New mothers are likely to go about their days with no adult companionship, female or otherwise. After an extremely short hospital stay during which nurses and lactation consultants and friends and family may gather around, most women take their newborns home to an isolated daily life, where the innumerable struggles of new motherhood will be endured primarily alone. For the women who return to paid work six weeks or three months later, this may remedy some of the social disconnection that characterized maternity leave, but it also marks the beginning of a perpetual time shortage. Though it may be exactly what they need, time to connect with other women in meaningful ways often feels like an unattainable luxury to working mothers.
The evolutionary psychologist David Buss has proposed that our increased social isolation may be linked to the greater incidence* of depression in women compared to men.18, 19 Because we tend to live in isolated nuclear families, stripped of the extended kin and other social supports that existed in previous generations (and which still exist in many other cultures), those bearing the brunt of childcare—that is, women—may be particularly taxed by this lack of community. In addition, the same sex differences that promote reproductive success for our species are also thought to make women more susceptible to depression. For instance, women’s stronger orientation toward social belonging and greater capacity for attunement with others—propensities that serve us well in child-rearing and many other realms—may make us more sensitive to separation and criticism, which are key features of depression. Whether we develop full-blown cases of depression or not, going it alone sets women up for a difficult experience both practically and emotionally, one in which their thoughts and feelings exist in an echo chamber. And it is one reason why new mothers come to see me for therapy. In my own experience sitting in the client seat in psychotherapy with a growing family, some of the most helpful moments were when my therapist spoke these very simple words, “It is so hard. This is really such a very, very difficult phase of family life.” The “it” to which she was referring was the strain of mothering young children while maintaining a career. Herself a mother, she was a decade or so ahead of me on the same long-term motherhood-psychologist balancing act, and her words were enormously soothing, a balm for my tired head and aching heart. My heart really did ache; it ached for the rosier image of family life that refused, day after trying day, to come to pass. Connecting with someone who understood and validated my frustrations was tremendously important to my healing process. Left to my own devices, it was so easy to get pulled down into the bog of self-critical thoughts, the same ones I recognize in so many of my clients.
Our public policies send an implicit message that it shouldn’t be so hard to balance everything. Put that message next to the lack of honest discourse and add social isolation, and what we have is a poisonous combination. Without a truthful cultural narrative that exposes the hardships of mothering and reassures every struggling new mother that her pain is normal, that pain turns quickly to suffering and shame. Without public policies and workplace standards to accommodate the dual-earner households that are now the norm,* and without communities to share the burden of work and to provide emotional support, mothers are too quick to assume their inability to achieve “balance” is a reflection of their own flaws. A societal problem gets internalized as an individual problem.
Because these quiet struggles are shrouded in secrecy, nobody knows the extent to which everyone else is also having a similarly hard time. And so they think, Maybe I’m not cut out for this motherhood thing. I wish instead they could all be thinking, We aren’t meant to be doing this motherhood stuff alone. It’s really, really hard. And “balancing” motherhood with careers, or anything else, is impossible. But our social structures and policies would have us believe we can, and should, be able to weave motherhood seamlessly into our lives, with little to no support.
When overwhelmed new moms look around for help, they find slim pickings. As researcher Bonnie Fox puts it, “Given the dearth of social supports to new parents, the weight of their responsibilities is considerable, especially for women who have the ultimate responsibility for their babies’ welfare in addition to the responsibilities they already have with respect to their partners and their homes. The help women need must come largely from family.”20 The trouble is, for many women, the word “family” means “partner.” We often have no one else. There may not be a village. And when our partners let us down, as they inevitably will, the stakes are high—so much higher than when any one member of our extended support network drops the ball. As the next couple of chapters will show, this puts considerable strain on a relationship already rendered more fragile by the birth of the baby.
6
The Great Divide
While fatherhood remains one option among many, motherhood revokes the whole concept of free will. It is with motherhood that the myths of equal opportunity and shared autonomy bite the behavioral dust.
—Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood
“What can I do to help?”
In therapy, Rachael continued to describe to me her mounting frustration with her husband’s response to routine scenarios at home (like getting dinner on the table, getting the children ready for bed, getting the family ready for an outing). Instead of simply acting and trying to do the thing that needed doing, Scott routinely asked his wife to identify how he could be helpful.
Scott’s question—an all-too-common one voiced between couples in this scenario—speaks volumes about the roles into which Scott and Rachael have fallen since becoming parents. The good news, in this case, is that Scott is not oblivious to his wife’s stress, and he does not feel entitled to stand by and do nothing as she carries out these domestic tasks. Some readers might even be thinking, What a nice husband, offering to help like that! But it is the word “help” that frustrates Rachael. Why, she wants to know, is he in a position of helping?* Why is he not equally in command of what needs to be done? Why must she delegate tasks to him, and why is she the only one who knows how many diapers to put in the diaper bag, which soap is the one that won’t irritate their younger child’s skin, or which water bottle belongs to whom? And how, when inside her head she is rehearsing such aggravating questions, is she going to refrain from lashing out at him in anger?
