Miami, 10 a.m.: The phone rings. Ada has had a car accident and can’t come to work. Bill, a professor, has meetings all day and teaches in the evening. Suddenly I have 11 hours to fill with Isabelle. My adult voice echoes solo off the walls. I build blocks, read “Hop on Pop.” Isabelle and I have our magical moments, but not 11 hours of them. Instead, my day unravels like a ball of string. I skip my shower, let the calls pile up on the answering machine. It starts to rain. Ada has some special technique for getting Isabelle to nap, but I don’t know what it is and so she won’t sleep. By late afternoon, I sit parked at Miami Beach in tears, baby finally dozing in the car seat. Will Ada return tomorrow? The next day? At all?

Home, relatives visiting: “Oh, isn’t she smart! Isn’t she wonderful!” Our toddler can dance, chase birds and identify “bow wows.”

“And — what did you say, Isabelle?”

“Aqui! Mommy aqui!” she says, thumping my chest.

“Listen! She’s saying, ‘Here’s Mommy’ in Spanish!” I tell my husband.

It took me years to learn Spanish. I’m excited that Isabelle is learning the language from Ada. I have bought children’s books in Spanish for our nanny to read to her. Still, I’m keenly aware that the more Spanish Isabelle learns, the less she sounds like my daughter. My Midwestern relatives look perplexed.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
-

I am a mother with a full-time nanny. I do not feel displaced. I feel privileged. Hiring Ada is some of the best mothering I’ve ever done. I’m proud of having found this Latina Mary Poppins, with her sunny disposition, boundless energy and sense of fun. If Isabelle loves her nanny, that’s great. I love her, too. Ada is one of the best things that has happened to me in years.

Yet the mommy-nanny tie is also complicated and full of contradictions. Ada is the rock on which I’ve rebuilt my writing career and she’s quickly become part of our family, but she can leave any day. Ours is the strongest and most intimate of ties, born of mutual love of a small being. However, we are also distant, an employer and employee from different worlds. I entrust Ada with the most important person in my life, but I pay her less per hour than I pay the handyman. We are friends, but I am the boss. I am the mom, yet she sometimes knows more about my daughter than I do. She works for us 9 to 5 weekdays — she doesn’t even live with us — but she affects my life profoundly.

My husband, for instance, has been displaced not only by our baby, but by our nanny. It’s no coincidence that I forgot Bill’s birthday this year but remembered Ada’s. I often try harder to please my nanny than I do to please my spouse. Even in my worst moods, I compliment Ada’s new hairstyle and thank her for cleaning the floor. I’m not always as grateful when Bill takes the car in for service. Figuring that my husband is mine to have and hold forever, I take him for granted. In contrast, foreign nannies’ lives are unstable, subject to changing immigration laws, disasters in their home countries and the needs of their extended families. I try harder with Ada than I do with Bill, because I fear losing her more than I do him.

It’s also hard for a man to compete with another woman. My husband doesn’t speak Spanish, so he can’t talk to Ada or join our conversations. But there’s more to it than that. Bill isn’t good at chitchat — that great stuff that greases the wheels of daily life. Like many men, he focuses on one thing at a time. If I mention that Isabelle kissed a boy in the park while he’s reading the paper, I interrupt his concentration. In contrast, Ada and I discuss everything from Isabelle’s escapades to the difference between Latin and American men while she’s peeling carrots and I’m brewing coffee. Working out of the house, I chat with Ada on and off all day. I haven’t had this much female companionship since college and had forgotten how nice it is. When I buy a new outfit, Bill says, “Nice dress.” Ada compliments the color and appreciates the cut. When I talk about motherhood, Bill listens. The mother of three grown children herself, Ada understands.

The nanny-mommy relationship is also refreshingly clear-cut. I pay Ada. She takes care of Isabelle and cleans. She works regular hours. Her responsibilities are clearly defined. In contrast, Bill and I are constantly negotiating over domestic chores and child-care tasks, and sometimes we argue over them. Ada sees a dirty dish in the sink and she cleans it, without my asking. That’s her job, of course. But her presence has so transformed my daily life that some days I can’t help but love her more than I love my husband.

Then there’s Isabelle. I expect my husband to love his daughter. But Ada’s devotion to Isabelle has come as a surprise, like the compliment of a perfect stranger on your baby’s special smile. I had hoped that my nanny would like my daughter. But I hadn’t realized the extent to which nannies can fall in love with their small charges. Ada posts pictures of Isabelle on her refrigerator and sends them to her family in Honduras. She brags about my daughter to other nannies — insisting, to my delight, that Isabelle is the best and brightest of them all. The other nannies counter with similar claims about the children they care for. Like parents who go to dinner without their kids only to talk all about their kids, Ada and her friends never really leave the children they care for behind.

