by Jancee Dunn
Because making those cupcakes was about my ego. I was eager to dazzle the kids, the teacher, and my fellow moms. If I really wanted my child’s birthday to be the biggest hit in kindergarten, all I had to do was squeeze a dollop of neon frosting from a tube into a cupcake wrapper, top it with sprinkles, and serve.
Nor do I need to make every moment of my child’s life a developmentally significant enrichment activity. Joshua Coleman often hears complaints from mothers who say that their husband’s idea of a meaningful encounter with the kids is to let them crawl around underneath his feet while he watches TV. Coleman answers that kids don’t require focused, minute-to-minute attention in order for them to grow and learn—that in fact they can learn from crawling around on the floor at Dad’s feet.
Lily, a friend of a friend, says she tries not to obsess about her husband’s quality time with the kids. “I would get resentful when I’d get home from brunch with a girlfriend, and the house is a mess, my husband is watching TV, the kids are playing together in another part of the house, and it seems clear he hasn’t really been engaged with them at all,” she says. “But now I’m trying hard to simply go through a quick checklist when I return. House still standing? Check. Kids unhurt? Check. Dog not lost? Check. All’s well that ends well.”
I realize that I sometimes condemn Tom as being an uninvolved parent, when he is just engaged in a different way. My idea of involvement is to plan an elaborate art project; Tom’s is to tote Sylvie with him when he buys bike tires (“She knows the different valves and air pressures,” he says proudly). I used to get annoyed when he started pulling our daughter into his world of computer chess, protesting that we had agreed to limit her screen time. But then he taught her to play—and now she regularly beats him. Unlike me, Tom has always tried to include Sylvie in his pursuits, rather than the other way around—something I want to start doing, too. He says this is less some carefully thought-out, progressive parenting strategy than sheer self-interest.
“I am also, at heart, trying to win her over, and prove to her that her father is an endless source of fun activities,” he says. “And there’s an added wonder in seeing those things you have always enjoyed suddenly encountered through the eyes of your child, which somehow awakens you again to the pleasure and power of those things. But the virtuous circle here is that I acquire a partner in crime—a riding buddy, a bird-watcher and a stargazer, a willing soccer goalie. Instead of dutifully filling in my Dad hours, I’m doing things I want to be doing anyway, which makes me want to do them longer, which allows us to spend more time together, which only leads to more shared interests, which brings us closer together. Not that I still don’t have to go to the damned bouncy castle once in a while.”
In a similar vein, I have to train myself to let some things go. When I phone New York professional organizer Julie Morgenstern, consultant for Fortune 500 companies, who has ordered the closets of Oprah Winfrey, among others, I divulge a pet peeve: that while Tom has taken over laundry duty, he typically waits to do it until the bag has swelled to the size and shape of a manatee. “Right,” she says. “So my question to you is, if he waits that long, what does it cost you, other than your obsessive need to not have it pile up? What’s it actually costing you?” I tell her that because he is a cyclist and has a constant churn of exercise clothes, the bag is perpetually off-gassing, causing me olfactory distress. Also, at a certain point I run out of underwear.
“Right. So those to me would be legitimate reasons. Whereas if you’re thinking, ‘I hate to see something pile up when it could be getting done,’ that’s emotional. If it’s just annoying you, no one’s gonna get motivated—unless you stop having sex with him because there’s too much laundry.” Asking myself what something costs me has headed off many fights, because often the answer is “Not too much, actually.” If his disorder is hidden behind a cabinet and I can’t see it, if his pile of periodicals is not physically blocking my way, it’s not “costing” me a thing. Let it go.
My more freewheeling new attitude should probably include whittling away nonessential chores. Do the kids’ meals need to be home-cooked when they’d much rather bolt down microwaved chicken fingers? (One friend’s sons request them “extra rubbery,” so she obligingly blasts them for an additional minute.) Does the house have to be spic and span? Do the kids need to be bathed every night, or even every other night?
