by Jancee Dunn
Don’t pee on the gift.
Terry Real’s maxim is correct: if I tell Tom I’m okay with him playing a long Saturday soccer game, I cannot pull the silent treatment when he returns. (And as Che Guevara once put it, “Silence is argument carried out by other means.”)
Don’t suffer (for) the little children.
It’s perfectly valid to ask if a kid event will be fun for you, and to reconsider if it isn’t (remember the research about how children are upset when their parents are tired and stressed?). As professional organizer Barbara Reich points out, you don’t have to go to three kids’ birthday parties in one day. (Although I would happily attend if all three featured magicians; if they’re hostile, or drunk, all the better.)
My weekends were transformed when I simply took a little time to build in some fun for myself instead of handing over those days wholesale to my child. Why can’t parents have a bit of levity, too? For instance, I devised a plan before Easter for the grown-ups in my family to have an Easter egg hunt of their own. We stashed the kids in my parents’ den with a film that they had all been clamoring to see, and set them up with treats.
Once the kids were sufficiently narcotized by the movie, I staged an egg hunt for the adults, along with various backyard games. Winners were directed to an upstairs Prize Room where they could choose among bottles of Scotch and wine, gift cards from various big-box stores, fancy chocolates, and firming moisturizers. The years dropped away as my mother forcefully bodychecked my sister Dinah in order to snatch the golden egg. (“I wanted to win that Scotch,” she said, serenely brushing herself off.)
At Thanksgiving, I once again stashed away the kids with a movie, then furnished every adult with a coin and a pile of scratch-off lottery cards, with enticing names such as Instant Frenzy and Triple Tripler. Not a word was said as everyone set upon those cards with greedy concentration. My father won fifty dollars and announced that he was going to buy a 100-count box of contractor bags at Costco—his idea of a madcap splurge.
Let him do things his way.
If every father-daughter outing involves a giant milkshake, so what? If he dresses her in plaids and stripes, who cares?
So many aspects of childcare that I have assigned a gendered valence to, such as feeding kids or putting them to sleep, are just as easily and competently performed by the other gender. Children don’t care one way or the other who is handing them Goldfish crackers.
The FBI’s methods of paraphrasing and emotion labeling are remarkably effective.
As the FBI’s Gary Noesner (and just about every psychologist) tells me, all people want to be understood. Everyone wants to feel validated. Part of the reason I would get so furious at Tom is that I felt he wasn’t listening to me, so we were condemned to repeat a lifelong loop of demand/withdrawal. He still sounds wooden when he attempts to restate how I’m feeling in his own words (paraphrasing) or names my feelings instead of ignoring them (emotion labeling). But I always appreciate it, and it usually succeeds in calming me down—sometimes because his guesses are so off that I have to laugh (“You’re feeling dejected. No? I meant, you’re feeling uneasy. Right? No?”).
Small things often.
This edict from the Gottmans has raised our game considerably. Small, specific, everyday gestures of affection that require almost no energy—giving a quick shoulder squeeze, buying the special salsa your spouse likes, sending a funny text—can make for big changes over time. What you do every day, the Gottmans claim, matters more than the things you do once in a while. Usually in the afternoon, I make Tom tea and bring him a cookie on a plate. When I was growing up, one of our nuttier family customs was that a paper napkin folded on the diagonal was “fancy,” while one fashioned into a rectangular shape was “everyday.” So I put a “fancy” napkin next to the plate, for an added dash of glamour.
Just a few kind words here and there are extraordinarily effective. Try this test on your mate: meet his gaze, raise an eyebrow, and tell him, “You know, you’re looking really good to me lately.” Then watch the comical procession of expressions that will cross his face: surprise, followed by narrow-eyed suspicion that you are making fun of him, cautious pleasure once he grasps that you are serious, and, finally, the most poignant sort of hopefulness.
Forge an alliance for the teen years.
As one of my friends with older kids put it, “Get your relationship together while your kids are young, because trust me, you and your husband are really going to need each other for emotional support when your kids are teenagers. Like Jason and I are constantly muttering to each other, ‘What the hell was that about?’ You sort of have this new esprit de corps.”
Another friend tells me about an argument she had with her teenage son over his curfew. “It was in his room, or should I say, I stood outside his room,” she tells me. “I don’t like to go in there because there’s dirty plates everywhere and piles of sneakers, and the whole place just smells like the reptile house at the zoo.” Soon they were yelling—not helped because he refused to turn his music down—and she stomped downstairs in disgust.
