rolls.
“I… feel embarrassed that I didn’t help,” he says. Bull’s-eye! My anger slowly ebbs away as I wait for the open-ended question. “Why don’t you tell me what things I can take over in the morning?” he asks.
I know Tom’s recitations aren’t entirely sincere, but the FBI’s techniques do calm me—if they work on armed hijackers and violent militia leaders, it’s not surprising that they are effective on an angry wife. And maybe with enough practice, his questions will move from scripted to genuine. As Noesner and Voss tell me repeatedly, people just want to be heard—and in order to actively listen, you must pay real attention. You can’t fake a paraphrase—if you do, you have failed to contain the situation with the agitated and potentially dangerous individual.
“Also, Sylvie was not marked down for being late,” Tom points out as normalcy resumes. “A nanny showed me a side door, and I had Sylvie sneak in.”
“You’re the best,” I say.
I am pleased with our new techniques, but aware that we have a way to go. We are now armed with methods to calm my temper, but the real work is to tackle the much larger, underlying problem: how we got into this situation in the first place. Under the guidance of some of the most eminent couples therapists in the country, we will try to learn how to quickly identify what is bothering us, conserve the energy our child has sapped by choosing the right battles, fight fairly, divvy up our household work, and tackle problems efficiently.
It’s a daunting plan, so I decide to begin our next phase gently, with something called the Zero Negativity Challenge, a thirty-day program developed by Dallas couples therapists Harville Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt.
I show Tom the calendar I have ordered from the Hendrix-Hunt “Couplehood Store”—complete with smiley face and frowning stickers—and explain the goal put forward by the plan: zero put-downs, comments, or negative behaviors for thirty days.
Tom studies it and shakes his head. “This is stupid,” he says. “It’s never going to work.”
“Nice going,” I say, slapping a frownie sticker on Day One.
Rage Against the Washing Machine: How to Divvy Up Chores
H. and I have been in a fight for two days and haven’t been talking. The silence is amazing.
—ANONYMOUS, FROM THE “CONFESSIONAL” SECTION OF THE MOTHERHOOD BLOG SCARY MOMMY
One evening I swing by my sister Dinah’s house in the New Jersey suburbs. Her two daughters have had late sports practice and have just finished their dinner of hurriedly microwaved pizza bagels. Dinah, who commutes from Manhattan, has arrived home at her usual hour of 7 p.m.; her husband, Patrick, finishes his shift in food service in the afternoon, so he handles school pickup. In their cozy yellow kitchen bright with family photographs and kids’ artwork, Dinah is eating a bowl of cereal, still in her work clothes, as the girls retreat to their rooms. I am helping myself to some Girl Scout Thin Mints I have excavated from their pantry.
Dinah and Patrick listen, eyes round, as I tell them about our harrowing trip to have our hair blown back by Terry Real.
“Wait, you paid a lot of money to get yelled at?” says Patrick, sitting down at the kitchen table and brushing aside a pile of manuscripts that Dinah has brought home. Jokey and gregarious, Patrick likes to hold forth on his twin passions: the New York Giants and smoked meats of all varieties.
As I work my way through five more cookies, I explain that Tom and I don’t want to waste our waning years together enmeshed in a petty war. “You get to be in midlife, and you realize your time is finite,” I say, dispensing my trademark oldest-sibling wisdom with a world-weary air.
Patrick gawps at me. “You guys could have just taken that money and gone to the Bahamas together!”
“Yes, but then we would have come back to the same problems,” I say. I’ve always viewed couples therapy as a costly last stop before divorce court, I tell them, but our communication had become so muddled and highly charged that we were deadlocked. Terry Real identified our problems and provided a plan to break that deadlock. Instead of attacking each other, he had us attack, together, the polarizing cycle in which we had become trapped.
Caught in the laser beams of Real’s penetrating gaze, I went on, we had no choice but to share our true, unguarded feelings (a process therapists call “empathic joining”) instead of taking our usual shots at each other. When Real guided us to some common emotional ground, we were able to at last begin to open up lines of communication that had been closed for a long while.
