To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  The Cowans’ identity pie chart findings lend great insight into why these discrepancies are so problematic. For men, it would be accurate to say that the addition of a “father” identity does not generally squeeze out other aspects of identity. Tracking men’s self-reported identity pie charts over time, they found that the men’s pie slices devoted to “partner/lover” and “worker/student” did not shrink to nearly the extent that the women’s did after becoming parents. This discrepancy was especially pronounced when it came to the “worker” identity, which, for men, remains essentially unchanged and always (on average) larger than the “father” portion of the pie. The reverse is true for women, whose “worker” identity becomes, and remains, eclipsed by their “mother” identity.

  One of my good friends is an immensely talented artist who, while pregnant with her first child, completed her master’s degree in fine arts. I remember attending the exhibit and artist’s talk that constituted her thesis and taking note of the fecundity that permeated the event. Here was a beautiful rosy-cheeked woman with a big belly beneath a vibrant green dress, surrounded by massive artwork of her own making on the walls—paintings of details from the natural world, of bees extracting nectar from the hearts of flowers, of flora and fauna in various stages of decay and regrowth. The symbolism of this is only apparent to me now, as I look back, because five years and one more child later, her art is on hold. Her art studio in the backyard sits unoccupied and in what she describes as a state of neglected disarray. Her creations, for now, are her children.

  It’s a familiar story for so many of us. Time is slipping away, and we are neither savoring our children as much as we’d like, nor are we attending sufficiently to the aspects of ourselves distinct from mothering. Especially during the early years of our children’s lives, creative pursuits are paused, friendships wane, physical fitness declines, sexuality hibernates, and career goals are abandoned or delayed. We find that so many interests and endeavors that matter to us are now, like the vegetation in my friend’s paintings, in various states of decay.

  What the Cowans’ pie chart data reveal so clearly is that this is not the straightforward story of a new parent, man or woman. This is the story of a new mother, and it unfolds next to a father’s decidedly different story. As the Cowans explain in their book When Partners Become Parents, “Even when women work full-time, their sense of self as Mother is more than 50 percent greater than their psychological investment in their identity as Worker. This sits in bold contrast to their husbands’ experience. Despite men’s increasing psychological investment as fathers, their Worker/Student aspect of self remains virtually unchanged. Even at its height, the Father aspect of men’s sense of self is smaller than the Worker/Student part.”

  Of course, the role of women in the workplace has continued to deepen and expand in the years since this study was conducted, and men’s contributions to childcare have increased.8 It’s possible that if the pie chart aspect of the Cowans’ study were to be replicated today, we would see some slight modifications among both women and men in the proportions of their identities they devote to parent versus worker. However, if very recent research on gender differences in “work-family guilt” is any indication, the internal tug-of-war over these two competing facets of identity remains greater in women, and comes at a greater emotional cost. A 2014 study reveals that among parents of toddlers, women feel considerably more guilt than men about the ways their work responsibilities interfere with parenting and vice versa, and the possibility that having a career negatively impacts their children.9

  The Cowans’ findings also reveal, very importantly, that the larger the difference in any given couple between the size of his and her “parent slices,” the lower the couple’s relationship satisfaction. Other recent studies show that it is not the absolute levels of childcare responsibilities, domestic work, or leisure time that matter for marital satisfaction; it is the degree of change on these fronts within each partner.10 One study found that when husbands’ amount of leisure time did not change across the first year of parenthood, wives were less happy in the marriage.11 Another found that the bigger the discrepancy between a couple’s ideal level of father involvement in the domestic sphere and his actual involvement, the more stress the mother felt.12 This all indicates that the notion of marital tension being linked to the discrepancy in how much parenthood changes and taxes moms versus dads is not mere speculation; the research bears this out.

  Another conclusion we can draw from research findings like these is that, compared to women, men are more able to adopt a parent identity without giving up other central aspects of self. It’s not that mothers willingly abandon other parts of their identity because mothering is the only thing that matters to them anymore; the other parts continue to matter, often enormously so. It’s that we have little psychological or physical energy to devote to the other parts. At the individual level, this can be a source of great sadness and disappointment. At the level of the couple, it can mean, as the Cowans put it, “moving through potentially hostile territory.”13 Women are understandably resentful about their husbands’ intact capacity to pursue non-parenting interests and goals. Men feel shut out by wives who won’t have sex with them or go out to dinner with them or engage in stimulating intellectual dialogue with them. Women feel their other identities have been snuffed out by motherhood, and needs like sleep, exercise, and balanced meals might even be going unmet because they are spending all their time making sure those needs are met for another being. In that context, their husbands’ requests for “alone time” or “couple time” often register as insensitive and burdensome. Later, we’ll look at how these different positions that men and women occupy actually reflect a fundamental state of longing and deprivation for both partners. For now, I’m just showing you the indisputable bottom line, which is this: a new baby’s arrival ushers in greater change for Mom than for Dad.

