Darcy Lockman - All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

For Liv and Tess

Am I being unfair to my husband?

It is a gray spring Saturday in 2016, the day before Mothers Day. Thereve been ten days of rain preceding this one, and Ive spent half of those in Michigan with my kids, without their father, visiting my parents. I love taking my daughters to Detroit, but solo-parenting Liv and Tess is draining, not least because I am the only person available to issue and enforce the dreary commands of early childhood, the ones that begin upon waking and do not cease until it is night and the weight of their petal-soft eyelids has finally become too heavy to resist. Use the potty. Brush your teeth. Put on your socks. Put on your shoes. Dont hit your sister. Clean up the basement. Take off your shoes. Put on your shoes. Dont hit your sister. Take off your shoes.

When we return to New York, I decide that what Id like most on the occasion of this Mothers Day is time to myself. I ask George to take our girls, then six and three, to visit his mother at her nursing home in Pennsylvania overnight. Ruth will be elated. George will feel good about spending the holiday with his mom. The kids will eat ice cream and play at Chuck E. Cheese and swim in the hotels indoor pool. Everybody wins.

As George is leaving for the gym that morning before the trip, he stops, choosing his words with the care of the married, and says to me: Im going to pack for the kids, but if you can think of anything that I might forget, could you lay it on the bed?

If you are a mother or a father, or have kept close company with a person who is a mother or a father, it probably will not surprise you to learn that George has never packed for our children. In the six and a half years since we became parents, I have done all the packing and all the other things like packing, and my husband knowsboth because I have insistently brought it to his attention for the past few years and because I have deemed its occurrence nothing less than the starting point for a bookthat I am no longer happy to take care of it for him. The social science research underscores that we are well within the norm in two regards. Our transition to parenting has not been easy on our relationship, and our division of labor has been front and center in that unease, a dusting of gunpowder ever ready to blow.

I am as careful as my husband when I respond. I want to be kind without losing my commitment to refusing responsibility for every detail and reinforcing this maddening system we have constructed in which I am the handler of all things. I ask him, What is it that you think you are likely to forget?

He thinks. Their bathing suits, he says.

Well, see, now youve remembered, I say, sounding to my ear like the equanimous badger mother in the Frances childrens books. I love her. He nods and heads out the door.

A part of me feels good about the exchange. Ive stood up for myself, Ive been good-humored about it, and George will remember the bathing suits (which the girls will gleefully sleep in when he ultimately forgets their pajamas). But the devil on my shoulderthe one internalized over decades of white noise about women and their responsibilities and their relative placeeggs me on: Youre not being fair to him. Hes taking them away, after all. Just throw some stuff together. Its only a one-night trip. Itll take you thirty seconds. Whats the goddamn big deal? I gather the iPad and some toys and put them in a bag, an offering to the devil, and to my husband, to whom I wish above all else to be fair.

In 2003, when I was thirty, my friend Tanya gave birth to her first child. She was a few years older than I was andbecause this was New York, the city of advanced maternal agethe first of my local peers to have a baby. Some months later, she became the first of my group to become a full-time working mother, and then the first to fall out of touch because of the new demands on her time. Wed try, about every six weeks, to get together, but it never seemed to happen. Finally, one afternoon on the phone, Tanya explained to me, as if it all made perfect sense, that she just was not ever going to be able to meet for dinner because her husband couldnt be alone with the baby all evening long. Johns job entailed entertaining clients, so I knew Tanya was often by herself after work with their son. If she could manage that, why couldnt he? I wondered. She hemmed before offering, He wouldnt. I asked why not. We went back and forth like that for some time. I hung up feeling puzzled by and disdainful of what she seemed to be letting her husband get away with, the renunciation of so much responsibility. Both of them worked. Why would they be less than equal partners at home? It defied all reasonable explanation.

The punch lines to this story are neither few nor far between. Suffice it to say that six years later, I found myself co-parenting with a husband as well. This was a fortunate situation, all nicely planned and smoothly realized. But it wasnt long after our first daughter was born that I remembered Tanyas plight because now it was mine, and if it was mine, it was also that of most of the working mothers I came to know in my dual-breadwinner neighborhood in a leafy stretch of Queens. Like me, the women I met through the comings and goings at preschool and playground worked full-time, and like me, postpartum, theyd found themselves shouldering the bulk of all the theretofore unimagined burdens at home. I saw this not only among my neighborhood friends but also, because Im a therapist, among my patients. In my office on the border between Chelsea and Midtown, I watched it begin as early as pregnancy. Twenty-eight weeks along and in her maternity work clothes, a woman would observe with some surprise and a nascent exasperation: Jason seems really invested in what kind of stroller we get, but hes also completely taking for granted that Im going to do all the research. Id hold my tongue because my first reaction seemed unkind and overly cynical. But what I couldnt help thinking was: And so it begins.

Here is where it began for me. The first fight I had with my husband about the shared responsibilities of parenthood occurred when our daughter Liv was not yet a month old. I was on what passes for maternity leave, taking eight unpaid weeks off from the clinic where I was finishing my post-doc hours. George, whom Id met in grad school, was working as a psychologist for the NYPD, a city job with good benefits and a nine-to-five schedule. I was enjoying my time at home with the baby as much as anyone on an infants sleep schedule with engorged breasts can. Unable to rest during the day, I took computerized practice tests for my licensing exam while Liv napped, and on a few beautiful fall afternoons, she and I met friends taking their lunch hours on the lawn in Bryant Park. It all looked downright hedonistic to my husband, also tired, and stuck in a small, windowless office in Lefrak City Plaza, interviewing police officer candidates seven and a half hours a day.

George had been accustomed to going to the gym most nights after work, and a couple of weeks following our daughters birth, he wanted to resume. It was a benign enough request from his perspectivewhich was then and, really, to this day remains much different from mine. He had long days at the office and wanted to work out. I had long days at home with our newborn and wanted some relief. Though I can no longer remember with great clarity what was so hard about being alone with one baby (ask any mother of two or more children, she is likely to say the same thing), I do recall the frayed nerves stoked by Livs uninterrupted wailing each evening between four and seven oclock in those first months. Its called the witching hour. Google it along with the word baby, and youll be directed to a series of websites that advise mothers how to manage this daily period of extreme fussiness. The sites direct their reassurances to women: Remember, you havent done anything wrong, youre not a terrible mother, and this is normal. If George came directly home after work, he arrived at five-forty-five; the gym meant seven at best.