“Terry shook up Tom so badly that he started doing dishes the night we came home,” I say to Dinah. “He just silently got up and grabbed a sponge.” And with Real’s new shaming exercise involving Sylvie’s photo, I report, I haven’t raised my voice in two weeks! I pause to think. “Although yesterday I sent Tom an all-caps text that was perhaps a little forceful.” (HOME. NOW.)
Patrick shrugs. “I guess we’re lucky, because at this point, we don’t really fight,” he says. “I mean, we’ve been married for almost twenty years, so we’ve pretty much worked a lot of this stuff out.”
Dinah looks at him wryly, her cereal spoon paused in midair. “Well, I wouldn’t say that,” she says. “Here’s something I resent: we both live here, and there are basic things that just need to happen in our house. They don’t get done by magical elves. Like, the place needs to be vacuumed.”
“I knew you were going to bring up the vacuuming,” he breaks in. “Okay, look, I forgot. But I spent the afternoon being a taxi service! I picked up the kids from school, picked up their friends, then drove one to soccer and one to basketball.”
“I know, and I appreciate that,” says Dinah, getting up to extract a container of yogurt from the fridge, which completes her improvised dinner—“but I have to say that I am really, really tired of having to ask you to do things.”
He sighs. “All right, I admit that I don’t like being told what to do. But here’s another thing: what’s the big deal about having to ask? Obviously there’s a mental block with men, so we have to be asked! So just ask! Ask us!”
She shakes her head. “But you just said you don’t like being told what to do. You see the bind this puts me in, right? After a while, I don’t feel like asking, because you make it clear that you don’t like being told what to do, and I figure it’s easier to just do things myself.”
He holds up his hands. “You’re right. Look, Dinah, I love you, but I do think women in general have a higher standard.” He turns to me. “I can watch TV for two hours and not check on the kids, but Dinah feels the need to entertain them. I wish I could be as doting as she is, but I’m not. As a parent, you’re never supposed to put yourself first. You can do the most outrageous thing, but if you say it’s for the kids, then it’s okay.” True, I say. He points to Dinah. “She gets the girls ready, packs the lunches, works eight hours in the city, comes home and puts the kids to bed, and then works some more. I think she does too much and wears herself out.”
Dinah sits down at the table with a sigh and eats her yogurt. “Yes, but especially by me working all the time and leaving early and coming home late, I feel like I’m caring for the girls when I do all the extra things I do, like leave them breakfast on the table. I mean, Claire’s thirteen—she can make breakfast herself. But that’s my way of telling her I love her while I’m running for the train. And I also like being efficient. You know? I like being needed.”
I ask Patrick if he feels guilty when he doesn’t do his fair share of things around the house. He sheepishly admits that he does. “Oh, definitely,” he says, glancing uneasily at his wife. “I mean, I can still sleep at nigh
t, but yes. I gotta admit, I’m lazy.” I think about the fricasseeing Patrick would receive if he divulged this in front of Terry Real.
“Do you do anything without Dinah having to remind you?” I ask.
“I do the grocery shopping,” he points out.
Dinah laughs. “Well, yeah. You care more about the food.”
“I make dinner two or three nights a week.” He ticks off his jobs on his fingers. “I do the cat litter. I feed the cat. I water the cat.”
She raises her eyebrows. “You water the cat,” she repeats, deadpan.
They continue Not Fighting as I get up and ransack their pantry for more cookies.
In study after study, research indicates that—surprise!—when men take on their fair share of household responsibilities, their partners are happier and less prone to depression, disputes are fewer, and divorce rates are lower. The day-to-day labor of keeping a household running is a remarkably significant issue for couples: a Pew Research Center survey found that sharing household chores ranked third in importance on a list of nine items associated with successful marriages. This put it ahead of pretty vital basics like good housing, common interests, and “adequate income” (which ranks at number four).
