How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

  The cruel paradox of weekends with kids can be boiled down to this: Parents want to relax. Kids do not. Those with younger children desperately contrive ways for their offspring to “run it out” as if they’re training greyhounds; those with older kids spend their weekends as a taxi service. “Before I had kids, I thought of weekend time as available,” says Caroline, a part-time freelancer and stay-at-home mom of two. “As a mom, you start calculating like a crazy person to save time any way you can. What if I skip the shower, then maybe I could get a coffee at the grocery store Starbucks so I could drink it and shop at the same time? I always think of those walk-in tubes at Chuck E. Cheese’s where you try to catch the tickets: the tickets for parents are minutes and hours.”

  Making matters worse is that for many parents, work obligations have bled into the weekend. In 2014, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) examined work-life balance in a number of countries by measuring the proportion of employees who toil fifty hours or more per week, against the time they devote daily to “leisure and personal care.” Out of the thirty-four member countries in the OECD, the United States ranked a dismal number twenty-nine. (Denmark is number one.)

  For Tom and me, weekends are a lingering source of tension. We have at least gotten better about arranging our weekdays. During the four months of our relationship shake-up, it is becoming clear that much of our friction has arisen from a lack of clear roles. Because we’ve sorted out what to do, I no longer expect him to read my mind, or fume that he isn’t helping. Now that Tom readies our daughter for school two mornings a week, for example, I am fully off the clock. That small, sweet bit of free time when I can linger over breakfast makes an enormous difference in my day. Of course, I am still “household manager,” constantly reminding Tom to do fundamental things such as feed the kid breakfast—but he does it.

  If a fight brews, Tom has been effectively disarming me with his FBI training and the statements supplied by Terry Real: Oh, that must feel bad. I can see why you feel like that. What can I say or do right now to make you feel better? It’s calculated, but who cares? If I’m emptying the dishwasher, he now jumps up and helps me unload. This largely symbolic task takes two minutes, but he’s clueing in to the fact that the goodwill he engenders lasts much longer. Sometimes he even says, “Need a hand?” This golden phrase lights within me a tiny flame of warmth; he is saying, in effect, If it were up to me, I would never do dishes and would happily eat directly out of a bag, but I care that you care. Recalling Dr. Chapman’s advice, I make myself thank Tom, and refrain from reminding him that no one thanks me for emptying the dishwasher. Our civility is indeed creating an upward spiral of goodwill: I am happier; Tom gets his much-needed peace.

  Some of this newfound courtesy is, admittedly, a performance that we put on for our daughter—I had shown Tom the research on modeling and explained that when Sylvie witnesses me doing the vast majority of household work, she forms an expectation of her future. I break out the modeling paradigm again to persuade him to be a parent volunteer for one of Sylvie’s field trips to a children’s museum. Parent volunteers, I inform him, are overwhelmingly female. It would be good for our daughter and the other kids to see that dads can volunteer, too. “Plus you work from home,” I say. “You don’t have to deal with getting permission from a boss.” When we tell Sylvie that Daddy will be coming along on the field trip, she is overjoyed.

  But as the day of the field trip approaches, the backpedaling begins. “I have a lot of work to do on Thursday, so I’m going to have to cancel,” Tom says breezily. “Most of the volunteers are stay-at-home moms anyway, so they have the time. I’m on deadline for three articles.”

  I sit down at my computer and call up the teacher’s email containing details about the field trip. Of the six women chaperoning, five have full-time jobs. I point to the names. “She’s a lawyer,” I say. “I guess she’ll work late tonight. Jessie works at a nonprofit in Manhattan. This one is an editor, this one is—”

  Tom holds up his hand. “Okay, okay, I’m going,” he says.