And must we be compulsively busy every second of the day, briskly doing something “useful”? Nonstop activity can be addictive, but it’s a mistake, warns the University of Houston’s Brené Brown, a mom of two. “One of the most insidious and probably profoundly dangerous coping mechanisms that we have absolutely glommed on to as a culture is staying busy,” she tells me. “And the whole unconscious idea behind it is ‘If I stay busy enough, I will never know the truth of how absolutely pissed off I am, how resentful I am, how exhausted I am from juggling everything.’”
Brown remembers that when she was waitressing in college, she was told to consolidate—do as much as you can at once, carry as much as you are able, make as few trips as possible. “And I realized that I was consolidating in my life,” she says. “I’d stop at a red light and think, ‘Oh my God, I have thirty seconds, let me check my email.’ I was constantly so proud of everything I could do.”
Now Brown is careful to build calm “white space” into her life—by regularly saying no, and ruthlessly paring down her schedule. “When I stop at a red light, I don’t check anything,” she tells me. “And I lock down nonnegotiable off-the-grid time. We schedule so many things, even fun things, that they all become a hassle to cross off our list.”
After a while, she says, as your body starts getting used to the quietude, it’s less tolerant of anxiety. “It’s like ‘Uh-uh, I got used to being calm and sleeping through the night,’” she says. “It’s like when you give up sugar and then go and eat a candy bar and it makes you physically sick.”
And so I eye my schedule, thinning out my daughter’s after-school activities and my weekend engagements. Do I need to volunteer for every field trip? No. Are we required to attend birthday parties of classmates my daughter barely knows? We are not. A helpful way to discern if the kids are actually close is to ask my six-year-old, ‘Do you know this child’s favorite color? How about their pet’s name? How many teeth have they lost?’” Good friends are in possession of this vital information.
Next, eliminate every instance of what psychologists call “decision fatigue.” Put everything you possibly can on autopilot, says Julie Morgenstern. “Make the same five quick dinners every week,” she says. “On the other nights, you can get creative or order out.” Most kids, she points out, are not clamoring for beef bourguignon—they much prefer Taco Tuesday and Pizza Friday. (I must admit that I, too, get a little excited for Taco Tuesday.)
Those who make a regular rotation of dishes with everyday ingredients, by the way, have been dubbed by the food company Campbell’s as Familiar Taste Pleasers, according to their internal research. My brother-in-law Patrick, a trained chef, is usually a Passionate Kitchen Master (adventurous, confident), but on the nights when his kids have sports, he is a pizza bagel–microwaving Uninvolved Quick Fixer. My favorite term is the one Campbell’s devised to describe time-crunched new parents who have the desire, but not the time, to make new foods: the Constrained Wishful Eater.
As for certain pernicious chores, I must accept that my spouse is not going to be good at some things. Therefore, I should quit banging my head against the wall. Gary Chapman remembers that early in his marriage, it irritated him that his wife, Karolyn, as he puts it, “loaded the dishwasher like she was playing Frisbee. I’m very organized, and we battled over that a long time.” He sighs. “Finally I realized that she was just not wired to do that. She was never going to be able to do it, and I just had to accept that. Because otherwise, if you don’t ultimately find a resolution, you can fight about those things for thirty years.”
Loading dishwashers, it turns out
, is one of the most fraught of all household tasks. According to dishwasher manufacturer Bosch, more than 40 percent of US couples say they argue about the “right” way to do it.
Just as there are specific categories of home cooks, internal research at GE Appliances has uncovered three dishwasher-loading personality types. One group was deemed Protectors, says Jennifer Adam, the company’s Consumer Research and Ideation Manager. Protectors, she tells me, are focused on safety and sanitization—loading utensils with the handles up, so the fork tines aren’t touched when you unload, and hand-washing any dish that didn’t get clean in the dishwasher. Curators, the most exacting loaders, want to be impressive to others—they meticulously organize plates by size. Finally, there are Organizers: they just want to load and unload everything as quickly as possible. (I learned that I fall into this category when Adam shared some statements that GE uses to identify Organizers: I need to get dishes done and out of the way so that I don’t feel tense and When I see dirty dishes in the sink, I realize that I’m running behind.)