This rather amazing finding surprised even the Pew researchers, who said that in seventeen years of polling, no item on the list has risen in importance nearly as much. In other words, this issue is about more than laundry: it’s a direct depiction of the sense of fairness, or unfairness, that exists within a relationship. It touches on so many significant, and interrelated, issues: gender roles, money, respect, values, intimacy, tradition.
Yet many women either don’t bother persisting (and, like Dinah, stoically do chores themselves), do not ask forcefully enough, or—like me—somehow do not feel justified in urging their spouses to raise their game. As Real pointed out to me during the one-on-one part of our session, I somehow skipped over the crucial step of simply asking Tom, clearly and calmly, for what I wanted, and rocketed straight to anger and frustration. Why was I so reluctant to elucidate my needs?
“As women, we sometimes have trouble asking for help,” says my friend Jenny. “Maybe we really do want to do it all, or don’t want to admit we can’t. Or we think our husbands should intuitively know what help we need, and if they don’t we’re annoyed. But doing everything ourselves isn’t heroic—it’s toxic.”
Jenny is right. Part of my hesitation is that I feel the pull of traditional societal expectations more than I’d like to admit—starting with the baseless but tickling fear that if I’m too “demanding,” my husband will leave me. (For many women, “standing up for yourself” still carries the stigma of “being a pain in the ass.”)
And for hundreds of years, a woman’s central identity has revolved around being a good wife, mother, and housekeeper. My role model growing up was my mother, who stayed home with three daughters and capably ran the house, joining the working world only when we were almost in college. Most of my friends, whether they are employed or not, do the vast majority of household work and childcare. As the saying goes, you can’t be what you can’t see.
My taking on all the household work started slowly. When our baby was born, Tom took three weeks off from work—which, as a self-employed writer, he was able to finesse. During that mostly harmonious time, he gingerly bathed our daughter, burped her, and laundered her onesies, carefully spraying stains with spot remover. He played with her for hours, and took her for long morning walks in the stroller he had fastidiously researched, measuring out turning ratios in our apartment, agonizing over cup-holder placement, squinting at folding configurations on web pages. He spent more time on the stroller in total than he had when he bought the family car, as if our daughter’s very future depended on some perfect arrangement of ergonomics.
And we had diligently set aside a portion of our incomes so that I would be able to stay home full-time with her. As it took much longer than we anticipated for me to get pregnant, the only upside was that we had a decent-size nest egg by the time the baby arrived—enough for me to be a stay-at-home mom for at least two years. Of course, we had to be careful not to live extravagantly. Occasionally, for quick cash, I’d knock off a few magazine assignments that I hurriedly wrote (or, to paraphrase Truman Capote, typed) while the baby slept—a health story on vitamins here, a celebrity interview there. During that sweet, carefree time, I vowed to profile only the celebrities who were sane and smart, a modest list that included Julianne Moore and Nigella Lawson (who supplied me with a mantra I have now adopted: I believe in moderation, in moderation).
Tom, meanwhile, left each morning to write at the New York Public Library’s Reading Room while I tended to the baby. Normally, he handled the cooking, but since I had time during the day to prep for meals, I completely took over kitchen duty. Soon I was doing everything domestic, and he was slipping away for longer times on nights and weekends, but I was so contentedly ensconced in our little nest that I was unconcerned.
Then one pleasingly drowsy afternoon, I received a call from Cyndi Lauper’s manager: Would I be interested in cowriting her autobiography? Cyndi had apparently retained fond memories of a late and rowdy night that we spent together in Las Vegas when I was a reporter for Rolling Stone (and regularly stayed up past 9). It was as fun as you’d expect: so often a celebrity’s image is completely at odds with the real person—comedians are dark and brooding; America’s sweethearts are unhinged nightmares—but Cyndi is irrefutably the adorably kooky and down-to-earth gal from Queens her fans know and love.