  That afternoon, he returns from the trip full of funny stories about our daughter’s classmates. “It’s so interesting to see this part of her life that has been sort of hidden from me,” he says. “At lunch, the kids had a long debate: if an invisible person eats lunch, can you see the food, or does it become invisible, too?” Tom was called upon to solve the dispute, and presumably only made the kids more confused when he told them it depended if the “mechanism of invisibility” was the man’s skin (“which would act as a kind of cloaking shield, so the food would be invisible”) or his whole body, in which case “a foreign substance would presumably be shown.” Thankfully, he then reverted back to Dad Mode, and told the kids to make their sandwiches disappear.

  As he becomes ever more involved in our child’s life, his wife and daughter grow closer to him, and more appreciative. Upward spiral.

  Our weekends, however, still need help. When time is less structured and all family members have conflicting agendas, skirmishes tend to erupt. My friend Marea says that for stay-at-home mothers like herself, weekends are especially complicated, because they often don’t feel comfortable or justified in asking their husbands to pitch in.

  As a result, her weekends are no different from her weekdays. “Our daughter wakes me up early; I make breakfast and get her dressed,” she says. “Sean sleeps in and then takes his time waking up, complete with a stretch session. After he’s good and limber, he hops in a hot shower for twenty minutes to loosen up completely. By that time, I’ve made lunch and there are two stacks of dishes. My stress level might be getting up there by this point, especially when he comes out of the shower, sits on the couch, and nine times out of ten pulls out his phone, completely ignoring the kid. And he knows I’m annoyed.” She sighs. “I just see this stuff as some sort of bad-boy act of defiance, and it’s enraging.”

  Yet he won’t offer to help, and she, hamstrung by her belief that he needs the entire weekend to recharge, doesn’t feel empowered to ask—which means that seven days a week, the mundane work is dumped entirely on her.

  I recall therapist Ann Dunnewold’s advice to appeal to a man’s sense of fairness. “So Sean gets weekends totally off, which means he has eight days of leisure a month,” I tell Marea.

  She nods. “Right.”

  “That’s”—I do a quick calculation of sixteen waking hours times eight—“128 hours a month that he has off on weekends. How about you? What do you get?”

  She blinks. “Zero.”

  I nod. “Uh-huh.”

  So why would she not rise up and insist that he do more, when she has nothing to lose except extra loads of laundry? I relay the story of Marea’s hesitation to feminist writer Caitlin Moran at our rendezvous in Philadelphia, and she erupts in a most satisfying way. “Well, then there’s no rest for your friend, is there?” she says, shaking her head. “Clearly she needs to negotiate. It’s something I literally can’t understand when I see it happening in other relationships. If you love your wife, how can you not address this issue? You have to have a conversation with your man and go, ‘Fairies don’t do all the work. Why are you doing this to me?’”

  Moran’s husband, journalist Peter Paphides, is, to no one’s shock, an avid feminist. “My husband has turned his geekery toward being an excellent parent,” she declares to me. “He was so proud about getting the right Tupperware for our girls’ packed lunches. I constantly point out to the girls, ‘You are very lucky you have an absolutely exceptional father. There are a lot of girls out there who do not have fathers like this.’” She cackles. “I did dick-move him early on, because I can’t drive, and absolutely refuse to, so he’s had to do all the school runs and shopping, while I just sit at home typing on Twitter, going, ‘It’s great not driving!’ It’s working out quite well for me.”

  Returning to Marea’s dilemma, Moran does have sympathy for the classic feminist demand that housewives should be paid for their work.
“There’s a complete logic to that. If you put your granny in an institution and you’re paying someone to care for her, it’s a business transaction. But caring for your granny yourself is an unpaid thing?” She leaps up and stomps around the room in her heavy boots. “We’ve been told that there should be some sort of element of pride to keeping house and being a good wife and mother. There is this massive underlying belief that a woman will never run out of love and care and attention—that they should be able to give until they die. Without any point where you go, ‘That’s enough.’ Men need to be either inspired into doing this stuff, culturally, or they need to be shamed!”

  Moran continues this rant for a good twenty minutes. I must admit, it is fun to wind her up.

  A restful, restorative weekend with kids may not be entirely possible, but surely someone, somewhere, has found a way to elevate it beyond a bleak slog through sports, playdates, and chores.