Even as we normalize and better understand our own losses and challenges in motherhood, our appraisal of these changes in comparison to our husbands’ presents another set of challenges, and often sets in motion a troubling marital dynamic. Our husbands seem to have sacrificed less. Our husbands seem to be carrying on relatively unencumbered. Our husbands are generally faring better. We are not, in any way, oblivious to our partners’ relative well-being, and our feelings about it are quite complicated.
On one hand, we want our mates to suffer in the same way we have suffered. That way, at least, we would feel less alone, less ashamed, less incompetent by comparison. So we hate them a little bit for being spared the worst of it. On the other hand, we seek refuge in their perceived stability. We hand off the baby to them when we have no more nurturance to give. We vent to them about how hard the day was. We cry on their shoulders about how hard mothering is. And then we pull away and wipe our eyes and look into their faces and ask (maybe silently, maybe out loud), “Why isn’t this as hard for you?”
Research on gender differences is one of the most prolific areas of scientific study. We know a tremendous amount about how girls are different from boys, and how women are different from men, across a huge array of arenas: academic performance, social development, emotional intelligence, physical health, career and financial trajectories, and so on. There is no question that differences exist, but the question of what drives these differences is a source of endless debate. Which differences come from the inherent biological factors that distinguish males from females? Which differences result only from the way boys and girls are differently socialized? And which are some mix of the two? The familiar “nature versus nurture” debate will never be
resolved, nor does it need to be; the science of gender (and anything else) runs on unanswered questions, and each new piece of knowledge generates more unanswered questions. In science, the asking and wondering are always more interesting than the knowing.
Inside our personal lives, though, we rarely feel like scientists. We have such a stake in the observations we make about ourselves, our children, and our partners that we can hardly be expected to have a stance of objective curiosity about them. We want to get right to the bottom of why something is upsetting to us, and almost always, the mental shortcuts we take lead us nowhere good.
The best—and most damaging (to marital health)—example of this is the mental shortcut of attributing our spouse’s upsetting behavior to his or her personality. A concept called the fundamental attribution error has been illuminated again and again in psychological research, and it refers to our tendency to interpret the behavior of other people as stemming from stable personality traits. For example, your boss spoke to you in a patronizing way because he is a sexist power-monger. Your friend missed your birthday because she is inconsiderate. Your kid hasn’t cleaned her room because she is disrespectful. And your husband did x, y, or z thing—anything that hurt you, disappointed you, or angered you—because he is selfish.*
What if it was you who committed all these egregious acts? To what would you attribute your own behavior? Ah, well, the fundamental attribution error applies only to others. Self-serving creatures that we are, when we behave poorly, we chalk it up to circumstance and not personality. If you spoke in a patronizing way to your employee, it was because he had just spoken to you in a highly disrespectful manner and undermined your authority. You forgot your friend’s birthday because you’ve been so distracted by your mother’s hospitalization. You haven’t cleaned up after yourself in the bedroom because you’re too exhausted and have no time. And all those things you said or did to hurt, disappoint, or anger your husband? You were just having a bad day or, more likely, just reacting to whatever unkind, unreasonable thing he did or said.
The reality is this: women and men experience the transition to parenthood differently. As with any other line of research where gender differences emerge, the question of why it’s not the same for men and women is a matter of debate. The data give us some compelling clues, and I’ll speak to those, but ultimately we simply do not yet know. As science continues to inch forward toward greater clarity, we are meanwhile living the gender differences inside the walls of our own homes, and it’s aggravating. It’s painful. Searching for a way out of the pain, or at least an explanation for it, we’re likely to make some of the common cognitive mistakes—like the fundamental attribution error—that plague the human brain. But the better we can understand these cognitive distortions, the better our chances of getting through challenges with our partnership intact. If we can resist the mental shortcuts, we can begin to appreciate the dynamic complexity of what drives these gender differences, which often have nothing to do with our spouse’s character, or our own.
Welcome to the 1950s
New mothers are quite often blindsided by the degree to which the weight of a new baby, literally and figuratively, rests on them. We can attribute this unpleasant surprise in part to the lack of honest social discourse about new mothers’ actual experiences; nobody is saying to expectant parents, “Wait until the baby comes! You’ll feel like you traveled back to the 1950s in your gender roles!”
But in addition, the fact that this comes as such a surprise to couples has something to do with unrealistic expectations. In chapter 3, we discussed the problematic nature of expectations and how much emotional suffering comes from the gap between whatever tough experience we’re having in the realm of parenthood and what we expected it would be, or should be, like. There is one particular widespread expectation that throws new mothers for the biggest loop when it goes unmet, and it almost invariably does. It is the expectation that the care of the new baby will be shared more or less equally between mother and father. For a wide, wide majority of heterosexual couples—regardless of age, race, or socioeconomic status, regardless of how progressive-minded they are, and regardless of whether or not both spouses are career-driven and working outside the home—this is simply not the case.
