How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

  A cash-strapped friend of mine leaves her kids with her mom once every few months, and she and her husband do what they term Drunken Errands. “We live in a really walkable part of Minneapolis, so we huff down a few drinks and then do what needs to be done,” she says. “We end up giggling and bumping into each other at Target, and sober up by the time we return home. Mostly.” If you’re home, set up the kids with dinner and a video and then have a romantic dinner à deux in another room.

  Some neuroscientists contend that the best way for couples to bond is to try something new together. Brain scans have shown that when we are confronted by something novel, certain brain areas are activated in anticipation of some sort of reward, including the midbrain, which is flooded with the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. (Once the stimulus becomes familiar and the brain learns that no reward is coming, it calms down.)

  Your novel activity doesn’t need to be paragliding, either—anything different will do. While Sylvie is at school, I book a session at an appealingly kooky Korean spa in Manhattan that boasts rooftop hydrotherapy pools, a swim-up bar, and a sleeping room for power naps.

  Tom and I revel in a long morning of hydro-massage followed by bouts of giddy disorientation as we try a stint in an Ice Igloo; something called a Chromotherapy Sauna, which flashes mood-enhancing lights; and the Infrared Zone, which emits “microscopic infrared wavelengths that are directly absorbed into the body.”

  “I may never forget this day,” Tom whispers as a pair of sturdy Korean ladies industriously scrub off entire layers of our skin with mitts.

  “That’s the plan,” I whisper back.

  Kids: Your New Budget Deficit

  The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  What a bunch of crap.

  —MY FATHER, J. C. DUNN

  When I was pregnant, Tom and I indulged in many dreamy conversations as we took long walks (or, in my case, long, sweaty waddles) through our Brooklyn neighborhood. We speculated endlessly: Would our baby have blue eyes like Tom, or brown eyes like me? Would she be outgoing? Shy? Athletic? Bookish?

  Rarely was anything practical discussed, such as how we would manage to pay for college. It was much more sweetly romantic to talk about the decor of the baby’s room, or what sort of teddy bear she might like.

  My father, Mr. Preparedness, was horrified. He sent me an email (subject line: URGENT) stating that according to the College Board, a nonprofit that tracks the price of higher education, the average cost of yearly tuition and room and board at a private four-year college for 2009 (the year Sylvie was born) was $34,000 (2016’s figures have climbed to an ulcer-inducing $43,920).

  Like any self-respecting retiree dad, my father phoned me five minutes after sending his email to inquire if I had received the email, before providing a helpful breakdown of the particulars of said email.

  “Did you get the statistics I sent? Have you set up a college fund yet?”

  “No, Dad,” I said. “Jeez, she isn’t even born yet.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said grimly. “Start now, or when she’s out of high school, her room and board will be a cardboard box under the bridge.”

  “What bridge, Dad?” I asked, just to wind him up. “The Brooklyn Bridge? Or are you thinking of one in New Jersey?”

  “Go ahead and laugh,” he boomed. “You won’t be laughing when you have to pay your kid’s tuition with your retirement fund.” He went on to paint a bleak picture of Tom and me spending our golden years sleeping in our car as we travel to various parking lots for the night. Eventually, I gave in and promised him we would set up a 529 fund for the fetus. We put a hundred dollars in it, and that was the extent of any sort of practical preparation. Everything else, we reasoned, would be worked out as we went along.

  Soon after the baby was born, we began to fight about money.

  Most of us have money worries, and the enormous responsibility to provide for a family only tightens the vise. It seems that men in particular feel this strain: an analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, found that when men become fathers, they earn up to 19 percent more, most likely because they put pressure on themselves to work harder—especially if their spouse is taking time off. Babies also have a habit of inopportunely arriving right in the middle of a person’s prime moneymaking years. The optimists among us believe that one’s salary rises as you climb the ladder; the salary profile database PayScale.com shows otherwise: men’s salaries peak at the age of forty-eight, while women’s top out at thirty-nine.

  Tom and I had saved carefully so that I could take off two years when our baby was born, but soon after her birth, Tom was rattled by our avalanche of new expenses (our credit card debt was inching toward $15,000, the current national average). He quickly set up a command center at his computer and methodically fired off article pitches to dozens of magazine editors.

  There’s no way around the fact that the costs of raising a child are staggering: to bring up a baby born in 2013 to the age of eighteen, a middle-income couple will shell out $245,000, according to figures from the US Department of Agriculture. That’s almost a quarter of a million dollars, not including college: factor in the statistics my father sent for a four-year private college and the total outlay is a heart-stopping $420,000. The cost of disposable diapers alone averages $864 yearly, according to the parenting website BabyCenter.

  And so our money issues began to swirl in a dank cauldron of paranoia. If a package arrived for one of us, it was condemned by the other as a wasteful extravagance. One fight erupted when I received a new pair of shoes. Tom asked why on earth I needed them when I had “perfectly good ones” in the closet. “Because I’m meeting an editor from InStyle next week,” I said loftily. “Note the magazine’s title.”