And there lies the great Catch-22 of the nanny-mommy relationship. I wanted a nanny who would be wonderful with my daughter. And so that’s what I got. Though I’m still No. 1, Isabelle is fond of Ada. She calls our nanny’s name sometimes when she’s not around. She runs into her arms with delight. While it’s largely a relief and joy to share Isabelle’s affections with another woman, I admit that at times I have been jealous. I’ve scrambled across the rug on my hands and knees, growling, trying to be as much fun as Ada. I’ve mastered “Los Pollitos Dicen” and other Spanish children’s songs. But competing with Ada is a game I can’t win. At 5 p.m., my nanny is still dropping to her knees to chase Isabelle across the rug, as energetic as she’d been eight hours earlier. Being Mary Poppins exhausts me. With Ada, I’ve had to learn to be myself as a mom.

That’s not good enough for some, who believe women with nannies are copping out on motherhood. Our culture sanctifies the mother-child bond. Daddies are dispensable, rarely mentioned in any discussion of child care. Mom is always at center stage. When a mother seeks to share her starring role with another woman, she sometimes gets criticized — unless, of course, it’s Grandma. One hears, disparagingly, of children being “raised by nannies,” the implication being that Mom has failed in her duty (Dad, again, is not mentioned) and that the nanny’s presence is damaging. The press chronicles horrifying cases of nannies beating children and encourages parents to secretly videotape the women they hire. It’s enough to make any mother hiring a nanny head to the Spy Store.

Bad things do happen with nannies, just as they do with parents. But the real lesson these women offer is about love. The nannies I know don’t steal affection from the families they serve; they add it. Love is not a zero-sum game, in which one bond always comes at the expense of another. There is plenty of room for other adults in Isabelle’s life besides her parents. It’s a tremendous pressure as a mother to always be the center of your child’s world. Ada takes the pressure off, giving Isabelle things that I can’t give her and providing our toddler with another positive claim on the world. When Ada’s grandchild asked if her grandmother loved Isabelle more than she loved her, our nanny said, “No,” and explained that love is not divisible, that there is plenty to go around. You need to be comfortable with that idea to be happy with a nanny. Because the nannies I know are more likely to shower their charges with too many kisses than to lock them in the closet.

There are tradeoffs. I do miss some of Isabelle’s experiences. Yesterday, when I returned from two hours at the copy shop to hear about the latest nanny-baby party, it was obvious to me who has the more fun job. And even when the words are flowing and I get an accolade or two, it’s clear who has the more important one. My articles may or may not be read. I have to write them. And I’d find it difficult caring for Isabelle full time. So I tap away, compiling paragraphs. Today I shower. I return my calls.

And below I can hear Ada singing about two elephants balancing on a spider web, making the future laugh.

I began my campaign for an equal parenting arrangement with Bill soon after
seeing his room and long before we got married. Bill repeatedly agreed to
this arrangement. Still, I wasn’t optimistic. In most couples we knew, women
were doing most of the domestic work. And some of them had husbands who liked to
cook. How was I going to get a guy who could barely operate the microwave
to boil baby bottles? The therapist I was seeing to deal with my fear of
motherhood suggested I read books on child development. Focusing largely on
a mother developing her child, they didn’t help. I wanted a book on
marriage development. I wanted something that said: Yes, a guy who can’t
boil water can share child care.

Now there finally is such a book, though it’s not one of those cheery tomes
that say how wonderful it is to share domestic tasks with your husband.
“Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works,” by Francine Deutsch, is about being in the trenches with your spouse. It’s about the day-in-day-out negotiation that goes into sharing child care, the challenges and
benefits of such arrangements, and why so many couples who set out to
parent equally fail to do so.

Deutsch wrote the book to address her own concerns. The author had invested
six years in graduate school to get her Ph.D. and five on the job market
before becoming a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke College. She
wanted children but couldn’t imagine giving all that up to be a
stay-at-home mom. Nor did she have the energy to be superwoman. Equality at
home seemed the only means of really having it all.