Many progressive couples hold the perfectly reasonable assumption that the egalitarian arrangement they have worked hard to cultivate within their marriage will not fall all to pieces when they have a baby. They might notice that their friend Addie seems to feel trapped at home while her husband, Mark, still gets out a lot, and they might notice that Mark hands the baby over to Addie when a fresh diaper is needed. They think, We’re not going to be like that. We’re going to split all the baby responsibilities right down the middle.
I wish they were right.
But unless they are one of the few exceptions to the rule, they’re more likely to be wrong.
Sometimes women from older generations—the ages of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers—observe that it seems to have been easier on the marriage when there was no question that the wife would stay home with the children. The roles were clearly defined; the children, and everything remotely related to them, were the territory of the mother, and there was no expectation that it would be otherwise. This, it seems to me, is a key insight in that it speaks to the power of expectations—our assumptions about the future—over our experience of our current reality. Many modern couples, particularly dual-earner couples and those who strive for an egalitarian relationship in which household tasks and decisions are shared, have the expectation that baby care will also be shared. Of course, moms who intend to breastfeed are aware that in the early months, they will devote much more time to feeding than their partners will, and therefore their sleep will be more disrupted. Still, they are usually caught off guard by the extent to which they are immediately and intimately intertwined with their new babies while their husbands remain, at least relatively speaking, unencumbered. They are caught off guard by how everything baby-related is central to their everyday experience and somehow much more peripheral in the experience of their partners.
At best, this disparity creates a temporary rift, a divide that both partners see as an understandable, mostly benign disconnection that will eventually dissipate as the baby becomes a toddler and then a preschooler. At worst, the disparity is a recipe for resentment, and possibly rage, in a new mother whose husband is neither as emotionally changed nor as practically challenged by the arrival of the baby.
There is a correlation here, and it’s not a coincidence: the extent to which we are responsible for attending to the new baby’s needs is predictive of how destabilized we feel by the baby’s existence.1 That alone offers a key insight into why mothers are typically more destabilized than fathers during the transition to parenthood. But even when fathers are highly involved in the practical aspects of baby care, there remains a significant discrepancy between mother and father in terms of how much the baby occupies mental and emotional space. I have listened to new mothers marvel—and not in the admiring way they might marvel at someone’s brilliance or accomplishments—at how their spouses can ignore the cries of their baby in the night, how they can not know what time the baby woke up from her nap, how they can return to work two days after the birth not angst-ridden about being away from their baby all day long.
None of this is to say that the transition to fatherhood is not a momentous occasion. New fathers, too, undergo significant change on multiple levels. But among most heterosexual couples, the tension lies in the relative change for a father compared to a mother. One could argue that there is nothing wrong with this discrepancy in and of itself; the problem is that the discrepancy is contrary to expectations. New mothers naturally, inevitably, engage in a process of comparison, assessing the ways in which they have been affected by their new son or daughter compared with how their mates have been affected. Almost invariably, there is no contest.
For many couples, the divide begins with pregn
ancy, when a woman, compared to her partner, is already undergoing considerable transformation. The experience of pregnancy cannot be truly, fully shared by even the most interested man, because he does not have a baby growing inside him. Often, a woman wants her mate to be as fascinated and consumed (or pained and exhausted) by the pregnancy as she is, but that’s virtually impossible. In one of very few comprehensive empirical studies that tracked couples closely across time as they became parents,2 researchers Carolyn and Philip Cowan at UC Berkeley found that even before the baby is born, pregnant mothers begin to redefine themselves as parents more so than fathers do. The study participants were asked to fill out “identity pie charts” in which terms like mother/father, partner/lover, daughter/son, worker/student, friend, etc., were assigned portion sizes based on how big those aspects of identity felt. During pregnancy, women’s “mother” slices were on average twice as big as men’s “father” slices. It could be argued that this is because they really are already mothering, albeit indirectly, by virtue of having a developing baby in their bodies. But this gap does not close once the baby is born. The Cowans found that when the study participants’ babies were eighteen months old, a man’s identity as a parent was still less than one-third the size of a woman’s.
A tremendous amount of research corroborates the findings of the Cowans’ landmark longitudinal study; discrepancies in the “identity pie” are only one way to talk about it. Studies show that whether or not women also work outside the home, they continue to bear the responsibility of acting as the primary caretakers of infants,3 and consequently they report greater parenting strain and stress in the postpartum period,4 as well as having to make more significant lifestyle changes than their husbands do.5 Compared to fathers, mothers experience more depression after the birth of a child, and there is much evidence to suggest that this difference is not solely, or even largely, due to physical or hormonal changes.6 The notorious decline in marital satisfaction that occurs across the transition to parenthood—which I’ll discuss extensively in chapter 7—is also considerably more prominent for women and in some studies is found only among the women.7
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