My husband and I had a fight recently while vacationing with our baby daughter, Isabelle. He sounded reasonable and calm. I sounded like a shrew.
We were on our way to dinner, having left the baby with my mother, whom we were visiting. I'd covered while Bill had dressed, then he'd left me 20 minutes to get ready while he watched Isabelle. It hadn't been enough. Scrambling, I'd showered, slapped on lipstick and steamed carrots for her dinner. Whisking the baby from my husband's arms, I had run upstairs to change her diaper (he offered but he's slow). Back down to the oven for the carrots. Upstairs again for a few flips of the curling iron -- this was our one evening out alone, after all. Down to the living room to talk to my mother, who was setting up "Lawrence of Arabia" on the VCR. Barking instructions at my husband: "Tell the restaurant we'll be late! Find her sweater!" Now, in the car, I realized I'd given my mother almost no advice about putting our active 1-year-old to bed. "Lawrence of Arabia"? I turned to Bill angrily: "Did you ever find her sweater?"
Oh my God, I thought, I'm becoming one of those kind of women.
When we travel, it seems to take 10 times as much brainpower to keep the details of Isabelle's little life straight. My brainpower. Heading to the restaurant, Bill remained irritatingly calm and centered, blissfully unaware of the laundry list of things I'd run through. How could he be aware of them? He doesn't do them. He doesn't even think about them.
Like so many women, I handle most of the details of child care.
I don't mean to. Supposedly I don't want to. Bill and I are committed to equal parenting; as he is an academic with a flexible schedule and I'm a freelance writer, we've been able to bring it off. Or so I had thought. We put in equal shifts with the baby. He has his own areas of expertise, like getting Isabelle to bed. We routinely congratulate ourselves on our 50-50 arrangement. I constantly brag about what a great father and partner he is.
But traveling recently I realized that something is missing. A thousand and one things, actually, that I do in a semiconscious Mommy-driven state. While these things remain oddly invisible to my husband, they keep me in a constant state of motion and distraction, always feeling that I'm forgetting something -- which I usually am. At times, especially when traveling, it's hard (did we pack the baby nail clipper?) to think (the ear thermometer?) a straight thought about anything else (will the hotel have a crib?) for all the details of child care.
So after a year with Isabelle, we've established a pattern. I do these little things all week. Bill does his assigned tasks and shifts with Isabelle. Then we go out for our weekly "date" and I yell at him for not having cleaned the squished peas off the highchair seat. The devil is in the details.
There are several problems here. First, you can't appreciate what you don't do. And you especially can't appreciate what you don't even know is being done. My husband doesn't thank me for keeping Isabelle equipped with Pampers, wipes or Desitin. He doesn't see me cruising Walgreen's, baby on hip, itemized list in hand. What he sees is a woman who suddenly explodes when he mentions that we're out of diapers. He sees the detail that broke mommy's back but not the 1,001 tiny tasks that led to the outburst.
Adding insult to injury, some husbands (luckily not mine) actually believe that they are doing these things. We know that this is not true. Our spouses may handle garbage and recycling, but it's our agendas that are filled with baby appointments and play dates, our purses that are stuffed with pacifiers and Mylicon Drops. A recent MacArthur Foundation study found middle-aged men much more likely than women both to overestimate their contribution to child care and household chores and to underestimate how fairly chores are divided.
Pat Schroeder hit the nail on the head in an anecdote in her book on her 24 years in Congress. Asked soon after her election how Schroeder's new job had changed his life, her husband told a reporter: "I spend more time involved in things like taking the children to the pediatrician." Reading this, Schroeder immediately called her husband from the House cloakroom. "For $500," she asked, "what is the name of the children's pediatrician?" Schroeder's husband stammered something about having been misquoted. Busted!
While more men now know the name of their child's pediatrician, our culture still does not expect them to be involved in child care -- especially not in the minutiae of child care. Women, the theory goes, were once gatherers, and are therefore naturally suited to juggling 15 things at once. Baby on hip, phone on her shoulder, Mom whirls about the kitchen like a dervish, a paragon of productivity. Once hunters, our husbands are supposedly designed only for activities involving single-minded focus -- like stalking a bear or a good plumber. But how quickly that man evolves once he leaves the house and climbs into his car! The fellow in the next lane is driving, talking on his cell phone and tapping the seek button on his car radio in search of a tune to match his mood. He's a master of dispersion. He hunts only at home.
The idea that women can do all these things without cost is ridiculous. It takes time and energy to keep track of a child's needs. Worse, it takes brainpower. What women want is not just to assign their husbands these detailed tasks (though some of us don't even get that far) but to permanently transfer them to our spouses' brains so we can think of other things. We want "buy baby wipes" to pop up automatically on his radar screen like all those icons on his Windows desktop. We want him to write "apple juice" on the grocery list. We want initiative.
So when a stranger comes along and offers a little get up and go around the diaper-changing table we're smitten.
It took me a few dates to fall for Bill. But with my new nanny, Adaluz, it was love at the first sight of her giving Isabelle a bath. I try to remind myself that Adaluz is just a regular person. But secretly I see her as an angel from heaven. Here is a person who, of her own accord, will sort Isabelle's socks and apply a little spot remover to the bib of her pink party dress. Recently I told Bill that Adaluz was the best thing that had ever happened to me. "You're the best thing that ever happened to me," he responded.
Well, maybe my husband does have a few points here.
Women know that details can make life easier: the right toy on that long car ride, the snuggly blanket in the suitcase. Long before we became mothers we were details aficionados; in college I used to brag that I could live for a week off all the things in my purse. Life and the women's magazines have taught us to accessorize, to find meaning, maybe even a destiny, in the right shade of lipstick. Now, as we manage tiny beings with tiny needs, life, more than ever before, seems to be in the details.
But is it? Or do we risk losing our lives in this quest for the perfect baby bonnet? I hate to admit it, but at times my husband has rescued me from myself, steering me away from those items marked "mom-invented" in the baby catalog -- like the tiny suspenders that keep baby's shirt tucked in, or the device that warms the wipes for baby's bottom. Bill notes that the $80 baby play yard we spent a Saturday night assembling had a life span of three weeks before Isabelle outgrew it. (Oh, but those three weeks when I finally had my hands free!) That special rearview mirror I bought to let me view Isabelle in the car seat while driving has never made it out of the drawer. Bill also notes that I sometimes don't let him help. This is true. Knowing that I can do it faster and better, I take over, leaving him confused about all those 50-50 commitments we made at our last not-so-romantic dinner alone. I ask him to dress her, then follow them both to her room to select the right outfit and pull it over her head. Soon after, he interrupts me with some inane question about whether to give Isabelle peas or carrots for dinner. I'm stunned. How did my Harvard-educated husband become so stupid? But perhaps I've taught him ignorance. I've taught him that there is some critical difference between peas and carrots, and when it eludes him, he comes to me to decide. I say I want help but I also want control, of all these little things I care about and he doesn't.
Recently, though, I've realized that I can't have it all. I can't write full time and remain diaper-and-wipe chief. I don't feel romantic talking about baby safety locks. My husband can't learn to feed Isabelle dinner unless he does it himself.
Bill and I have identified details as the next frontier in our quest to co-parent Isabelle. At our dinner over vacation we made some new commitments. I'm in charge of baby clothes. Bill is in charge of buying new shoes. I have taken the zip-lock bag of Cheerios out of my purse. Recently he made Isabelle's dinner to leave with the baby sitter.
Last night I noticed her shoes looking a wee bit tight.
