The official history of Joey’s Problem—the story Nancy and Evan give me—begins with Joey’s fierce attachment to Nancy, and Nancy’s strong attachment to him. On an afternoon walk through Golden Gate Park, Nancy devotes herself to Joey’s every move. Now Joey sees a squirrel; Nancy tells me she must remember to bring nuts next time. Now Joey is going up the slide; she notices that his pants are too short—she must take them down tonight. The two enjoy each other. Off the official record, neighbors and Joey’s baby-sitter say that Nancy is a wonderful mother, but privately they add how much “like a single mother.”
For his part, Evan sees little of Joey. He has his evening routine, working with his tools in the basement, and Joey always seems happy to be with Nancy. In fact, Joey shows little interest in Evan, and Evan hesitates to see that as a problem. “Little kids need their moms more than they need their dads,” he explains philosophically; “All boys go through an oedipal phase.”
Perfectly normal things happen. After a long day, mother, father, and son sit down to dinner. Evan and Nancy get the first chance all day to talk to each other, but both turn anxiously to Joey, expecting his mood to deteriorate. Nancy asks him if he wants celery with peanut butter on it. Joey says yes. “Are you sure that’s how you want it?” “Yes.” Then the fidgeting begins. “I don’t like the strings on my celery.” “Celery is made up of strings.” “The celery is too big.” Nancy grimly slices the celery. A certain tension mounts. Every time one parent begins a conversation with the other, Joey interrupts. “I don’t have anything to drink.” Nancy gets him juice. And finally, “Feed me.” By the end of the meal, no one has obstructed Joey’s victory. He has his mother’s reluctant attention and his father is reaching for a beer. But talking about it later, they say, “This is normal when you have kids.”
Sometimes when Evan knocks on the baby-sitter’s door to pick up Joey, the boy looks past his father, searching for a face behind him: “Where’s Mommy?” Sometimes he outright refuses to go home with his father. Eventually Joey even swats at his father, once quite hard, on the face, for “no reason at all.” This makes it hard to keep imagining Joey’s relationship to Evan as “perfectly normal.” Evan and Nancy begin to talk seriously about a “swatting problem.”
Evan decides to seek ways to compensate for his emotional distance from Joey. He brings Joey a surprise every week or so—a Tonka truck, a Tootsie Roll. He turns weekends into father-and-son times. One Saturday, Evan proposes the zoo, and hesitantly, Joey agrees. Father and son have their coats on and are nearing the front door. Suddenly Nancy joins them, and as she walks down the steps with Joey in her arms, she explains to Evan, “to help things out.”
Evan gets few signs of love from Joey and feels helpless to do much about it. “I just don’t feel good about me and Joey,” he tells me one evening, “that’s all I can say.” Evan loves Joey. He feels proud of him, this bright, good-looking, happy child. But Evan also seems to feel that being a father is vaguely hurtful and hard to talk about.
The official history of Joey’s Problem was that Joey felt the normal oedipal attachment of a male child to his mother. But Evan and Nancy add the point that Joey’s problems are exacerbated by Evan’s difficulties being an active father, which stem, they feel, from the way Evan’s own father, remote and inexpressive self-made businessman, had treated him. Evan tells me, “When Joey gets older, we’re going to play baseball together and go fishing.”
As I recorded this official version of Joey’s Problem through interviews and observation, I began to feel doubts about it. For one thing, clues to another interpretation appeared in the simple pattern of footsteps on a typical evening. There was the steady pacing of Nancy, preparing dinner in the kitchen, moving in zigzags from counter to refrigerator to counter to stove. There were the lighter, faster steps of Joey, running in large figure eights through the house, dashing from his Tonka truck to his motorcycle man, reclaiming his sense of belonging in this house, among his things. After dinner, Nancy and Evan mingled footsteps in the kitchen as they cleaned up. Then Nancy’s steps began again: click, click, click, down to the basement for laundry, then thuck, thuck, thuck up the carpeted stairs to the first floor. Then to the bathroom where she runs Joey’s bath, then into Joey’s room, then back to the bath with Joey. Evan moved less—from the living room chair to Nancy in the kitchen, then back to the living room. He moved to the dining room to eat dinner and to the kitchen to help clean up. After dinner he went down to his hobby shop in the basement to sort out his tools; later he came up for a beer, then went back down. The footsteps suggest what is going on: Nancy is working second shift.