  It was his turn to be excoriated when a larger package arrived for him: inside was a bike. I pointed out that he already had three perfectly good ones. “But this one is for gravel races,” he said. “I need longer chainstays for stability and disc brakes for more braking power. It also has bigger tire clearance and a slacker head tube.” As he threw more jargon at me, he watched my expression go from suspicious to confused: victory!

  But it wasn’t just our purchases—we fought continually about how much to spend on Sylvie’s toys and activities. I maintained that fewer toys force children to use their imaginations, while Tom bought our daughter a cornucopia of sports gear, toys, and games that we couldn’t afford. I liked playdates in the park, which happen to be free; he loved to enroll her in endless unusual classes and camps (a surf camp at Rockaway Beach, a robot-building class). We were at loggerheads.

  Arguing about money is “by far” the top predictor of divorce, says Sonya Britt, chair of the personal financial planning department at Kansas State University. She found in her research that couples that fought about money early in their relationships—regardless of debt or income level—were more likely to split. “That is key,” she tells me, “because it’s saying that people have to have this good base communication, and if they don’t, the problems are going to come out eventually. And if you’re adding kids in the mix, the problem is just going to get bigger.”

  Even when people stay together, found one study, marital brawls about money were found to be “more pervasive, problematic, and recurrent” than other issues, and couples used harsher language than they did in other kinds of arguments. That is undeniably the case for us.

  Making matters more fraught for Tom and me is that we are freelancers whose incomes vary wildly from year to year. Tom and I never know exactly what we will earn singly or jointly in any given year; we basically find out at tax time. We aren’t alone: in a survey from the financial service group Fidelity, a full 43 percent of the respondents could not say how much their partner earned; 10 percent of that group’s guesses were off by $25,000 and up.

  Why the disparity? One reason is that the economy is moving from salaried to project-based jobs, so
more people have incomes like ours that fluctuate from year to year. So-called contingent workers—self-employed people, part-timers, and freelancers like us—now make up an estimated 40 percent of the nation’s workforce.

  As our daughter grew, our finances became more complicated, and our clashes around them more intense. Then a friend who was struggling with her husband’s gambling problem mentioned that she was undergoing financial therapy. A small but expanding field, financial therapy combines fiscal advice with psychological counseling. It delves into your relationship with, and emotions behind, money—still a cultural taboo many are reluctant to discuss. Money does not seem like a very touchy-feely subject, but financial therapists say that fights around it have less to do with money itself than with other emotional hot-button issues, such as the values we want to pass on to our children. What they do is try to resolve the underlying issue that causes a person to become, for example, a “serial borrower” or “financial enabler.”

  Unlike financial advisors, financial therapists work to make clients uncover their root fears and core beliefs about money that commence in our early years. They ask clients: Was money a source of status when you were growing up? Fear? Security? Shame? Most money conversations between partners don’t probe into the past—why would they, when there is a more immediate worry of making the rent or dealing with a lost job? But financial therapists maintain that in order to dial down the stress of talking about our cash flow (or lack thereof), it’s helpful to understand the “money scripts,” or stories we tell ourselves about money.

  Britt and an associate uncovered four basic money scripts that negatively impact a person’s financial health: money avoidance (people who don’t want to deal with it, or even think about it), money worship (those who believe their troubles would be over if they just had more dollars), money status (those for whom self-worth equals net worth), and money vigilance (those who are nervous about funds to the point of self-deprivation).

  Even a brief money conversation makes both Tom and me fibrillate with anxiety—Britt’s research found that when people watched just four minutes of financial news on television, their stress levels skyrocketed. Not only that, but with our stealth purchases, it was clear that we were growing ever more secretive with each other—something divorce lawyers call “financial infidelity.”

  I don’t have the heart to pull Tom into yet another therapy session, yet I am intrigued by the idea. And so I find myself at the home of financial therapist Amanda Clayman—who, as it happens, lives right down the street from me in Brooklyn, and tells me she would be happy to share some insights. Smiling and warm, with a chic blond pixie cut, she ushers me into the sun-dappled courtyard of her apartment. We chat away as she pads around barefoot, watering her flowers.

  The need to hang on to our money is almost primal, says Clayman as she brushes some white flower petals off a chair so I can sit down. “People think that money is a rational, concrete topic, when really it’s a highly emotional subject that’s hardwired into our sense of survival,” she says. “So if we feel like somebody is threatening our money, we literally feel like it becomes a fight to the death.” (Indeed, research shows that even a quick chat about funds can trigger the neurochemical “fight or flight” reaction.)

  I tell her that Tom and I have never had a single conversation about our emotions around money. She shrugs and says that most people don’t. But the way that your partner thinks about and uses money, she goes on, reflects something personal and internal about them—tease that out, and it puts you in a much more collaborative framework, diffuses the tension, and places you back on the same team.

  She has clients create a system with a few intersecting components. One is that each partner is equal in the financial relationship. “Establish that no one has more control or decision-making power than the other,” she says, “even if they make more money.” This rule is especially necessary to curb resentment among stay-at-home mothers who often have to ask their partners for funds, creating an unwelcome power imbalance. I know one stay-at-home mom who has to present weekly receipts to her husband for his approval—a power-tripping, relationship-eroding move.

