How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

  When Reich runs downstairs for more containers, Heather whispers in my ear, “I don’t want her looking in my underwear drawer, okay? Will you say something?”

  But Reich has already burst into the boys’ rooms, where the phrase “underwear drawer” is a foreign concept. She points to the soccer uniforms spilling from drawers, looking like the room had been ransacked by the local narcotics unit. “Uniforms should be kept in a single location, whether it’s a bin or designated drawer,” Reich rules, “so no frantic hunt for soccer socks.”

  She dumps out the drawers of Heather’s elder son, swiftly folds his T-shirts into thirds, sleeves tucked in, and arranges them vertically instead of horizontally. This not only creates more space, she says, but each T-shirt will be visible and thus get used more often. “No chance,” Heather says to me under her breath. Later, however, she calls me to recant, saying that the new system has provided her son with a whole new wardrobe of previously unworn clothes (research shows we wear only 20 percent of what’s in our closet).

  In the younger boy’s room, Reich inspects an easel. “Does he use this?” Heather says no, and Reich wrestles it into another bag. “Easels take up space, and kids are just as happy drawing on a table,” she says. “If large, unwieldy items aren’t being used, get rid of them.” As she inspects a shelf of trophies and medals, she furrows her brow. “Were any of these given to every member of the team?” Heather nods. Barbara calls to her son, who is busily arranging shoes in Heather’s closet. “Matthew, what do I say when everyone gets a trophy?”

  “Out they go,” comes the muffled reply.

  As she ruthlessly banishes a half dozen “participation” trophies, Reich tells us that parents should do toy purges twice a year—once before birthdays, and once before December holidays, when they have leverage. Parents, she says, are often the ones hanging on to old toys, unwilling to accept that their child has outgrown them. I tell Reich that I am sentimentally holding on to Sylvie’s old games and coloring books and she shakes her head. “I tell clients, ‘You can have a home, or a toy museum.’” And toss junky birthday party favors within twenty-four hours (“By that time, they’re sick of them, anyway”). Then she unloads a stack of clear plastic containers (“Always clear, so you save time by seeing what’s inside”) and swiftly sorts toy cars, her hands a blur.

  How many toys is too many? My friend Lindsay, mother of three boys, can pinpoint the precise moment when she knew she had to cut down. “My sons’ pet frog Sammy had jumped out of his cage, and no one could find him,” she says. “Well, I came across him months later, buried at the bottom of the kids’ toy box. Thank God the boys were at school at the time, because Sammy looked like a leather wallet.”

  Decluttering expert Peter Walsh advises parents to set limits by storing toys in a set number of bins—say, four. When the bins are full, children can add a toy, but they must donate another. This trains them to be generous, Walsh has said, and to understand that unlike Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they can’t own everything. Toy swaps also keep the clutter down: sometimes we’ll arrange for Sylvie and a friend to bring five toys on a playdate and then trade them for the week. She gets a fresh supply of toys, and I don’t spend a dime.

  Children are just like adults when it comes to too many possessions, writes Simplicity Parenting author Kim John Payne. An avalanche of toys, he contends, can make a child feel anxious and distracted. Even the senior director of the Play Lab at the toy company Fisher-Price once admitted that too many toys can feel “overwhelming to some children.”

  In his book, Payne advises cutting back on toys that are too complicated (elaborate, joyless “educational” toys), too fixed (ones that require zero imaginative input, such as a huge furnished plastic castle with a cast of thousands), or too commercial. The more a child can use their imagination with a toy—initiating the action, rather than having it prescribed for them—the better. A Barbie lifeguard can work only as a Barbie lifeguard, but a big cardboard box can be a bus, a house, a spaceship. Boredom, asserts Payne, is a gift; out of it comes engagement and creativity.

  I’ve seen this many times. Once, when I refused to entertain my daughter on a snowy afternoon, she drifted into her bedroom. She emerged a while later and announced that she had turned into our superintendent, Doug. She had constructed Doug’s tool kit out of an old shoebox, and a ring of “keys” out of paper clips (although she stopped short of chastising our neighbors for neglecting to separate the recyclables from the trash). She spent the afternoon industriously doing “odd jobs.”