  I can remember the weight of this disparity during the period when I was breastfeeding a young baby while working full-time. My husband and I have a long commute, which at the time we did together most days of the week, so usually we arrived home as a family. Always, my first priority was to feed the fussy, hungry baby, who had not been happy to be strapped in his car seat for forty-five minutes. I remember sitting immobilized on the couch when I was hungry, too, when I needed to go to the bathroom, when I wanted the simple freedom of getting home from work and standing at the kitchen counter looking through the mail. I remember observing my husband being free to do each of these things. Though I appreciated the moment of stillness with my baby—the opportunity to hold him and look at him and simply be together—often I was distracted by an undertone of resentment that I couldn’t help but feel. Sometimes, my lovely husband would bring me something to drink or a snack—a very thoughtful act on his part—but I didn’t want to have to eat and drink while nursing. I wanted both of my hands free. I wanted the unencumbered state he was enjoying. My rational mind would fire off thoughts like, It’s not his fault you’re stuck here on the couch. He’s not guilty of anything right now. At least one of us is able to let the dog out and get dinner going. Sometimes, those thoughts would nip the resentment in the bud, but not always. It just wasn’t fair, and it was easy to feel sorry for myself and to get attached to the totally useless, but very compelling, agenda of making sure my free-as-a-bird husband knew exactly how hard it was to be so tethered to a baby.

  When I was teaching my Psychology of Parenthood undergraduate seminar, I had my students read a journal article called “The Formative Years: How Parenthood Creates Gender.”14 One admirably honest student said to me one day, “Professor Millwood, I didn’t do the reading. But I can tell from the title that this article must be about how children are shaped into gendered roles by their parents, and that’s a fascinating topic!” Well, yes, that is a fascinating topic, but this article, as I told the student, isn’t about that. It’s about how the experience of parenthood shapes the parents—not the child—a
long gender lines. This concept has a bit of a backward quality at first glance. Don’t we establish our gender roles long before we choose to become parents? Don’t gender differences and inequalities influence the way we experience parenthood, rather than being produced by parenthood? Indeed, those things are true. Far less intuitive and also true is this: the demands and restrictions of parenting actually create gender roles that were far less pronounced before.

  Research spanning back to the 1970s, when gender equality issues first became a legitimate topic of scholarly inquiry, tells the following story extremely consistently: for heterosexual couples, the transition to parenthood brings with it a more conventional division of labor.15 In other words, regardless of how hard a couple works to establish an egalitarian relationship prior to becoming parents, and no matter how progressive or unconventional their pre-baby division of labor may have been, when that first baby comes home, their who-does-what arrangements become more gender stereotypical than they were before. Broadly speaking, this means that Mom takes on more of the domestic and child-rearing duties, even if both Mom and Dad have full-time careers or jobs outside the home. This is not a temporary scenario, referring to a working woman’s brief stint as a domestic goddess during her maternity leave when she is home all day with a newborn. A woman’s return to work after maternity leave most assuredly does not redistribute the care of the baby; an abundance of research shows that care remains unevenly distributed, even when the number of hours each partner works outside the home is exactly the same. When women are earning more money than their spouses, they still do twice as much domestic work and three times as much caretaking of their children than their husbands do.16 If you are like me, each of these sentences makes you wince and close your eyes and say, “Make it stop!”

  I do have some good news, sort of, but I have to warn you that as soon as I convey it, I will return to more bad news. From 1965 to 2010, the pattern in thirty different industrialized nations has been one of gradual convergence in the amount of time men and women spend on domestic and family tasks. Men’s proportional contribution has moved from approximately one-fifth of women’s to approximately one-third of women’s.17 In other words, for every hour a man spends in the domestic sphere, a woman spends three. Fifty years ago, for every hour a man spent on domestic duty, a woman spent five hours. In terms of childcare specifically, fathers’ hands-on contributions over the past fifty years have tripled, from a little over two hours per week on average to a little over six hours per week.

  With these encouraging findings in mind, it would be reasonable to assume that as fathers are doing more, mothers are doing less. Unfortunately, the statistics tell a different story. In that same forty-five-year period (from 1965 to 2010), the time mothers spent in direct hands-on childcare activities also increased. When children are under age six, mothers with full-time jobs clock just ten fewer hours per week directly caring for their children than their stay-at-home-mom counterparts,18 and working moms today spend as much time with their kids as stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s!19

  The inverse relationship between moms’ and dads’ contributions we might expect—as Dad does more, Mom is able to do less—is simply not there. Of course, this may speak more to the shift in recent decades toward “intensive parenting” than it does to any failure to step up on the part of dads. Despite a clear, if too slow, change toward greater paternal involvement on the domestic front, women face unrelenting pressures to prove to themselves and others that their professional success does not come at the cost of their success as mothers. Men simply do not face similar pressures. It’s evident from the research that increased involvement of fathers is not the same as achievement of egalitarian partnerships. More often than not, when couples talk about joint and equal participation in the tasks of raising children and running a home, they are referring to either an illusion or an aspiration, rather than a current reality.