  I tell Clayman that Tom and I make roughly the same income, so we divide our bills in half and share a joint credit card account for family expenditures—but we also have one separate credit card each, the source of our increasingly covert spending.

  She recommends that after a couple has worked out a family budget, and the monthly bills are paid, each spouse gets a certain amount of discretionary spending—say, a few hundred dollars a month—which is deposited into their individual checking accounts, so that one person is not petitioning the other for cash. Nor will anyone have to justify a purchase. “Because sometimes we’re not going to agree on what’s a worthwhile purchase,” she points out. “I’m sure if I talked to my husband about how often I get my hair cut and colored, he’d be surprised, because he’s a fifteen-dollar-haircut guy.”

  Next, your financial management has to be inclusive. “Grown-ups should not be exempt from money matters,” says Clayman shortly. “Both have to participate.” She sees many couples in which one person handles the money, while the other claims to be “terrible with numbers.” This places a burden squarely on one mate, when both should find a way to participate and be partners in a common cause, playing to whatever strengths they have. “It’s also good for your kids to see a flexible back-and-forth,” she says, “where both parents treat each other as competent and equally responsible.”

  Women, especially, shouldn’t be left out of the equation: you don’t want your kids to internalize that Mommy isn’t good with math or perpetuate the idea that money should be handled by men: research has shown that parents talk to girls less often about money than they do boys.

  Finally, financial matters between couples must be transparent. That means that even if there are negotiated areas of autonomy such as the discretionary spending, each person has access to all information if he or she wants to take a look.

  Clayman says that transparency is healthy for kids as well—not to know your salary, necessarily, but to see a predictable choreography to your finances: mail gets opened daily, bills are paid weekly, accounts are reviewed monthly. “Children need to see that money exists within a framework of time, and that inattention to time brings a swift consequence of disorder,” she says. “It shouldn’t be, ‘Crap! Didn’t I just pay that?’”

  Financial transparency between couples should also include your credit ratings. Finance guru Suze Orman advises new couples to share their FICO credit scores as early as possible. (As she cheerily proclaims, “FICO first, then sex.”) Credit card companies such as Citi and American Express now provide FICO scores on their statements; each of the three credit reporting bureaus will also issue one free credit report a year.

  The next day, fortified by Clayman’s advice, I gather our financial information after Sylvie has gone to school. Tom and I make ourselves an omelet at our usual lunchtime of 11:30 (when you work at home, the rationale is usually “Why wait?”). Then we sit down at the kitchen table and have a heart-to-heart about money. Tom looks gloomy at the prospect of still more mutual unburdening, but I feel a rush of affection for him as he gamely tackles the questions a financial therapist would pose: What are your fears about money? What did your parents teach you about it? How do you define financial security? What is your money nightmare?

  He divulges that when he was growing up, money was a source of fear and panic. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mom, who struggled to pay the bills. To this day, when he sees a bill, he quickly stashes it out of sight as if he can’t bear to look at it—where it is frequently lost in the mulch of his paper piles. In other words, he’s a classic money avoider.

  My view of money is completely incompatible with Tom’s (not necessarily a bad thing—if you have two savers, for example, you may never go on vacation). I am not as fearful about money—and one reason, I realize, is that my father made
a ritual out of paying the bills. Once a month, he took out his basket of bills and set them on the coffee table, along with a roll of stamps and a pile of envelopes handily pre-stamped with our return address. Then, while a football game played in the background, he sedately took care of the bills and looked over his accounts. My childhood view of bill paying is that it was visible, consistent, and calm (we kids never saw my dad get worked up, unless the Giants were losing).

  But money to me meant more than security. Growing up, I envied the rich kids in our town for the ease and self-assurance that I assumed their sizable bank accounts provided. Connecting the dots as I talk through it with Tom, it becomes clear to me that wealth has always signified self-confidence. In the fashion world that I dip in and out of, when you purchase the “right” bag or shoes, they do indeed give you more poise—they allow you, at least superficially, to “pass.”

  For all the fashion world’s exuberance, most editors wear a uniform—lots of black, small jewelry, discreet accessories without logos. As a former Jersey girl whose father managed a J. C. Penney store, I can never quite quell the feeling that I am an outsider in this rarefied world. A gleaming new pair of shoes quiets that hectoring voice of insecurity. It seems fairly clear that my money script is “money status.”

  Yet I also feel guilty about ordering those shoes, and in fact rarely buy anything for myself—something Kansas State’s Britt says is common behavior among mothers. “There’s research that when women have extra money, they spend it on their kids and not on themselves,” says the mom of two, who admits she does this herself. “And when men have extra money, they tend to spend it on fun things, like alcohol. Or music.”

  And our culture applauds self-sacrificing mothers who put their children first. In a study of low-income single moms in the Philadelphia area, sociologists found that mothers risked harsh criticism from other moms if they had nicer clothing than their children. As one mother in the study commented, “I can’t see my son walking around with Payless sneakers on with me walking around with Nikes or Reeboks or something.” (Oh, do I understand that mind-set: the limit of my self-sacrifice extends to eating only the broken bits in a box of crackers, so the rest of the family can have the whole ones.)