  In a now-famous German experiment, two public health workers persuaded a Munich nursery school to pack away their toys for three months. For the first few days, the children, faced with nothing to play with but tables, chairs, and a few blankets, wandered around listlessly. But then they began to come to life: they constructed forts with the blankets and tables, and played games like “family,” “vampires,” and “bogeyman.” They pretended to be in a circus. At the end of the three months, the researchers found that the children played more cooperatively with each other and showed more concentration and focus than a group who had not undergone the experiment.

  Back at my sister’s, Reich moves on to the desk of Heather’s younger son. She holds up an outline of a dinosaur he had colored in. Children’s artwork, she says, making eye contact with all of us for emphasis, should be kept only if it shows creativity and personality—that means no worksheets and no homework, unless it’s an especially inventive essay. To save even more space, she goes on, scan or do a digital photo of artwork and put it on the computer. Reich preserves her children’s most special creations and mementos in 12-by-15-inch document boxes, color coded for each child.

  The contractor bags for donation multiply as we all crowd into the bathroom, chattering excitedly. Reich excavates some lightbulbs from the bathroom cabinet. “I saw lightbulbs in the front closet, too: you should always store like with like. Knowing where things have a home saves tons of time.” Then she quaffs more green tea and lays down a game-changer: store stain remover where the kids take off their clothing, like the bathroom, and teach them at a young age to spritz their stained garments. We gasp. Of course! “When they’re little, they think it’s fun,” she says. “It’s all about routines, so they don’t even think of it as something they’re doing to help, it’s just something they do. Like if we’re all watching a TV show together, I stick the laundry bag in front of them and everybody folds. They don’t know any different.”

  Her routines extend to homework, which is done at a set place and a set time every day (in her case, at the kitchen table, after her twins have rested and had a snack). “And I keep homework supplies nearby so they don’t get up,” she says. “Once they get up, you’ve lost them.” She calls to Matthew, who is unloading another teetering pile of clear plastic bins in the hallway. “Right, Matthew?” A distant assent. “Routine is one of the best ways I know to curb arguments—it’s only when things are unclear that there’s anything to fight about.” (This rule also applies to spouses, she adds.)

  A short while later, Reich flits down to the kitchen, entourage in tow. She scans the cereal boxes stored on a high shelf and tells Heather if she wants the kids to get their own snacks, she must put them on a low shelf—the more autonomous they are, the less scrambling you will have to do. She pulls out a small magnetized notepad and slaps it on the fridge. “And tell your kids that if they use up something and don’t put it on this grocery list, they’re not allowed to come complaining to Mom. Make everyone responsible.”

  She spots Heather’s large family calendar posted on the wall and approves: a monthly family calendar, either paper or digital, is crucial. Every family member should be accountable for their appointments to avoid surprises and “oops” moments; make yearly doctor’s appointments around every family member’s birthday, so you’ll always remember. “And I’m very much in favor of a family meeting on Sunday nights for scheduling,” she says, and then wince
s. “Although I tried to implement this and my husband laughed at me in front of the kids, undermining me. So I guess I would say to start that when the kids are young.”

  We take a quick pizza break, with Reich holding forth as we eat. “What you want is fewer things circulating in your brain, and for as many things to run on autopilot as possible, such as meal planning,” she says, taking a delicate bite of pizza. I am suddenly aware that I am wolfing my own, and attempt to slow down. I’m always the parent at kids’ parties happily eating oil-filmed lukewarm slices while the other mothers look on in pity.

  Reich is still firing off tips. Because she also consults with clients about management, she throws in a few about decluttering your schedule. Make your days less tumultuous by simply saying no. “It’s entirely valid for moms to ask themselves if they want to attend a particular event, if their family will actually enjoy it, and if their presence will be missed,” she says. “There’s no reason to go to three birthday parties in one day! Carve out time for the things you really love!”