Our daughter had just turned two, and our savings were nearly gone. After much deliberation with Tom, we decided that this opportunity was too good to pass up. We hired a nanny for three days a week, whereupon I would meet Cyndi in her apartment on the Upper West Side for interview sessions. Her manager instructed me to wear exercise clothes and bring my tape recorder, so that I could conduct my interviews while we did a vigorous walk together in Central Park.
Well, my exercise clothes stayed pristine. Day after day, Cyndi, clad in gym gear, would mutter, “Oh, to hell with it, let’s just stay here.” She’d make a cappuccino to take down to her doorman and brew us some tea. Then we’d sit in her vintage-style kitchen (which looks exactly like the set in the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video) and eat, and gab.
Often, it was hard to get her to focus—life with Cyndi was a constant 1930s screwball comedy—but her digressions were so entertaining that I didn’t mind.
CYNDI (PICKING AT A COFFEE CAKE): I’m so fuckin’ fat.
ME: In what universe? No, you are not. Note: she is not.
CYNDI: Am so. How do you stay so skinny?
ME: I’m actually not that skinny. I have a big behind that I can never get rid of.
CYNDI: Lessee. I stand up to show her. Pull your pants tight so I can see the outline. She inspects my behind. Eh, it’s not so bad. Then her gaze travels up to my face.
CYNDI: C’mere. You know what, doll? Not for nothin’, but your face looks a little dry. I’m going to spray you.
ME: With what? I’m not sure I—
CYNDI: Just c’mere. She extracts a bottle from her purse and proceeds to spray my face with some concoction that burns. She does this a dozen times; it is like being in a car wash.
ME: What is it?
CYNDI: An activator.
ME: What does it activate?
CYNDI (SHRUGGING): Who knows?
After spending the day with Cyndi, I’d race home, relieve the nanny, play with Sylvie until bedtime, and then transcribe and write up my interview after she had fallen asleep. I found that one benefit of dealing with the famous is that it is excellent practice for handling a toddler. Celebrities are used to being the center of attention, have little impulse control, are prone to meltdowns, and can be aggravating—until they give you a dazzling smile, and all is forgiven.
But as Sylvie started to walk and talk, and our family life grew busier and more complicated, it was as if I suddenly
woke up and noticed that I was doing all the donkeywork. Even Tom’s small transgressions began to grate on my nerves, such as his near-daily habit of asking me to help find his keys, prompting me to inquire if he had checked up his ass. (As Roseanne Barr used to say, men think the uterus is a tracking device.) This tic, once somewhat endearing, was less so after I had spent the day scouring various playgrounds for our daughter’s lost stuffed lamb. A turning point had arrived in our marriage. We began to quarrel, and never stopped. But Tom was still, understandably, reluctant to change his habits. Why alter the status quo that works decidedly in his favor?
But equality, as Lean In’s Sheryl Sandberg has stated, is not a zero-sum game. Beyond the most immediate and obvious benefit—that I will cease being, as Real memorably put it, a “raving lunatic”—there are so many others. A Cornell study found that couples with young kids who split housework more evenly reported better and more frequent sex than when the woman took on most of the chores. (As study author Sharon Sassler noted drily, “Perhaps if more men realized that sexual frequency was higher when the domestic load was more equitably shared, they would grab that Swiffer more often.”) Children benefit, too, in surprising ways: research has shown that when men share housework and childcare, their kids do better in school and are less likely to see a child psychiatrist or be put on behavioral medication.
And girls with more involved dads develop greater self-esteem. I inform Tom that fathers who regularly do household chores, according to a University of British Columbia study, have daughters who are more likely to aspire to less stereotypically feminine careers, instead voicing an ambition to be an astronaut, professional soccer player, or geologist. When girls see fathers pulling their own weight, they receive a direct message that they are not—and should not be—destined to shoulder all the tedious work by themselves.
“What she hears from us is ‘Girls rule,’” I say, driving the point home as Tom flinches, “but in our house, what she sees is ‘Girls clean.’” We can repeat all the empowering slogans we want, but as the author James Baldwin once wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”