  I suddenly think of my friend Jenny. She has earned the admiration of other moms by deftly sorting out her family’s weekends with forethought and planning.

  We meet at our usual lunch spot, a former Cobble Hill carriage house, now a coffee shop by day and bar by night that peddles microbrews and “specialty craft drinks.” Signs affixed to the space’s exposed-brick walls offer homemade sausage-making workshops, a meeting of the Brooklyn Accordion Club, CSA pickup times, and a show featuring vintage electric pianos.

  A very New Brooklyn clientele gathers at the large communal tables: bearded, tattooed guys with man buns eating artisanal Pop-Tarts, laptop tappers sporting bold eyewear, twenty-something creatives updating their Etsy websites, and moms like us marking time before the school run.

  I race in, late from a stint as a volunteer cafeteria helper at my daughter’s school, and slide onto the bench next to my friend, who, with her willowy frame and wavy red hair, resembles a contemporary version of Millais’s painting of Ophelia. Both of us are wearing a variation of the Brooklyn mom uniform: striped shirt, skinny jeans, small gold earrings fashioned into an “organic” shape, Bold Lip.

  I order my usual avocado toast on pepita multigrain with a house-made ginger ale; for Jenny, the triple kale salad (raw, charred, and “crispy sesame”). I quiz her on her weekend formula and she obligingly lays it out for me. She, her husband, and their two sons begin with a family meeting. “As corny as they sound, they really do work,” she says. Gather everyone, she says, and go around the circle asking each family member to say one or two things they’d like to do that weekend.

  “Kids as young as two can do this,” she says. “Even if the idea is not feasible, such as cotton candy for dinner, try to incorporate some aspect of it—like, kids pick the restaurant for dinner. At the very least, don’t shoot down an idea right away. Nobody likes that person at a meeting.”

  “Say out loud,” she goes on, “‘This weekend I want A, B, and C’ in order of importance. Assume nothing,” she says. For kid activities, she and her husband alternate weekends, allowing one free pass to Run! Save Yourself. “That way,” she says, “both parents have an opportunity to grab the easier job on offer—like staying home while the baby naps versus taking the big kid to the paintball birthday party.” (Alternatively, Jenny and I know one set of parents who simply flip a coin when confronted with a kid-tivity that’s particularly dread inducing.)

  She suggests the following noninflammatory ways to commence the bargaining process:

  If you want to go play basketball for a few hours this weekend, that’s fine. I’ll stay home with the kids. Next weekend, I’d love to catch that new art exhibit, and you can take care of the kids. Cannily, she is presenting this in the very way that psychologist Joshua Coleman suggests: as though it’s a done deal, and you just have to figure out how to get there.

  You’ve been working a lot the past few weeks, and I’ve had a lot of solo-parenting time. I’m feeling burnt out and impatient with the kids. It’d be great if I could recharge my batteries with some alone time.

  You know what, I miss my fun side. What are some ways you can help me rekindle that?

  I’ve made a list of the kids’ weekend activities. Do you think you could handle X, Y, and/or Z? Asking if he can “handle” it, she says, presents a little challenge no guy will want to back down from. And as Yale psychology professor Alan Kazdin points out, choice increases the likelihood of compliance. It’s not the choice itself that’s important, it’s the feeling that the person has a choice that makes a difference in behavior.

  When delegating, consider which child-related duties play to your husband’s strong suits, she says, and which jobs you are happy to truly hand over—tasks that aren’t going to summon your inner micromanager. Then give him the reins. “If he takes on the kids’ swimming lessons, let him do it soup-to-nuts—the clock watching, the bag packing, all of it. There may be a week that the kid swims naked,” says Jenny. “You might smell a moldy diaper in the gym bag a month later. Shut your mouth and let it go. He will eventually work out the kinks. He will. He may relish giving you updates on the kids for once, or gloat a little about how on top of it he is.”

  She is also a fan of the “after eight” bargaining chip: you’ll find your spouse is much more open to the idea of you hitting the gym or grabbing a drink with friends, she says, after the kids go to sleep.

