by Jancee Dunn
We have to keep each list a secret from the other.
We show up early for our next session, brandishing our homework like dutiful students. Winch asks me to begin with the list of Tom’s thoughtful gestures.
“Should I read them to you?” I ask.
Winch shakes his head. “No. I’d like you to read them to Tom, and see his reactions while you’re reading to him.”
Strangely nervous, I pull out my list and begin:
Drives me everywhere because I’m a timid city driver and afraid of what I call the Crazies.
Takes us to parks and botanical gardens on the weekends.
Paid the bills for our daughter’s first two years so I could stay home with her.
Takes our daughter out most late afternoons to exercise, and also to piano and swimming lessons and chess tournaments.
Makes me laugh constantly.
Does all my annoying computer fixing, which is no small thing.
Painted my parents’ new house last summer, weekend after weekend in the heat—
I am suddenly overwhelmed and have to pause. “Tom,” I say, touching his arm. “Every weekend in the sticky heat! On a rickety ladder! Near a wasp’s nest!” Tears spill down my face. “You were so nice to my parents, and when you’re kind to them, you’re kind to me.”
“Where was this?” breaks in Dr. Winch. “North Jersey? Wow. Not that close, either.” After I regain my composure, I go on:
He is intellectually stimulating, constantly finding interesting movies for us to watch, books to read, and places to go. While the movies are often bleak Romanian films about, say, an orphan trying to survive during Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, I still appreciate the gesture.
Makes me coffee every morning.
Races home from business trips to be with us.
Patiently taught our daughter to read, spell, and ride a bike.
Plays games with our daughter whenever she asks, which is at least once a day.
Can refuse our daughter nothing, including the two activities he dreads the most: the American Girl doll store and the 9 a.m. “open bounce” at the bounce house off the highway, which corrals all his nightmares under one roof—loud club music, fluorescent lighting, screaming, vomiting children, and high injury rates.
Spends weeks planning our vacations.
Is very gentle and never raises his voice.
I have to pause here. “Now I’m crying again,” I say, faltering, “and I can’t see my paper.”
“There is a box of tissues behind you,” says Winch. “Tom, do you have anything to say to that?”
Tom looks slightly uncomfortable. “It’s funny that we haven’t done that sort of thing before,” he says.
“Few people do,” Winch replies.
Tom shrugs. “I was thinking for some of them, ‘Well, shouldn’t anyone do that?’ But I was tearing up, too, in response to Jancee. It’s just a weird thing to hear in that form. It’s like feedback, in a way.”
“It’s not ‘in a way,’” says Winch, “it’s as feedback as feedback gets. It’s not your six-month review—but if it were, you might get a raise.” He leans forward. “Look, I’ll ask you this question: for most women reading that list, what would they think about that husband?”
Tom, unused to this sort of scrutiny, begins to stutter. “You know, sort of, hopefully, you know, dutiful, caring? Attentive, in certain ways, at least? Just kind of maybe more action-oriented, instead of qualities like being emotionally available? Or something?”
Winch stops him. “But I think you can read emotional availability in every line, frankly.” He smiles. “To me, that list pretty much reads like you should come with spandex and a cape. You’re saying, ‘But there’s nothing there about my flowery emotional expressiveness.’ But most women would look at this list and go, ‘Does he have siblings?’ To me, that has so much heart. There’s love and devotion all through it. You’re emotionally expressive, certainly, in so many other ways than the verbal straight-on. It’s so much more important to write what somebody does rather than what they say. Then you can see how they really feel.”
Tom nods. “It’s interesting, on social media you get so much feedback, kudos and likes, but you don’t give or get it with yourself or in your relationship.”
“Right,” says Winch. “But being mindful is difficult. That’s why this exercise will help, because you may not realize how much your actions are noted and appreciated, how much they really mean. Your wife tears up as she talks about your painting her parents’ house.”
Winch recommends this exercise for any couple. “It’s important to clear the time, look at each other when you’re reading it, and talk about how each thing makes you feel,” he says. The benefits of this can last months, or years.
Couples therapist Esther Perel agrees, saying that there are few more powerful gestures than telling your partner, I took time for you, I thought about you, I am telling you out loud. The combination of composing something meaningful and then reading it aloud, she says, “changes everything. It adds the secret sauce.”
Winch then has me read the list of things that annoy me about Tom. I am a little reluctant to pollute the rosy atmosphere we have created, but I carry on.
He just forgot my birthday, which never happened until we had a child. This is a person who regularly makes meticulous plans for bike trips and forgets nothing.
Winch looks placidly at Tom. “I say this to husbands a lot,” he says. “The return on investment with cards is huge. Huge. Those few minutes to get a card and write something nice—biggest and best investment ever. Some things are hard. That’s not.” Tom nods meekly and I continue with my list.
When I ask him to do something, he ignores me or says, “Later.”
He shovels in beautiful meals that I prepare, sometimes three a day, and often does not say thank you or even bring his dishes to the sink.
He doesn’t acknowledge all the extra work I do with our daughter, much of it hidden.