BEHIND THE FOOTSTEPS
Between 8:05 a.m. and 6:05 p.m., both Nancy and Evan are away from home, working a “first shift” at full-time jobs. The rest of the time they deal with the varied tasks of the second shift: shopping, cooking, paying bills; taking care of the car, the garden, and the yard; keeping harmony with Evan’s mother, who drops over quite a bit, concerned about Joey, with neighbors, their voluble baby-sitter, and each other. And Nancy’s talk reflects a series of second-shift thoughts: “We’re out of barbecue sauce…. Joey needs a Halloween costume…. Joey needs a haircut….” and so on. She reflects a certain second-shift sensibility, a continual attunement to the task of striking and restriking the right emotional balance between child, spouse, home, and outside job.
When I first met the Holts, Nancy was absorbing far more of the second shift than Evan. She said she was doing 80 percent of the housework and 90 percent of the child care. Evan said she did 60 percent of the housework, 70 percent of the child care. Joey said, “I vacuum the rug, and fold the dinner napkins,” finally concluding, “Mom and I do it all.” A neighbor agreed with Joey. Clearly, between Nancy and Evan, there was a leisure gap: Evan had more than Nancy. I asked both of them, in separate interviews, to explain to me how they had dealt with housework and child care since their marriage began.
One evening in the fifth year of their marriage, Nancy told me that when Joey was two months old (and almost four years before I met the Holts), she first seriously raised the issue with Evan. “I told him: ‘Look, Evan, it’s not working. I do the housework, I take the major care of Joey and I work a full-time job. I get pissed. This is your house too. Joey is your child too. It’s not all my job to care for them.’ When I cooled down I put to him, ‘Look, how about this: I’ll cook Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. You cook Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. And we’ll share or go out Sundays.’”
According to Nancy, Evan said he didn’t like “rigid schedules.” He said he didn’t necessarily agree with her standards of housekeeping, and didn’t like that standard imposed on him, especially if she was “sluffing off” tasks on him, which from time to time he felt she was. But he went along with the idea in principle. Nancy said the first week of the new plan went as follows. On Monday, she cooked. For Tuesday, Evan planned a meal that required shopping for a few ingredients, but on his way home he forgot to shop for them. He came home, saw nothing he could use in the refrigerator or in the cupboard, and suggested to Nancy that they go out for Chinese food. On Wednesday, Nancy cooked. On Thursday morning, Nancy reminded Evan, “Tonight it’s your turn.” That night Evan fixed hamburgers and french fries and Nancy was quick to praise him. On Friday, Nancy cooked. On Saturday, Evan forgot again.
As this pattern continued, Nancy’s reminders became sharper. The sharper they became, the more actively Evan forgot—perhaps anticipating even sharper reprimands if he resisted more directly. This cycle of passive refusal followed by disappointment and anger gradually tightened, and before long the struggle had spread to the task of doing the laundry. Nancy said it was only fair that Evan share the laundry. He agreed in principle, but, anxious that Evan would not share, Nancy wanted a clear, explicit agreement. “You ought to wash and fold every other load,” she had told him. Evan experienced this plan as a yoke around his neck. On many weekdays, at this point, a huge pile of laundry sat like a disheveled gu
est on the living-room couch.
In her frustration, Nancy began to make subtle jabs at Evan. “I don’t know what’s for dinner,” she would say with a sigh. Or “I can’t cook now, I’ve got to deal with this pile of laundry.” She tensed at the slightest criticism about household disorder; if Evan wouldn’t do the housework, he had absolutely no right to criticize how she did it. She would burst out angrily: “After work my feet are just as tired as your feet. I’m just as wound up as you are. I come home. I cook dinner. I wash and I clean. Here we are, planning a second child, and I can’t cope with the one we have.”