For her book, Deutsch interviewed 150 dual-earner couples. Those who share
child care 50-50 are the focus of her study, but she also interviewed
families in which working women do most of the domestic work. The 50-50
couples range from those who split tasks down the middle to those in which
husband and wife carve out separate but equal spheres. (That’s the solution
if your husband can’t wash baby clothes — he gets to put baby to bed instead, as I
discovered after the birth of our daughter Isabelle 17 months ago.) Most of the equal couples in the book didn’t start out that way; in many, the women
took time off work when the children were young. While most of the equal-
sharers and their unequal counterparts are affluent, highly educated
professionals, the book includes a group of blue-collar couples who share
child care by alternating shifts at work.

First the good news: As I’ve found with Bill, it is possible to share
child care, even if your husband is all thumbs in the kitchen. But women
usually don’t get parity unless they demand it. Most men do not wake up the
morning after becoming fathers and suddenly rush out to buy wipes. A third
of the equally sharing women reported battles with their partners to
establish equality. Some used their husbands’ desire for children to
bargain for equal sharing. Others threatened divorce. The equally sharing
wives are an assertive lot who send their mates clear, unequivocal
messages. “I couldn’t get away with it with Janet,” said a father named
Daniel. “She would hand me the baby and head out the door.”

Now the bad news: If you married a couch potato or workaholic, or are
ambivalent about equality, you’re in for some tough times. You can’t “halve
it all” unless you insist that your husband do his half — and even then,
some won’t. Confirming women’s worst fears about men’s attitudes, Deutsch
identifies five strategies fathers use to avoid child care:

• Passive
  resistance: They perform tasks so grumpily that their spouses decide it
  isn’t worth it, or they simply ignore their wives’ requests altogether.
  “In one ear and out the other,” one man tells Deutsch.

• Incompetence: These men burn dinner, forget to pick up children and generally create more problems than they solve.
• Praise: “It would be a struggle for me to do
  the laundry. I don’t think I do it as well as Roz. I think she is better
  with sort of the peasant stuff of life,” said one man.

• Different standards: These men
  conveniently don’t care about details such as what the kids eat, and thus
  figure they can ignore them.

• Denial: By comparing their domestic
  contributions to those of their fathers, who did almost nothing at home and
  whose wives did not have jobs, these men make themselves look good. They
  also attribute their partners’ greater domestic loads to personality
  differences. Says one, whose wife complains that he doesn’t make dinner:
  “Cooking relaxes her. She likes to do it and she likes to keep busy.”

As “Halving It All” makes clear, equal parenting primarily benefits women,
which is why men fight it. Sharing child care gives women more career
options, more personal time and more sleep. Indeed, by interviewing so many
real couples, few of whom are particularly liberal, “Halving It All” takes
the polemics out of the battle between the sexes and reveals the division
of labor in parenting for what it really is: a sleep and sanity issue for
mom. Men who share equally benefit from being more attached to their
children — but hey, you can be attached to your child without emptying the
Diaper Genie. Many of the men sharing child care in “Halving It All” are
making real sacrifices in their careers and leisure time — the kind that
women have always made. You don’t get something for nothing. My husband
complains about being behind on his work, having too much to do and being
tired. It’s great. He knows exactly how I feel.

The book’s equal sharers challenge the economic assumptions about family
that underlie all the tiresome articles in the press about how women can
(and presumably should) juggle careers and kids. Often not even mentioned
in these pieces, dad is assumed to be too busy supporting the family to
share child care. Deutsch acknowledges that women are more likely to take
time off work for child care: They tend to work fewer hours, earn less
money and have more flexible jobs than men. But rather than viewing these
factors as causes of inequality, she looks at how couples make
gender-driven choices that lead to these patterns. Men maximize their
career options without considering children. Women look for jobs that can
accommodate motherhood. Baby arrives and mom goes part-time because –
surprise, surprise — she’s earning less than dad is. That may be fine for
some women. The best stay-at-home moms I know have a special talent for
child care and often special training in related fields such as teaching or
social work. But many other women end up ambivalent or unhappy about these
career sacrifices — not to mention poor, if they wind up divorced.

In contrast, rather than supporting one traditional male career, equal sharers look for two of what Deutsch calls “family careers” — jobs that
provide some flexibility for both partners to accommodate children.
Husbands reduce their hours, pass up promotions that would interfere with
family life and even change jobs to share parenting. Women support these
choices, work outside the home themselves and, difficult as it is for some,
relinquish their role as primary parent to make room for dad. With fathers
more involved at home, these couples spend as many parental hours with
their children as do the couples who do not equally share child care.