He gives our daughter compliments and tells her he loves her, but not me.
After we fight, he doesn’t apologize or even allude to the fight. He just starts speaking in a normal voice about a new topic, which I find weird and jarring.
Winch nods slowly. “What strikes you when you hear the two lists together?”
“The contrast,” I reply. “The list of good things is larger and the acts are more significant.”
Then Tom pulls out his homework detailing the ways he can demonstrate how he cares for me, and nervously begins:
Consistently thanking her for meals and small things. Like I could say, “Thanks for picking up the milk.”
Try to give her time to herself.
Answer her and be more communicative and try not to be reactive. Try not to fly off the handle or play weird little games, and be specific about when I’m going to do something instead of “later.” It’s easy to just give a time.
Recognize special events like birthdays more conscientiously.
Make our daughter’s meals more often.
Take our daughter to birthday parties and appointments.
If Jancee’s rushing around with our daughter getting her ready for something, I could maybe ask, “What can I do?” (Or, as my friend Jenny likes to say, the magic phrase is I’ve got this. “Preferably if you really mean it, but let’s just go ahead and give you a free pass to sprinkle it into the dialogue here and there even if you’re not completely sure you ‘got this,’” she says. “It’s aspirational, and reassuring.”)
Then Tom reads the list of things he loves about me, among them:
You make me laugh. I think it’s a sign of a deeper connection, something unusual that we share; and now, if you’ll notice, we have incorporated Sylvie into our mirthful existence.
You are a wonderful mother. I just love seeing these new parts of you emerge, and I love you more for it.
You are my best friend. There is no one else I would rather spend time with, tell things to,
wake up next to, silently exchange knowing glances with. Romantic love gets all the attention, but I think this is not to be underrated.
In fifteen years of marriage, I had never heard that Tom considers me his best friend.
“There’s a box of tissues behind you,” Winch reminds me.
And so we try to say kind words to each other. It often sounds scripted and false, but we do it. It is more difficult for Tom: Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen has famously noted the disparity in men’s and women’s conversational styles: women, she says, tend to use “rapport talk,” in which they focus on personal experience and seek to build connections, while men favor “report talk,” giving information about impersonal topics.
Tom’s favorite thing to do is dispense information about impersonal topics, so I appreciate the effort it takes for him to disclose that an encounter with me and Sylvie left him feeling a bit stung. He had opened Sylvie’s bedroom door to find us playing a game she invented called Unicorn Land.
“What’s going on here?” he said, using his Hearty Dad voice. Sylvie, upset that he had torn the fragile web of magic she had woven, shooed him away and ordered him to shut the door behind him. I said nothing, assuming that I was sparing him the labyrinthine rules of passage to Unicorn Land, a complex intermingling of spells, passports, and secret words. But he confessed to me later that he felt shut out of this cozy family scene.
There is no doubt that being mindful of your every interaction is wearying. It requires vigilance. Communicating. Adjusting. Over the next few months, I take many time-outs in which I pull out our daughter’s picture, try to steady my breathing, and wait for the initial wave of anger to pass. I dutifully recite the words Terry Real supplied: I know that what I’m about to do is going to cause you harm, but right now, my anger is more important to me than you are. It’s been helpful to use time-outs, shape my turbulent feelings into “I” statements, state clearly what I need, and keep my voice neutral. Day by day, the more cordial we are with each other, the more harshly out of place an argument sounds.
I constantly remind myself that the more affectionate we are in front of our daughter, the more secure she will be. And teaching by example—what psychiatrists call modeling—can be used strategically to help develop a kid’s own behavior, says the Yale Parenting Center’s Alan Kazdin. “Modeling is so important,” he tells me. How potent is it? Research has demonstrated, he says, that there are special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. When we watch someone do something, our mirror neurons become active in the brain, as if we ourselves are engaging in the same behavior we’re observing. “If I’m lifting a stapler on my desk, and you’re watching me, your brain would fire cells that are equivalent to your hand lifting up the stapler as well,” he says. This suggests, he goes on, that observation of a behavior forges the same neural connections made from practicing that behavior—so that modeling can actually change the brain.
I tell Kazdin that I have given Sylvie many lectures on how we must treat others with respect—yet she has observed many times that I haven’t treated her father with respect. “I think it’s nice in some ways that parents don’t really realize the responsibilities that they have,” Kazdin, a father of two grown children, says sympathetically. “And that is that their behavior is being observed all the time. It’s really daunting. You make one obscene gesture in traffic, and you’re going to see it in your house ten times. You can say, ‘I only did it once.’ It doesn’t matter: the mirror neurons took it right up, and it’s there.”
Along with being more affectionate in front of our daughter, I hit upon the idea of telling her about how the two of us met, after uncovering a small but growing body of research that suggests that when parents share family stories, their children benefit in all sorts of ways.
Psychologists from Emory University’s Family Narratives Lab found that teens with a solid knowledge of their family history have lower rates of depression and anxiety, greater coping skills, and higher levels of self-esteem. Researchers theorized that this was “perhaps because these stories provide larger narrative frameworks for understanding self and the world, and… a sense of continuity across generations in ways that promote a secure identity.”