Adam, a mother of two, confesses that in her own life, her husband loads the dishwasher and she reloads it. “My husband worked here at [GE’s] Appliance Park,” she says, “and he still loads it wrong.”
One could argue that “wrong” is a relative term, but Tom really does load it wrong: he often puts glasses in sideways or upside down. Nor is he wired, I realize, to make beds—his most careful effort makes it look like someone’s been sleeping—and having violent nightmares—on top of the covers. I will be much happier if I abandon all hope that he will ever do either of those things.
My next effort is to lay off the scorekeeping. One Saturday during our negotiating meeting, Tom asks if he can play soccer for a few hours in the morning with friends. I tell him that’s fine. Afterward, he showers, makes himself a sandwich, and then slinks off to the bedroom in the furtive way that my cat used to do when she was looking for a place to quietly throw up.
I follow him into the bedroom.
ME (HANDS ON HIPS): Don’t tell me you’re going to take a nap.
TOM: Just for half an hour. I’m worn out after that game. It was really hot.
ME: Well, we have things to do. You said you’d help Sylvie with her school project.
TOM: It can wait!
ME: Nope.
After he hauls himself up to help our daughter cut out “special places, objects, or activities” from magazines and glue them onto construction paper, I feel ashamed. Of course the homework could have waited—I generated a false deadline, because I was so annoyed with his single-guy weekend bubble. I had already allotted three hours for him, and a nap would have pushed it to four or possibly five. But my scorekeeping is petty, and also pointless: our daughter was reading quietly. I was making biscuits. Why couldn’t he take a nap? Keeping score to prove a point is a silly waste of energy. I apologize, enjoying the new sensation of being calm and reasonable.
Finally, many experts tell me that the best—some say only—way to teach one’s husband to learn the ropes and appreciate the volume of work you do is often the technique that is least used: leave the damn house. Many husbands I know, mine included, have never spent more than a day alone with their offspring. This is my fault as much as his: Tom has offered to take our daughter for the weekend, but I have been reluctant to arrange a getaway with my sisters or friends. Again, part of this is ego: will they survive without me?
Please, snorts couples therapist Esther Perel. “One important intervention for my clients who are mothers that overmanage—who are overwrought not by difficult life circumstances but by the culture of perfection that has captured parenthood—is that I tell them to go away for the weekend,” she says. I admit to her that I am that over-managing mother. “Then go away alone, go with your friends, go away with someone you haven’t seen in ages!” she says. “Your child won’t die! Your husband is not a nincompoop! You need to realize that you have an identity that is bigger than just motherhood, and trusting that your child will be okay in the hands of others creates a more humble presence for you. And you’re not allowed to prepare all their meals and freeze them.”
University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock agrees. “Make him learn to be competent. Make him learn to share household managing. Look at it this way: the kids can bond with their father.” This is one of many instances in which giving up control can actually give you more control over your relationship.
Since we have had a child, I have never spent a single night away from home. I start slowly and book an overnight visit with a high school friend who lives a quick train ride away in Connecticut. But as the day grows closer, I worry that I’ll spend the whole night… worrying. I ask a friend who has just returned from a trip with her college girlfriends how she refrained from fretting when she left her husband alone with their infant son. “Simple,” she says. “Limit your contact. I told my husband, ‘I don’t want to hear from you unless there is a fire, flood, or blood. No emails—only texts of our son looking happy, well fed, and alive.’” She had a carefree, booze-soaked rendezvous, and nothing caught on fire in her absence.
Leaving the house for a night is unnerving; my daughter cries oceans of tears. Because I can usually be found approximately three feet away from her at all times, I have unwittingly engineered my departure to be a catastrophic event. “Please don’t go,” she weeps, clinging to me.