About two years after I first began visiting the Holts, I started to see their problem in a certain light: as a conflict between their two views of gender, each with its load of personal symbols. Nancy wanted to be the sort of woman who was needed and appreciated both at home and at work. She wanted Evan to appreciate her for being a caring social worker, a committed wife, and a wonderful mother. But she cared just as much that she be able to appreciate Evan for what he contributed at home, not just for how he supported the family. She would feel proud to explain to women friends that she was married to such a man.
A gender ideology is often rooted in early experience and fueled by motives traced to some cautionary tale in early life. So it was for Nancy:
My mom was wonderful, a real aristocrat, but she was also terribly depressed being a housewife. My dad treated her like a doormat. She didn’t have any self-confidence. And growing up, I can remember her being really depressed. I grew up bound and determined not to be like her and not to marry a man like my father. As long as Evan doesn’t do the housework, I feel it means he’s going to be like my father—coming home, putting his feet up, and hollering at my mom to serve him. That’s my biggest fear. I’ve had bad dreams about that.
Nancy thought that women friends her age in traditional marriages had come to similarly bad ends. She described a high school friend: “Martha barely made it through City College. She had no interest in learning anything. She spent nine years trailing behind her husband [a salesman]. It’s a miserable marriage. She hand washes all his shirts. The high point of her life was when she was eighteen and the two of us were running around Miami Beach in a Mustang convertible. She’s gained seventy pounds and hates her life.” To Nancy, Martha was a younger version of her mother, depressed, lacking in self-esteem, a cautionary tale whose moral was “If you want to be happy, develop a career and get your husband to share at home.” Asking Evan to help again and again felt like hard work but it was an effort to escape Martha’s fate and her mother’s.
For his own reasons, Evan imagined things very differently. He loved Nancy and if Nancy loved being a social worker, he was happy and proud to support her in it. He knew that because she took her caseload so seriously, it was draining work. But at the same time, he did not see why, just because she chose this demanding career, he had to change his own life. Why should her personal decision to work outside the home require him to do more inside it? Nancy earned about two-thirds as much as Evan, and her salary was a big help, but as Nancy confided, “If push came to shove, we could do without it.” Nancy was a social worker because she loved it. Doing daily chores at home was thankless work, and certainly not something Evan needed her to appreciate about him. Equality in the second shift meant a loss in his standard of living, and despite all the high-flown talk, he felt he hadn’t really bargained for it. He was happy to help Nancy at home if she needed help; that was fine. That was only decent. But it was too sticky a matter committing himself to some formal even-steven type plan.
Two other beliefs probably fueled his resistance as well. The first was his suspicion that if he shared the second shift with Nancy, she would dominate him. Nancy would ask him to do this, ask him to do that. It felt to Evan as if Nancy had won so many small victories that he had to draw the line somewhere. Nancy had a declarative personality; and as she confided, “Evan’s mother sat me down and told me once that I was too forceful, that Evan needed to take more authority.” Both Nancy and Evan agreed that Evan’s sense of career and self was in fact shakier than hers. He had been unemployed. She never had. He had had some bouts of drinking in the past. Drinking was foreign to her. Evan thought that sharing housework would upset a certain balance of power that felt culturally right. He held the purse strings and made the major decisions about large purchases (like their house) because he “knew more about finances” and because he’d chipped in more inheritance than she when they married. His job difficulties had lowered his self-respect, and now as a couple they had achieved some ineffable balance—tilted in his favor, she thought—which, if corrected to equalize the burden of chores, would result in his giving in “too much.” A certain driving anxiety behind Nancy’s strategy of actively renegotiating roles had made Evan see agreement as “giving in.” When he wasn’t feeling good about work, he dreaded the idea of being under his wife’s thumb at home.
Underneath these feelings, Evan perhaps also feared that Nancy was avoiding taking care of him. His own mother, a mild-mannered alcoholic, had by imperceptible steps phased herself out of a mother’s role, leaving him very much on his own. Perhaps a personal motive to prevent that happening in his marriage—a guess on my part, and unarticulated on his—underlay his strategy of passive resistance. And he wasn’t altogether wrong to fear this. Meanwhile, he felt he was offering Nancy the chance to stay home or cut back her hours, and that she was refusing his gift, while Nancy felt that, given her feelings, this offer was hardly a gift.