And so, to strengthen the family folklore and to show her that our relationship has endured for many years, we start telling our daughter tales of our early days together. We always begin with our first date in 1999, a century so distant to her young mind that it could figure in a Ric Burns documentary, with TLC’s “No Scrubs” subbing in for the tinkly ragtime music. Soon she finishes our sentences.
“When I first met Daddy, we were set up on a blind date, and he was so shy and nervous that he—”
“—talked about how Bubble Wrap is made!” Sylvie supplies gaily. “And how he played a game called Dungeons and Dragons for hours and hours when he was little.”
“Right. He sure did love Dungeons and Dragons—and I guess because he was nervous on our date, he went on for some time about it! That’s not how most grown-ups chat when they go out together, so at first I thought maybe he was too odd for me. And at the time, I was working at a music magazine called Rolling Stone, and Daddy was worried that I was wild and stayed up too late.”
“When sometimes you go to bed before me,” she observes.
“Yes, I can barely make it to 8:45. Anyway, the more I talked with your dad, the more I realized that being odd is a good thing, and that he was the most interesting person I’d ever met.”
After a while, Sylvie committed our stories to memory—so that in a way, they have become her stories. On their first date, they went to the movies, and Daddy put his arm around Mommy. Mommy knew she wanted to marry Daddy within two weeks. Mommy has seen Daddy cry only two times: when she was walking down the aisle to marry him, and the night I was born.
TGIM: How Not to Hate Your Weekends After Kids
On a Friday after work, I call my sister Heather for a quick catch-up. She is in the car rushing from her teaching job to the grocery store; to avoid holding her cell phone while driving, she puts me on speakerphone and drops the phone in her lap.
Tonight, she informs me, she is hosting a slumber party with the triplets—three identical friends of her youngest son, who come as a package deal. “So I have to run to Price Chopper because we’re out of snacks,” she says, sounding muffled from the confines of her lap. “And I need spaghetti makings for dinner. Oh, and breakfast: when the boys sleep over at other people’s houses, the parents make a real breakfast, so I should get bacon and eggs and all that stuff. Then I’ll run home and clean the house and get the spaghetti ready.”
I inquire about the rest of her weekend. On Saturday, she’ll fry up the bacon and eggs for the crew of boys, ferry the triplets home, deliver both sons to other playdates, and buy birthday presents for two of the kids’ friends before her son Gray’s yearbook committee meeting at 3.
“Hold up,” I interrupt. “That’s a school project, isn’t it?”
“Oh, weekends are the new weekdays, even for kids, don’t you know? It’s nuts.” From 6 to 7:30, she continues, her older son, Travis, has soccer practice.
“Then we do a family movie night,” she says. “But even that is exhausting, because by the time everyone scrambles to shower and eat dinner it’s always 8:30. Rob and I put the movie on and we just want to be in bed already, and it’s 10 and we’re nodding off. But if we tell the kids, ‘Let’s finish the movie tomorrow,’ they get so upset because it’s supposed to be family time. So we try and stay awake.”
On Sunday, she goes on, both boys have soccer tournaments from 8:30 to 3, which she and Rob divide. This time commitment—almost a full workday in itself—is a familiar reality for parents of the estimated 44 million American kids who play organized sports. Youth sports have become so highly professionalized that the travel industry built around it alone generates an estimated $7 billion annually. In response, specialty travel agencies have sprung up whose sole focus is to book hotels f
or traveling youth teams and their families.
The old games of kick-around in the local park have given way to sports campuses like Rocky Top Sports World in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, an 80-acre, $20 million facility that hosts “tourney-cations,” in which the whole family can build their vacation around a kid’s soccer tournament. Heather’s town has its own sports campus, housed in a former prison, which for authentic period details still sports some of its barbed-wire perimeter—presumably to deter parents who contemplate making a break.
But Heather gets no time off for good behavior. After her kids’ soccer tournaments, she drives them home for showers, homework, and dinner. When the boys are in bed, she prepares her teaching lesson plan for the following week. “Oh, and from Friday to Sunday I’m also doing at least five loads of laundry,” she says. “And of course the whole time Rob and I end up fighting about who does what.”
She pauses. “You know what? I almost like my workweek better, because it’s more regimented. Like, I know the kids will be in bed by 7:30 reading. If I’m shopping on the weekend, it’s not even fun shopping—it’s shopping for their sports socks. How can two boys go through so many sports socks?”
She abruptly stops speaking.
“Heather?” I say worriedly. “What is it? Oh no, were you speeding? It’s a cop. Is it a cop?”
“No,” she says, sighing. “I got so distracted talking to you, I forgot to go to the grocery store and drove home.”
She curses and pulls out of her driveway.
Tom and I sometimes exchange wry looks when we see child-free couples on the street. With their yoga mats tucked under their arms, they good-naturedly bicker about where they will go to brunch before a roll in the hay and a nap. “When I was single, I used to be annoyed by people with kids,” Tom says as we pass a duo making out on a street corner. “Now I’m annoyed by couples.”