Bad Mother
Page 5
I could and sometimes do reply with some version of “be careful what you wish for,” but I know what it is that they are looking for. It’s not that they want a crazy wife with a terrible temper who can neither cook nor change a lightbulb. They don’t want a Weebleshaped lover who not only wobbles but falls down. They certainly wouldn’t enjoy having their personal lives splashed between the covers of books and magazines. What they want is to get laid.
The part of the essay that intrigues these men is where I wrote about how I am still interested in having sex with my husband. The men who write me these letters have wives like the women who sat in judgment of me on the set of Oprah. They have wives like the one who told the studio audience that she, unlike me, was a Good Mother, and on the very rare occasions when she let her husband “do his business,” she watched television (Jeopardy!, not cable porn). I consider it a great personal victory that I managed to restrain myself from handing her a pair of pruning shears and saying, “Here you go, honey. Go ahead and snip it off at the base. You might as well finish the job.”
The men write me, “Please tell me how to make my wife interested in sex again.” Most of them reassure me (honestly or not) that they have not yet cheated on their wives, but the threat lies implicit in the e-mail. I just want some pussy, the more honest among them say. If she doesn’t give it to me, can I really be blamed for looking for it somewhere else?
I know these men want me to give them some kind of magic spell, some words to incant or a particular gift to buy that will cause their wives to rip off their stretched-out sweatpants or highwaisted mommy jeans, toss their nursing bras into the trash, and slither into the scraps of lace and silk advertised on the cover of this month’s Victoria’s Secret catalog.
Save your money, I tell my male correspondents. If she’s not sleeping with you now, you’re not going to wake up her dormant libido by giving her a pair of tiger-printed crotchless panties. On the contrary. If you do, next Christmas you might find yourself the recipient of the gift of a twenty-class yoga card or a twelve-hundred-dollar Miele vacuum cleaner. It’s a present, sure, but who’s it really for?
What I tell these men is that if they are serious about wanting to salvage the erotic part of their marriages, they should unload the dishwasher. They should do a load of laundry (and fold it, too). There is nothing sexier to a woman with children than a man holding a Swiffer.
It can’t come down to something as silly as that, can it? After all, as I wrote in the essay, it is not merely Michael’s domestic prowess that inspires my devotion. I argued that I, unlike most women I know, have failed to make some kind of amorous transition, to supplant my husband with my children as the object of my passion. So yes, perhaps my advice to my correspondents is reductive, but the truth remains that one of the main reasons Michael is still so alluring after fifteen years of marriage, the reason I’d rather go to bed with him than do pretty much anything else in the world, is that I’m not angry. I’m not saying we don’t fight. You bet we do. But I no longer suffer from that slow burn, that simmering fury that characterizes so many of the women I know, both stay-at-home moms and those with jobs that reward them with a salary.
Let me say (again) that I know that there are multitudes of women who are both sexually satisfied and deliriously happy with the choices they have made. There are also many (although I’ll bet you not multitudes) whose husbands are equal partners in all aspects of their domestic lives. If you’re one of those lucky people, you should just turn to the next chapter. This one’s not for you.
This chapter is for those women—and the men to whom they are married—who have ended up, contrary to their expectations, living lives disturbingly similar to those of their mothers. Even the mothers who bought us the Free to Be You and Me albums never really expected that their husbands would take on half the childcare and household responsibilities. But we, their daughters, listened to the record and took for granted that our husbands would. This chapter is for the women who are surprised and, frankly, pissed off to find themselves, like their mothers before them, shouldering the bulk of the domestic burden.
It is kind of remarkable how little housework the men who marched next to me at the Take Back the Night vigils have ended up doing. Their approaches toward the work of caring for a family, while significantly more generous than those of their fathers, many of whom probably would have collapsed at the sight of a meconium-filled diaper, don’t come close to parity.
Not long ago, the journalist Lisa Belkin published a cover story in the New York Times Magazine about how housework is shared by men and women in heterosexual relationships. She offered some numbers from a University of Wisconsin study: “The average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14—a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work. But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.”
Frankly, I’m surprised by her surprise. That’s certainly an accurate reflection of the relationships I know, and I live in Berkeley, a nuclear-free zone where the city council awards Code Pink a free parking space to make it easier for them to protest the Marine recruiting station. One would think that if any town had a significant proportion of adherents to “Equal Shared Parenting,” it would be this one. And it’s true that the cafés, the homeopathic pharmacies, the dog parks, and the aisles of Whole Foods are replete with men wearing drooling, gurgling fashion accessories strapped to their chests, men who are expert at slapping on a Seventh Generation chlorine-free diaper without tearing off the tabs, men who never miss a single back-to-school night (okay, maybe not that last one). It’s just that most of those men don’t spend their weekends cleaning the toilet (or arranging with the maid service to do it for them).