But by the time I am on the train to Connecticut, I receive a text from Tom with a photo of the two of them gleefully drinking milkshakes. That night, my friend and I stay up late talking like the teenage friends we once were. I come home rejuvenated, and our daughter pelts into my arms bursting with news: Daddy taught me to jump rope! We saw a rat in the park, and it was almost a foot long! Daddy flipped pancakes and one of them stuck on the ceiling! See? We kept it there for you!
Finally, if compliments and courtesy and clear lists don’t work, it’s time to play hardball. Tell him if he doesn’t pitch in, you’ll cease cooking dinner or doing the laundry. “Or stop doing chores that you know he’ll do if you don’t,” says Coleman. “Like, if you pay the bills and he can’t tolerate the bills being late, tell him, firmly but politely, that you can’t do it anymore and it’s his responsibility. Say, ‘This is what’s on my plate, and this is what I’ll be taking off of my plate.’” But it has to be a threat that affects your spouse, he warns. “It can’t be, ‘Well, I’ll show you, I’m not going to clean the toilet as frequently.’ Because he’ll just scrape off the mold and go.”
I covertly monitor Tom to see if there is anything he can’t tolerate neglecting. I observe him for a week before it hits me: if our daughter is capering around our apartment past her bedtime, well into her third wind, he starts to fibrillate. “It’s bedtime,” he’ll say, to me (another habit we most definitely have to fix). Aha, I think. He is positively twitching to read books and play computer chess! A motive!
So I announce, firmly but politely, that I am taking bedtime duty off my plate. “But she wants to hear you tell a bedtime story,” he protests. I reply that if he gets her into pajamas and bed and oversees teeth brushing, I’ll finish with a bedtime story. Which is the same every night: a narrative-in-progress about a boy I grew up with in Pittsburgh who was extremely naughty. Sylvie revels in nightly tales of his misdeeds: how he set fire to the curtains in his living room, how he would climb to his roof and throw things at neighborhood children. “What happened to him when he became a grown-up?” she asked me breathlessly one night. Apparently, he is in jail, I told her, for posing as a doctor. Sylvie was so exhilarated by this thrilling news that she had trouble sleeping.
And so Tom takes over bedtime duty. He is not the pushover I am, endlessly fetching water and stuffed animals; he puts her to bed with prison discipline: Lights out! Some nights, he even gets her to bed early—a valuable skill we would never have uncovered otherwise.
I am not at all confident that our new division of labor will be sustainable, but because we are still rattled by
Terry Real’s diatribe, it is at least the right time to attempt something new. I also know our routine might take a while to stick: contrary to the conventional wisdom that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit, UK psychologist Phillippa Lally found that it takes, on average, sixty-six days. I convince Tom to at least try it out for a few months.
On to fighting without screeching.
Rules of Fight Club
It is late afternoon. Our daughter is at dance class; Tom and I are standing in the kitchen. He is making coffee while I rummage through my recipe file.
ME: How does pasta Bolognese sound for dinner? I’ll have to get started now, because it simmers for a few hours. I can stop by the butcher on the way to pick up Sylvie from class.
TOM (LOOKING AT CEILING): Um. Well, I mean, it sounds okay, but we’ve just had a lot of meat lately? So I’m just not feeling like… His eyes flick to me just long enough to register that I am suddenly as motionless and acutely focused as a meerkat who has sighted a jackal on the horizon. Then again, who doesn’t love pasta Bolognese? As a matter of fact, that sounds—
ME: No, no! Let’s not have it then, if you’re not sure about a plate full of homemade Bolognese sauce that takes hours to make! Feeling doubts about it, are you? Addresses imaginary staff. Emperor Nero decrees that there shall be no meat tonight! Make it known! Never mind that if someone plunked down that pasta in front of me, I’d weep tears of joy! I open a kitchen cabinet, pull out a takeout menu, and slap it down in front of him. There you go! Dinner is served!
Later that night, Tom mournfully eats a congealed mound of General Tso’s chicken for dinner, ordered deliberately to convey that he has no problem whatsoever with meat, while I hate-munch a peanut butter sandwich; both of us, losers.