Her husband was in the kitchen, stirring tomato sauce on the stove, shirtsleeves crisply rolled up, NPR playing quietly in the background. He silently handed her a glass of the pinot grigio he had poured when he heard her thump wrathfully down the stairs. Entering the orderly, adult atmosphere her husband had created in the kitchen was like leaving a chaotic Third World airport and boarding a quiet flight in first class.
Your child can, and should, help you out.
It is a little disconcerting to see how many tasks a child can take off your plate. Little kids really do want to help (and per Brown psychiatry professor Richard Rende’s advice, you’ll get better results by calling a kid a “helper” rather than asking them to help, because, touchingly, they want to be viewed as a good person). Why was I continually picking up after my child, when she could do it herself? As I bent to scoop up her toys, I used to rationalize insanely, Well, at least all this bending is good for my abs. It’s sort of like doing crunches. Giving her just a few daily chores has freed up fifteen precious minutes of my time.
Again, it is imperative to lock in this behavior well before the commencement of preteen attitude.
Look for the good.
Therapist Guy Winch’s exercise of having me notice and write down all Tom’s kindnesses was an eye-opener. I had gotten so used to staying in the comfort zone of being resentful that the many good things he was doing, for both me and our child, slipped by me. In my martyred state, I noticed only the bad, which led to what’s known in cognitive science as a confirmation bias: a tendency to pay attention to information that confirms your pre-existing beliefs, while ignoring anything that might challenge those beliefs.
I am the only person who can decide how I am going to feel. So I continue to make an effort to see his acts of caring, some of which normally flit under the radar—such as monitoring and stocking a precisely arranged cabinet of seven sizes of batteries for Sylvie’s various toys. When he shepherds Sylvie and me across a busy crosswalk, he makes direct and uncomfortable eye contact with the driver waiting at the light, after reading research that this reduces a pedestrian’s chances of getting hit.
Tom is more than “some guy who lives with us.” As comedian Chris Rock has said, “Think about everything a real daddy does: pay the bills, buy the food, make your world a better, safer place. And what does Daddy get for all his work? The big piece of chicken. That’s what Daddy gets.”
One of the greatest gifts you can give your child is a loving relationship with your spouse—and with it, a sense of security, peace, and permanence. Investing in your marriage while your children are young, or even before they arrive, is vitally important for your kid’s future: research shows that children whose parents have happy unions are much more likely to have stable relationships themselves as adults.
Tom has proven that he cared about my unhappiness, and was willing to lean in, which touches me. It’s embarra
ssing to admit that I started this project because I was worried about the effect our fighting had on our daughter, whereas it was barely a concern that my relationship with my husband was deteriorating. Instead, Tom has become the ally I didn’t know I had.
Together, Tom and I are sharing the experience of watching this goofy, exuberantly happy child navigate her way through the world. We’re profoundly and permanently connected, because of—and despite—the arrival of our child. Our marriage is far from perfect, but it has improved immeasurably. Now the distress we cause our daughter occurs mostly when I give Tom a kiss after he has jumped up to unload the dishwasher.
“Gross,” Sylvie says, covering her eyes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am enormously grateful for the incisive intelligence, dedication, and profound kindness of my editor and friend, Vanessa Mobley.
My deepest gratitude to the sterling and supportive all-stars at Little, Brown: Reagan Arthur, Katharine Myers, Nicole Dewey, Lauren Passell, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Karen Wise, Sarah Haugen, and Carina Guiterman. Thanks also to the universally beloved Laura Tisdel, an early supporter of the book, as well as the generous and thoughtful Jocasta Hamilton at Penguin Random House UK.
Heartfelt appreciation goes to my agent, the brilliant, hilarious, almost absurdly charismatic Alexandra Machinist at ICM.
I offer my sincere thanks to the mothers and fathers who shared their stories and advice for this book. It is endlessly moving to see how my fellow parents support one another in doing “mankind’s hardest job.”
I am so lucky to have such a wonderful family: my parents, Jay and Judy Dunn, my sister Dinah and her husband, Patrick, and my sister Heather and her husband, Rob.
And, most importantly, I am forever grateful to my husband, Tom. I can’t think about what you mean to me without reaching for a box of tissues.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Jancee Dunn grew up in Chatham, New Jersey. She is the author of five books, including a memoir, a children's book, and Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir. Her essay collection, Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Vogue, Parents, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.
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