I just don’t get it. I know Michael’s and mine were not the only copies of Free to Be You and Me sold in the United States. Didn’t those former little boys get the message? Or is it that menial household tasks are, for those of us who don’t suffer from advanced cases of OCD, incredibly unpleasant? It was Carol Channing herself who told us, “Your mommy hates housework, your daddy hates housework, and when you grow up, you’ll hate housework, too.” Should it be a surprise that as soon as people are given the opportunity to opt out of it all, they do so? Is the problem not that men choose to do only a third of the domestic labor but that women let them? In other words, is this women’s fault, too?
There is likely a grain of truth to that—I have often felt like shaking my most bedraggled and downtrodden friends and saying, “Stop complaining, just dump the kid on his lap and take a personal day.” And plenty of husbands insist that when they try to do something around the house, they inevitably fail to accomplish the task to their wives’ satisfaction.* So yes, women need both to ask for the help they need and to let go of their preconceptions about how a job should be done.† But perhaps if my correspondents want to get laid, demanding even more from their wives isn’t the best way to accomplish that goal.
What men who describe spending an afternoon with their children as “babysitting” need to realize is that after an evening spent rushing from work to the grocery store, back home to cook dinner (or order it in—I’m a Jewish girl from the New York area, after all), then folding a load of laundry while supervising homework (and yes, thank you for doing the dishes, but it’s not like you cured cancer; don’t act like you deserve the Nobel Prize), before getting the kids to bed, packing their lunches for the next day, and then sitting down at the computer to answer twelve e-mails from the first-grade room parent about Pizza Day volunteers, fill out and submit the nursery school strategic plan survey, and creat
e an Evite for the birthday party you’ve left yourself less than a week to plan, most women just aren’t in the mood. And pretty much the same goes for eighteen hours spent chasing and cleaning up after the kids, even without the workday crammed in there, too.
Most men I’ve talked to understand that the women in their lives are not interested in sex when they are feeling beleaguered and frustrated, but they don’t really get it. The average man can be angry and frustrated with his wife, but still be perfectly happy to fuck her. The anger might even be just the pinch of Spanish fly he needs. Your typical man uses sex to unwind, while the last thing your typical woman wants when she’s wound up is to have sex. Women—or most women, or some women, or the women I’m talking about, or maybe just women like me—do not find resentment erotic. On the contrary. If I am angry with you, or even just irritated, then the last thing I want to do is give you pleasure. I’ll withhold it, even if that means I’m hurting myself, too.
Despite how it sounded to the men who read the article, it isn’t like Michael and I haven’t gone through our own periods of connubial drought. The postpartum hormonal swamp is nature’s friendly way of trying to keep you from getting knocked up again, so that you’ll be able to keep caring for the baby you already have. For the first couple of months after I gave birth, it was as if I were standing beneath a shower of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin, and not one of those environmentally correct low-flow showerheads, either. This was a spa deluge, dumping a hundred gallons a minute over my head. I would sooner have leaped into a shark tank full of starving great whites—while having my period—than have sex. Whatever sensual satisfaction I needed was amply provided by my sweet-smelling, plump, and delicious baby and the wash of oxytocin released every time he or she latched onto the breast. Even after the hormone flood had ebbed, breastfeeding was enough to keep me from wanting any other physical contact. I spent my days and nights at the baby’s beck and call, my body and breasts available whenever the baby wanted them. The last thing I could tolerate in the few hours I had my body to myself was to give it to someone else. And don’t even think of touching my breasts. If Michael accidentally brushed against my nipple while he was opening the car door for me, it took me a monumental exertion of will to keep from severing his hand at the wrist.
But even after these purely physical impediments to sex abated, there was a time when I still didn’t want it. This was the period when I had left my job and was staying at home full-time. I was bored, and depressed, and had lost the sense of self that had kept me company over the last thirty years. I wasn’t who I had once been, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be who I was. Because I felt lost, I also felt ugly. Or at least unattractive. During this period I dressed disturbingly like my children, in overalls and T-shirts, stretchy pants and capacious blouses. It was as if I were advertising by my attire my sexual inaccessibility.
This was a particularly grim period in our marriage. Here we had made together these two babies, whom we both adored, who gave us such constant pleasure, for whom we shared such intense love that it sometimes felt like pain, and the two of us were further apart than we had ever been. I remember lying in bed next to Michael and telling myself that all I needed to do was take a page out of Queen Victoria’s book and lie back and think of … well, not of England, nor of Berkeley, but of my marriage. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too tired, it was too daunting, and although it took me a long time to realize this, I was too angry at him. I was too jealous.