Not surprisingly, the equal sharers in the book have the most equal
incomes. Money is power. Deutsch’s blue-collar fathers find themselves
sharing child care despite their traditional views, largely because their
wives’ incomes are crucial to their families. But money isn’t the whole
story. In a quarter of the unequal couples, women earn the same or more
than their husbands do. And among the equal sharers, some of the women are
earning significantly less than their husbands. Men’s attitudes count. Some
are willing to support their wives’ careers and some aren’t. Equally
sharing husbands, for instance, push for flexibility at the office. Unequal
ones don’t. A mail carrier tells Deutsch that his work schedule is fixed
and suggests that his wife, a seamstress, can better cut back on her work.
Later, however, he mentions that some of the mothers who are mail carriers
at his post office have reduced their hours. A male lawyer and obstetrician
tell similar stories.

The book’s main fault is an obvious one. While Deutsch’s blue-collar
workers provide some economic diversity, most of her couples are upper-middle-class professionals and 96 percent are white. Deutsch acknowledges
this lack of racial diversity and notes that it would be particularly
useful to examine African-American families, where sex-role equality has a
longer and different tradition. Still, it’s a glaring omission.

The other problem with “Halving It All” is more subtle. It’s nice to see
men ‘fess up to avoiding child care. But the mothers interviewed look a bit
too saintly. While many men avoid child care, women also sometimes squeeze dad out. Let me name a few roles we play:

• Mad martyr: “If I do more, maybe he’ll notice and appreciate me for once, damn it.”
• Ambivalent feminist: “I want equality but he doesn’t help.” Help is not equality; arguing for help does not get equality.

• Wardrobe witch: “Pink socks with her red dress! Yuck! I’m
  all for equality as long as he does it my way.”

• Guilty giver: “My kid’s in day care all week. Am I really a bad mom? Give me that stroller, bub.”
• Mrs. Grumpily Grateful: “Oh, well” — sigh — “he does more than
  most men.” (But so much less than I do!)

I’ve filled all of these roles since Isabelle’s birth. I’ve also seen
working moms who claim to want a fair deal snatch the bottle from dad’s
hands and point out his incompetence with baby in front of friends. These
patterns come out in “Halving It All,” and Deutsch notes that women’s need
for control undermines equality. But she fails to show how obstinate we can
be, often sending our husbands mixed signals (at best) about what we really
want. With society encouraging them to stand back from the changing
table, and wives and mothers-in-law swooping in to do it “right,” is
it any wonder that some men revert to their fathers’ patterns and retire to the couch with a beer and the newspaper?

That said, “Halving It All” is a breath of fresh air and, for a snoop like
myself who is interested in other peoples’ marriages, great reading. I’ve bought
two related books: “When Mothers Work,” by Joan Peters, and “A
Mother’s Place,” by Susan Chira. Chira’s book was too heavy on studies for
me to get through as a busy new mom. But I liked “When Mothers Work” so
much that I read it twice. Reading it after Isabelle’s birth, however, the
book suddenly seemed too rosy. An equally sharing couple sits in their
beautifully decorated home, with Junior bouncing brightly from one parent
to another as the parents calmly reflect on their successful careers.
Really?

For Bill and me and the couples in “Halving It All,” equal parenting has
been a far messier affair: made up piecemeal at odd hours; negotiated over;
struggled for and won, often it seems, on a fluke. Equality in our
marriage, for instance, is partly attributable to the baby sling we got as
a hand-me-down, which became my husband’s special breast substitute, and
the difficulty of getting computer technical help. We’d been trying to get
Isabelle to take expressed breast milk for weeks when Bill tried again –
just as I’d gotten CompuServe on the line to deal with a computer crisis.
“I finally got CompuServe — I can’t get off!” I shouted over baby screams.
“I’ve been trying to get them for days!”

“Don’t worry, we’re OK! Keep doing what you’re doing!” Bill yelled back
from the next room.

For an unbearable hour, I manipulated my hard drive, dying to hang up and
grab my wailing baby from her father’s arms. CompuServe finally restored service
and, in tears myself, I finally rushed in, mommy to the rescue. But reaching
for Isabelle, I stopped. Sweat on his brow, Bill looked like a guy who had
survived a firefight. The bottle of expressed milk beside him was empty.
Vanquished, Isabelle was falling asleep. “We’re fine now,” said my husband
with a new air of confidence.

I realized then that my man of few domestic skills intended to live up to
his promise to parent equally. And ever since that battle of the bottle, he
has. It’s not perfect. I can be controlling. He sometimes acts removed. We
argue over things like when to put Isabelle to bed. But couples don’t
divorce over baby’s bedtime. Overall, equal parenting has strengthened our
sense of partnership. If we’re not always equal, we’re trying to be.