In the sixth year of their marriage, when Nancy again intensified her pressure on Evan to commit himself to equal sharing, Evan recalled saying, “Nancy, why don’t you cut back to half time, that way you can fit everything in.” At first Nancy was baffled:
“We’ve been married all this time, and you still don’t get it. Work is important to me. I worked hard to get my MSW. Why should I give it up?” Nancy also explained to Evan and later to me, “I think my degree and my job has been my way of reassuring myself that I won’t end up like my mother.” Yet she’d received little emotional support in getting her degree from either her parents or her in-laws. (Her mother had avoided asking about her thesis, and her in-laws, though invited, did not attend her graduation, later claiming they’d never been invited.)
In addition, Nancy was more excited about seeing her elderly clients in tenderloin hotels than Evan was about selling couches to furniture salesmen with greased-back hair. Why shouldn’t Evan make as many compromises with his career and his leisure as she’d made with hers? She couldn’t see it Evan’s way, and Evan couldn’t see it hers.
In years of alternating struggle and compromise, Nancy had seen only fleeting mirages of cooperation, visions that appeared when she got sick or withdrew, and disappeared when she got better or came forward.
After seven years of loving marriage, Nancy and Evan had finally come to a terrible impasse. They began to snap at each other, to criticize, to carp. Each felt taken advantage of: Evan, because his offer of a good arrangement was deemed unacceptable, and Nancy, because Evan wouldn’t do what she deeply felt was fair.
This struggle made its way into their sexual life—first through Nancy directly, and then through Joey. Nancy had always disdained any form of feminine wiliness or manipulation. She felt above the underhanded ways traditional women used to get around men. Her family saw her as a flaming feminist and that was how she saw herself. “When I was a teenager,” she mused, “I vowed I would never use sex to get my way with a man. It is not self-respecting; it’s demeaning. But when Evan refused to carry his load at home, I did, I used sex. I said, ‘Look, Evan, I would not be this exhausted and asexual every night if I didn’t have so much to face every morning.’” She felt reduced to an old strategy, and her modern ideas made her ashamed of it. At the same time, she’d run out of other modern ways.
The idea of a separation arose, and they became frightened. Nancy looked at the deteriorating marriages and fresh divorces of couple
s with young children around them. One unhappy husband they knew had become so uninvolved in family life (they didn’t know whether his unhappiness made him uninvolved, or whether his lack of involvement made his wife unhappy) that his wife left him. In another case, Nancy felt the wife had nagged her husband so much that he abandoned her for another woman. In both cases, the couple was less happy after the divorce than before. Both wives took the children, fought with their exes about them, and struggled desperately for money and time. Nancy took stock. She asked herself, “Why wreck a marriage over a dirty frying pan?” Is it really worth it?
UPSTAIRS-DOWNSTAIRS: A FAMILY MYTH AS “SOLUTION”
Not long after this crisis in the Holts’ marriage, there was a dramatic lessening of tension over the second shift. It was as if the issue was closed. Evan had won. Nancy would do it. Evan expressed vague guilt but beyond that he had nothing to say. Nancy had wearied of continually raising the topic, wearied of the lack of resolution. Now in the exhaustion of defeat, she wanted the struggle to be over too. Evan was “so good” in other ways, why debilitate their marriage by continual quarreling? Besides, she told me, “Women always adjust more, don’t they?”
One day, when I asked Nancy to tell me who did which tasks from a long list of household chores, she interrupted me with a broad wave of her hand and said, “I do the upstairs, Evan does the downstairs.” What does that mean? I asked. Matter-of-factly, she explained that the upstairs included the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The downstairs meant the garage, a place for storage and hobbies—Evan’s hobbies. She explained this as a “sharing” arrangement, without humor or irony—just as Evan did later. Both said they had agreed it was the best solution to their dispute. Evan would take care of the car, the garage, and Max, the family dog. As Nancy explained, “The dog is all Evan’s problem. I don’t have to deal with the dog.” Nancy took care of the rest.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 6