  We don’t comment and she senses, correctly, that we need a tutorial. “Okay, here is how to say no,” she says. “First rule: think before you automatically answer. Two: say no, not why.” My mother scribbles this down and underlines it twice. “This is how you do it: ‘Thanks so much for the invitation. We’re so sorry we can’t attend; it sounds like a great time.’ If you’re asked to volunteer, say ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t.’ That’s all. No reason is necessary!”

  I try it out. “I can’t, but I wish you well, because it’s such a worthwhile cause.”

  She claps her hands. “Exactly. Don’t make excuses, and don’t lie. If you tell your friend you can’t go to a party because your kid has swim lessons, she may be upset that you think swim lessons are more important.”

  (I suddenly recall what Brené Brown tells me is her “boundary mantra”: choose discomfort over resentment. As she says, “Ask yourself, ‘Am I saying yes because it’s more comfortable to say yes now, but I’ll be more resentful at the end?’”)

  Reich thinks for a moment. “Also, if you have multiple children, it’s easier to have them all in the same sport, because it’s all in one place, and also you can hand down equipment.” One of Heather’s friends—mother of five boys under twelve, including the set of triplets mentioned earlier—has all five sons play hockey for that very reason. “Now that they’re older,” she tells me, “I can just drop all of them at the rink and not have to come back to get them until four.”

  Reich glances at the clock: our magical day is drawing to a close. Heather is beaming. “I feel lighter,” she exults, giving me a fierce hug. No surprise there—clutter pulls you down psychologically and slows you physically. Heather now has fewer things to deal with, and is able to find and organize what remains more quickly. Is there a sweeter gift for a frazzled mother than order, peace, and priceless extra time not spent hunting down a missing shin guard?

  Reich, without the slightest trace of fatigue, is heading purposefully for the door. “I just want you to know that the goal here is not to be perfect, or to be crazy like I am,” she tells Heather as she slips on her gold shoes. “It’s to be able to make it easier to get out the door in the morning in time for school. And if that isn’t a quality-of-life improvement, I don’t know what is.”

  It’s certainly better for your marriage: according to one study, eliminating clutter can reduce housework (and the ensuing chore clashes) by up to 40 percent. My friend Jason institutes a Family Declutter jamboree every other month or so. Once each family member has filled a large trash bag for tossing or donation, they go to their favorite ice cream place for sundaes. “When your house is decently orderly and you know where everything is,” he says, “it prevents so many of those fights that start with ‘Where the hell did you put the wipes?’ and escalate from there.” And once the clutter is under control, order is easier to maintain: a Dutch study found that people tend to litter considerably more in messy environments than in clean ones.

  After Reich leaves, the men file warily into the house. “Jay,” my mother announces gaily to my dad, “we’re stopping at the Container Store on the way home!”

  “Oh, good,” he says, wearily fetching his keys.

  When I return to our apartment, I embark on a deep purge of the one area of our home that I haven’t obsessively straightened: our front closet. Tom watches with alarm, afraid that I may toss one of the many empty boxes he has hoarded in case he needs to “send something back.” When my mother sends a photo via group text of her newly pared-down basement, I ask Heather if Rob has caught the fever and cleaned out the garage. It was the one part of their house that Reich didn’t tackle—that would be a multi-day project, and her services, while effective, are not cheap.

  Another weekend over, and the garage is worse than ever, Heather texts back, with the forlorn tone of a diarist on a doomed arctic expedition. Then I remember my conversation with Dr. Gary Chapman. In his book The Five Love Languages, he writes that a woman had come to him, distressed, because her husband wouldn’t paint the bedroom after she had been asking him for nine months straight. Chapman told her not to mention the bedroom again. (“He already knows.”) Then he suggested that every time her husband did something good—haul out the trash, pick something up at the market—she was to give him a verbal compliment.