Becoming a parent had not changed Michael’s sense of himself, it had not destroyed his confidence, it had not made him feel lost. He definitely developed a new conception of his role in the world, but not one that was negative. That is not to say he didn’t experience moments of panic. He marked the births of each of our children with a series of ailments. A few days before Sophie was born, he woke up in the middle of the night with chest pains. He felt like he had swallowed a ball. Convinced that he was having a heart attack, he had me rush him to the emergency room (I’ll never forget the look on the guard’s face when the hugely pregnant woman dropped her husband off at the entrance and then went off to park the car). An anxiety attack, diagnosed the doctor. As my pregnancy with Zeke progressed, Michael developed this floating blind spot in his left eye. Stress, the ophthalmologist said. No cure but to relax. With Rosie it was hives, with Abe it was hives and the blind spot. But even in the throes of these bizarre physical manifestations of his provider anxiety, Michael still knew who he was. If anything, he felt more sure of his place in the world. He had to continue doing what he was doing, because now he had a family to support.
I, on the other hand, was supposed to be doing this Good Mother thing, this caretaking thing, this Gymboree and Music Together and baby-massage thing, but unlike Michael, I wasn’t happy filling my traditional domestic role. It didn’t feel like I had come into some deeper understanding of what it meant to be a woman and a mother. It just felt like I’d gone astray, that I was stuck in a hole I had dug for myself, a hole I was not supposed to want to escape. And complicating all this was the fact that I loved these children so much. They were adorable and sweet and a never-ending source of sidesplitting amusement. I have never laughed as hard as I did the day, for example, that I caught Sophie dipping Michael’s toothbrush into the toilet, with a seriousness of purpose that approached that of an EPA inspector testing Lake Michigan for PCPs. (Oddly, Michael did not find this quite as amusing as I did.) The fantastically adorable image of her chubby two-year-old face peeping out of her dinosaur Halloween costume is one that I will forever be able to rely on to make me feel happy. But even so, even with all these moments of joy, I was still glum and irritable, and about as horny as a … well … as a depressed mother of small children.
In retrospect, it’s hard for me to believe Michael hung in there through all this. Why he had faith that I would figure it out, I’ll never know. But he always did. When I first experimented with writing, he was immediately supportive, even though he had been through one marriage that collapsed at least in part under the weight of literary competition. He never reminded me that I had made a toast at our wedding in which I promised never to be a writer, both so that I could provide him with a steady income and health insurance and so that he need never fear that his success would make me jealous. Instead, he just told me how great he thought my writing was, and encouraged me to keep going. He was relieved that I had found what I needed—the beginnings of an identity separate from that of mother to my children. I was relieved both that the fog was lifting and that I was happy again. And we were both certainly relieved that my interest in sex had come out of its long hibernation.
In light of the seriousness of the sense of dissatisfaction I describe, in light of how profound a problem a young mother’s loss of sense of self can be, I know that it seems unduly lighthearted to prescribe as a solution merely that the men who write me those sad e-mails try to pick up a little of the domestic slack. But what kept Michael and me together through the worst of my stumbling was the sense that we were on the same team. He never seemed to be saying, “Well, you chose to make this bed, why should I have to lie in it?” He had learned his Free to Be You and Me lessons too well to make what some might see as a pretty reasonable request—if this is the division of labor that we’ve chosen, if I am to earn the bulk of the money like my father did, then I am entitled to expect you, like my mother, to make my home and care for my children.
There may be plenty of women who are fine with things that way, plenty of women who don’t object to carrying the extra domestic load, who think of that as a Good Mother’s task, even if they work as hard and earn as much money as their husbands. But it’s at least possible that Carol Channing was right, that everyone hates housework. Taking care of a house and family is work that never ends; like Sisyphus’s wife, you and your basket of laundry never reach the top of the mountain. Feeling like it’s all—or mostly—your responsibility is depressing. And even if you buy into the system,
it still makes you happy to have help. You inevitably feel warm toward someone who is clearly thinking enough about you to relieve you of part of your burden. It’s at least possible that my male correspondents might find that if, when they get home from work, instead of taking an hour to decompress, they put down their briefcases or toolboxes, roll up their sleeves, and scrub the stain out of the sink or puree some bananas to feed to the baby, their wives might suddenly be much more content. Hell, the men might even find themselves treated to that holy grail of male pleasure, and not just on their birthdays.
I suppose that it is disingenuous to discuss menial household labor without acknowledging that many of us are spared at least some of the most unpleasant of those duties: we subcontract them. There are, of course, millions of people who don’t have the resources to off-load their toilet scrubbing, just as there are people who on principle refuse to participate in a system that compels the lower economic classes to deal, like untouchables, with the filth of the higher. But I grew up in a decidedly middle-class house (with periods of real financial instability), and my mother did everything she could to find the money to hire a cleaner every other week. I think she just decided that if she were to come home from a long day at work, make dinner, and then set about scrubbing the floors and de-scumming the shower, she’d end up killing herself, and taking us along with her. During the headiest era of my mother’s feminist phase, she even figured out a way to spare herself the bulk of the cooking; she and the other members of her consciousness-raising group formed a supper cooperative. Each day a different one of them would cook for the group, separate the food into individual family-sized portions, and drop them off at the others’ houses.