  Finally, she says, “Give ‘me time’ freely and fully.” Her husband knows not to offer her time for a relaxing bubble bath only to ignore the kids as they amble off to the bathroom to cannonball plastic penguins into Mommy’s bubbles. If she tells him he’s free to meet friends, she won’t bring it up for the next three weeks every time she’s annoyed with him.

  In other words, as Terry Real so memorably put it, don’t pee on the gift. “Oh, my favorite new saying,” says Jenny.

  Parents tell me that their thorniest weekend problem by far is time management—so again I phone Julie Morgenstern, the New York City time management consultant. She has devised a novel approach to organizing weekends with kids that has been an instant hit with her high-powered clients. Envision your weekend, she says, as seven distinct units of time: Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, Sunday night.

  “So, if you think of your weekend as seven units of time,” she says, “you can dedicate each unit to various things: quality time where you reconnect, renewal time, and household stuff.” She then has clients keep each unit distinct. “I’ll tell families, ‘Look, stop trying to do chores and errands in every available moment,” she says. “On the weekend, compress it to one unit or two, maximum. So the Saturday morning unit could be devoted to housework, like ‘This is when we get the house clean together as a group, compress, consolidate, get it done.’ And then maybe in the afternoon you do your grocery shopping. That’s two units—but if you could get it down all into one, even better.”

  For many families, some weekend units are quickly gobbled up by sports or birthday parties. If this is the case, she says, parents should purposefully set aside another unit or two for fun and restoration. She uses the acronym PEP: Physical activity, Escape (hobbies and activities that instantly transport you), and People (those who relax or energize you, not drain you). If you don’t intentionally block out a unit for leisure, she warns, it will be consumed with another task. “Planning is exhausting, even making these damn decisions about units,” she says. “But if you don’t do it, you’re going to squander the time. ‘Free time’ is not the leftover hours after everything else. Build it into your schedule, so you have something to look forward to.”

  This means that, as in my friend Marea’s case, it’s essential to get behind the idea that you need recharging time, too, or eventually you become a depleted human equivalent of The Giving Tree: a gnarled stump who is gradually stripped of her apples, wood, and branches by a child. (Described as a metaphor for a mother’s unselfish love, The Giving Tree is one of those children’s books that is loved and loathed in equal measure; its many Amazon detr
actors scorn it as “an abusive and codependent relationship” and “boy with psychopathic personality disorder uses mother-figure tree to his benefit.”)

  Using the seven units of time, Morgenstern sketches out a potential weekend. “So, the Friday night unit could be a potluck with other families, if you need that social connection; Saturday night and Sunday afternoon could be units for fun family outings; while the Sunday night unit could be devoted to getting ready for the week.”

  I ask her: Isn’t the point of a weekend not to be organized—to have carefree, unstructured time? “Kids really benefit from routine,” Morgenstern, also the mother of one daughter, replies firmly. “A kid’s world is already pretty chaotic. So if you have a rhythm not only to your weekdays but to your weekends, like ‘Oh, Friday nights is when we have pizza with friends, and Sunday afternoons is when we go out and do something physical,’ the routine frees everybody from having to figure out what to do with your time, and just enjoy it.”

  After time units are slotted, examine the weekend schedule with a ruthless eye. Morgenstern says that when we overstuff our weekends, we needlessly inject conflict into our own lives. As she says, “You shouldn’t ask, ‘How much can I fit in?’ but ‘What’s going to fuel us? What is going to energize or relax us?’”

  This includes sleep. “As a parent, you’re working so hard, and giving, giving, giving constantly, so you have to be very thoughtful about what recharges you well—such as rest,” she says. On Sunday nights, many parents are tempted to stay up late to cram in a few extra hours after the kids are finally in bed—but Morgenstern says we need to reverse our thinking. If you think of sleep as something to cap the end of the day, you may be tempted to keep the party going. But if you use her psychological trick and view sleep as the beginning of the following day, it can be easier to slip into the sheets.