  The woman wondered how, exactly, that would get the bedroom painted. Chapman said, “You asked for my advice. You have it. It’s free.”

  After three weeks of receiving lavish compliments, the man painted the bedroom.

  I tell Chapman that I find this advice frankly irritating. “Why should I have to praise my husband, like he’s a golden retriever, for things he should be doing in the first place?”

  He laughs and says he understands. He explains that he isn’t suggesting that women should pump up the male ego—rather, that the need to feel appreciated is universal. Who among us does not love praise and kindness? “This isn’t manipulation,” he tells me. “Look, none of us, by nature, wants to be controlled with demands. He’s already heard fifteen times that you want something done. Now that he’s feeling loved, that task comes back to his mind and he wants to respond. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen this work.”

  But you can’t score-keep, he warns: you must offer compliments in the spirit of giving.

  I tell Heather about Chapman’s technique and she is aghast. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says. “Why don’t I get any praise?”

  “Just do it,” I say, summoning my still-potent authority as eldest sister.

  And so for weeks, Heather carefully tamps down her disgust and forces herself to pile compliments upon Rob whenever he does anything even marginally helpful. Like my husband, Rob is not a naturally suspicious person, so he has no idea that he is part of a test and cheerily accepts this pleasing new turn of events (whereas if the situation were reversed, Heather would have immediately checked his wallet for receipts from Volcanic Eruptions Gentleman’s Club, which exists in, where else, New Jersey).

  Then, early one Saturday morning, Heather calls me. “He’s doing it,” she whispers excitedly. “He’s shoveling out the garage.” It takes all weekend, but he clears away the entire mess.

  I then conduct my own trial on Tom, in an attempt to get him to excavate his closet after months of hounding. Like Rob, he is oblivious to my sudden avalanche of approval, aside from one observation that I “seem to be in a good mood.” I deeply dislike being put in the position of having to motivate him, although I will admit it is funny to see his chest puff like a quail when I proclaim him a “genius” after he performs a minor repair on a kitchen cabinet.

  And it works: one morning, Tom announces that his closet needs a “rethink,” and begins industriously hauling out the contractor bags.

  When I tell some mothers on the playground about the praising experiment, my enthusiasm is met with silence. “I can’t do it,” one of them finally says.

  I know. I kn
ow. And this little happy ending mirrors so many pieces I have written for women’s magazines, in which I must try something out—a new diet, a sleep regimen—and unerringly deliver a positive outcome. (“You know the drill,” an over-it editor once told me when she had me do a piece on practicing gratitude. “Be a little cynical at first but then, at the end, realize how fortunate you are, and all that shit.”)

  But it is the absolute truth that because Tom felt valued, he blossomed in almost comical fashion—even throwing a few compliments my way.

  If only the effort to stop my eyes from rolling wasn’t so tiring. As Heather tells me, “Dr. Chapman was right. It worked. I’m never doing it again, but it worked.”

  Know That Eventually It’s Going to Be Just the Two of You Again—Well, Unless Another Recession Hits

  When you first get married, you have a relationship that’s so important to you, and you’re working on it together. But then you have a kid. And you look at your kid and you go, “Holy shit, this is my child. She has my DNA. She has my name. I would die for her.” And you look at your spouse and go, “Who the fuck are you? You’re a stranger.”

  —COMEDIAN LOUIS C.K.

  At long last, it seems as if deeply entrenched gender roles are changing. Millennial men—those age eighteen to early thirties—have said in studies that they fully plan on being hands-on dads who split childcare and housework equally with their mates. Millennial women seem to support this idea: 88 percent of them told the Pew Research Center that a good husband is someone who will “put his family before anything else.” Notably, being a breadwinner was not seen as vital—only a third of millennial women said that a good husband “provides a good income.”

  All this was said, however, before the respondents actually had babies. Once those people became parents, their soaring ideals landed with a loud whomp. When the new fathers confronted the reality of work policies that were not exactly family friendly, the same studies found them quickly backsliding into more hidebound gender roles.