  Invisible Male Power and the Myth of Equality

  A few years ago, I called a friend of mine the day after her baby was born, to congratulate her and hear her birth story and find out how she was doing. She didn’t answer, and when she called me back later, she told me that she had been at the grocery store buying ingredients to make soup for her sick husband. Let me repeat: this was the day after she gave birth. I could not fathom how, or why, she found herself anywhere other than in the hospital or in bed, let alone combing the aisles of a supermarket so she could go home and cook a meal for her husband!

  This story bears resemblance to a refrain I’ve heard many times from friends and clients: “I don’t want my husband to have to get up with the baby at night when he has to go to work the next day.” I can appreciate that they want to protect their husbands from disrupted sleep in the interest of promoting their work efficiency and well-being. But the women who tell me this are usually in the very early postpartum period, when they are still recovering physically from childbirth (never mind the emotional recovery, and the importance of sleep for emotional well-being). I have to wonder: Why am I not also hearing stories of husbands who say, “I don’t want my wife to have to get up with the baby at night when she already has such long days of taking care of him with no help—I can at least help ensure that she faces her next day of mothering with a good night’s rest”?

  As researcher Bonnie Fox writes of the sample of new mothers she interviewed for one of her studies, “At a time when they needed sleep, men’s sleep was a more prominent concern for many women. At a time when they were overwhelmed with trying to figure out their new responsibilities, these women worried about the disruptions in their partners’ lives.”20 Among the women in this study, much like the women I’ve worked with in therapy, there was also a tendency to feel even more dependent on their husbands than they felt before the baby was born. Many new mothers describe feeling that they couldn’t handle the demands of parenting without their husbands’ instrumental and emotional support, and because of this, they prioritize their husbands’ needs and forgo their own. They seem to be saying to themselves, I need my husband more than ever, so I will tiptoe around and be as careful as possible not to place any additional pressure on him. I need him to be healthy and available. Though this makes some sense—in the face of stress, we should turn to others for support and should at least refrain from behaving in ways that alienate the people who can provide that support—the elements of carefulness and self-sacrifice are very problematic. Women should not feel they must walk on eggshells in order to ensure their husbands’ continued support. They should not feel they must preserve and protect their husbands’ well-being at the cost of their own.

  In one very illuminating study conducted by researchers Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Rankin Mahoney, a small sample of middle-class newlywed couples in southern California were interviewed about their marriages.21 The researchers were interested above all in questions related to relationship equality and distribution of power: Whose interests shape what happens in the family? Is one partner more likely to organize her or his activities around the other? Do both partners notice and care for the other’s feelings and needs? These were not the same questions they overtly asked the participants during the interviews, but they were the questions to which they sought answers in their behind-the-scenes analysis of what the couples shared. All the couples fancied themselves egalitarian; to be eligible for the study, they had to endorse ideals of gender equality and the importance of careers for both wives and husbands. The results were unsettling. Out of twelve couples, only one was categorized by the researchers as consciously and actively approaching equality. The majority of the sample—nine couples—were labeled “myth of equality” by the researchers because, despite their egalitarian standards and the portraits they painted of themselves, their relationships were characterized by an imbalance of power that always favored the husband.*

  It was not the presence of inequality that surprised the researchers; it was the discrepancy between perception and reality. The couples appear
ed to be coping with the inequality in their relationships through a complex mix of denial and justification. They engaged in “equality talk,” saying things like “We try to understand each other” and “We’re each free to be our own person,” which, according to the researchers, actually served to obscure and reinforce the underlying inequality. In a kind of smoke-and-mirrors effect, these couples spoke of compromise and give-and-take in a way that gave an air of gender equality, while what played out in their daily lives was anything but equal. Wives organized their schedules around their husbands’ needs, husbands chose which of the subjects their wives broached were important enough to listen to, and men’s career goals were prioritized over women’s. Yet nobody was fighting about these issues or complaining about power imbalances in the relationship. These couples were living examples of invisible male power.

  In case it appears as though I’m only exposing the naïveté of newlyweds in the 1980s, I want to clarify that this is a phenomenon to which none of us is immune. Though this study was conducted a few decades ago, the phenomenon of self-deception it captured is timeless. It also captures, quite powerfully, how deep the roots of our patriarchal culture run. If we do not even recognize gender inequality when it is playing out inside the walls of our homes and in the dynamics of our marriages, it is because patriarchy has shaped the lens through which we are looking. While we can hope the current rising tide of feminism will alert more couples to the power imbalances in their partnerships, we have a long way to go before the subtler manifestations of those inequities are laid bare. I’ve shared this research here for the same reason I tell students about it in my classes: it illuminates the uncomfortable fact that our behavior is often out of alignment with our ideals, and shows us how the forces that influence our day-to-day decisions are often operating beneath our awareness.