Things are as wonderful and difficult as one would expect them to be when
two people are in the same foxhole. Certainly they’re a lot better than I
ever imagined they could be when I swallowed my feminist pride and filled
all those garbage bags in Washington.

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.

My first hint of this seismic change came two nights after Isabelle’s birtha s I carried her around the hospital room at 4 a.m. while she craned her head back to examine the shadows on the ceiling. All this exploration, I felt, could be better done during the day, but Isabelle howled every time I returned her to the bassinet. I knew babies eat at night. What was shockingto discover was all the other things they like to do after hours. Reading the baby books, I discovered that infants come with no internal instructions about time; they can’t differentiate night from day. The basic concept Ihad used to navigate life did not exist in Isabelle’s world. I was supposed to teach her about time, specifically about sleep time.
This my husband and I tried vainly to do for six months. We had “quiettime” before “bedtime,” both of which she greeted with a bright baby grin. I spent hours with Isabelle between midnight and 6 a.m. — time not even scheduled by Franklin. After six months of around-the-clock nursing,sleeping in the bed with the baby, sleeping on the couch by the babyand singing, rocking and slinging the baby (over my husband’s shoulder in a baby carrier), we finally gave in to the sleep authorities and let her cryit out for three nights. She quickly became an eight-hour-a-night girl, butthose first months convinced me that bedtime is an artificial construct, as are many of our rituals. Why eat breakfast in the morning when you can enjoy scrambled eggs and toast at 3 a.m. while watching old movies oncable? Napping throughout the day — what a concept! Eating “on demand” –what a life! Had I been able to live on Isabelle time I would have thrived those first six months. Instead, I felt like a traveler on the red-eye,suspended between two time zones, adjusted to neither.

Mothers often complain that they “don’t have time.” But once Isabelle began sleeping through the night and I had a chance to think coherently, I realized that this isn’t true. Mothers have lots of some kinds of time, and little of others. Mother Time is both abundant and scarce, which is whynobody who lives outside this zone, including many politicians, understands our lives. A friend with a 9-to-5 job recently related how jealous she is of my hours spent strolling with Isabelle. Long leisurely walks aren’t something she has time to take. My days look like one long decadent vacation to her. The hours pass and I am still in the garden watching Isabelle explore a patch of grass, the demands of the Franklin Planner luxuriously suspended. I live in the present moment, largely because she won’t allow me to do anything else.

What I lack is “predictable time,” all those hours time management experts suggest you schedule for things that cannot be done with one hand and halfa brain. It’s predictable time that allows for creative projects, those moments taken for yourself that keep you sane. I don’t mind changing diapers. What bugs me is that I am constantly drinking my coffee cold, that little oasis of time for java and the New York Times now interrupted by baby needs. When I do get time it comes so unexpectedly — the baby sleeps an extra hour, my husband suddenly takes her on a walk — that I am totally unprepared and rush around like a madwoman trying to spend a credit I now will soon expire but not sure when, a state also not given toc oncentration or contemplation.

As a result, my marriage has become one long negotiation over time. Anothernew mother put it aptly, “The only time you have for yourself is the time your partner gives you” — or that you pay for. My husband and I are no longer just lovers and confidants, we’re shift workers, and that’s what sustains us these days. Having both cut back on work to be with Isabelle, we trade her back and forth for equal blocks of time. On difficult days I’ve called for paybacks of 20 minutes. This sounds crass but it’s actually quite liberating because it ensures each of us thatrarest of commodities, predictable time. Aren’t most mothers keeping track anyway? Forget diamonds and rubies. Hours and minutes are the most valuable gifts my husband can give me now.

This is especially true given how fleeting time now seems. Life used to pass in large blocks: another birthday, another Christmas, another newyear. On a daily basis its passing barely caught my attention. Now time zips by under my nose, leaving me grasping for yesterday’s child. Today the infant who could barely hold her head up stands swaying on the edge of toddlerhood, the baby disappearing before my eyes. Isabelle marks my life like a bookend. When Isabelle is 40 I will be 80. My babywoman throws my mortality in my face every day.

I’m sure it won’t always be so intense. New mothers are obsessed creatures. And things are changing. A nanny now comes afternoons and I write or go to the gym. I’ve begun to check tasks off in my Franklin Planner again. I even sleep eight hours a night.

But then at 2 a.m. I’ll hear something. I tiptoe into Isabelle’s room, searching in the dark for that tiny infant with whom I watched the moon, that crazy creature who scoffed at the world’s schedule.

But that tiny baby and sweet sliver of baby time are gone.