None of Us Can Have It All: It’s Too Much to Carry

This post is by Donald N.S. Unger.

My wife and I were at a dinner party. We hadn’t yet had a child, but it was moving up fast on our “to do” list. The guests included a couple with a new baby, perhaps four or five months old. The father had been comforting his son, walking around the living room with the crying baby cradled against his chest.

That didn’t last long; the mother moved in and snatched the baby away in exasperation. That’s a three-actor play and the audience has nothing whatsoever to say – perhaps the other people there didn’t even really take note that anything of consequence had happened. But I was profoundly upset.

We had a long drive home that night and – prospective parents with a commitment to sharing childcare – we spent a good deal of time chewing over this vignette.

He hadn’t done anything wrong – the father – had he?
No.
And that’s his kid too, right?
Right.
The crying hadn’t been going on for a worrying period of time, had it?
No.
And the baby wasn’t in danger, right? It wasn’t a Michael Jackson moment – the baby being dangled off a balcony – a clear need for someone to step in on an emergency basis to save the child from imminent threat?
No.

I’m not a sports guy, I don’t tend to use those metaphors, but I remember thinking, ‘Hey, he had the ball!’ Did she say ‘Gimme that!’ when she took possession of the baby? Or is that just the cartoon bubble I’ve attached in retrospect? It felt to me like that’s what she’d said.

I’ve had women tell me that, for some time after giving birth, the sound of a baby’s cry had on them an effect similar to nails on a chalkboard: not just instant attention, but tension, and a physical imperative jangling through their bodies that something-has-to-be-done-about-that!

During pregnancy and for some time after giving birth, the hormonal changes women undergo include a sharp rise in cortisol – a stress hormone – which some researchers believe is a spur to the vigilance that caring for a newborn requires and, perhaps as well, one way that mothers bond with babies. Men who live in the same household as a pregnant woman undergo a similar set of hormonal changes – a rise in cortisol, less testosterone and more estrogen – but this is something of a faint echo of what happens in women’s bodies.

Having raised the politically incorrect specter of biology and hormones, let me quickly add: so what? Yes, I believe “wiring” plays a meaningful role in gender identity – if you believe that sexual orientation is in-born, how can you believe that gender is essentially culturally constructed and externally imposed? – but we aren’t slaves to biology any more than we need be slaves to cultural norms and societal pressures. We have choices.

I’m not saying that “all women have to do” is step out of the way and men will joyously rush into the parenting sphere – to help, to share, to take over as primary parents, depending on the agreements and the circumstances, from household to household, from family to family. But I do believe we’re at an interesting inflection point: for decades now – and into the present – women (with male allies of egalitarian inclination) have fought for equity in the professional sphere, for a full range of choices, and for power. The cost has been high in blood, sweat and tears, but gaining ground is deeply satisfying. What about yielding ground?

While I believe in each person’s right to work to be whatever they want to be, I don’t think many of us have the capacity to be all of the things we want to be. Eventually, if you want to keep picking things up, you have to put something down, you have to make choices that involve loss, as well as gain.

So what about making the household the seat of a gender-neutral Domestic Authority – unified, divided or shared, according to the agreements within each family – rather than a Maternal Authority? That’s a little more complicated, the feelings there something between bittersweet and confused.

As women began to move into the professional sphere in the 1960s and 1970s, we began to reconfigure what American workplaces looked like and how they operated. That process is ongoing and imperfect and – for many women and men – often painful. Feminist theorists like Carol Gilligan argued that inclusion was not enough, that bringing women into domains that had previously been all-male meant something more than simply expanding the workspace, bringing in new people. It meant, as well, adjusting to, accommodating, incorporating and often benefiting from the ways in which women do things differently from men.

That’s what has to happen in the domestic sphere as well. Men aren’t going to act exactly as women do when it comes to cooking, cleaning and – perhaps especially – kids. And men who didn’t grow up being socialized as caregivers – biology isn’t the crux of the matter – are sometimes going to get things wrong, in some of the very same ways that women who aren’t socialized to be caregivers get things wrong. We learn how to be parents – all of us. It’s a tough and ever-changing job.

Our daughter is fifteen now. My wife was home with her for six months; I was home for the next two years; we’ve shared parenting since. Near the top of the long list of family-related matters for which I am grateful is the fact that she decided, early on, that – absent threat at the level of balcony dangling – she wasn’t going to move in to correct me as a parent. We’ve done no small amount of discussing, analyzing, bargaining and debriefing. We haven’t always agreed about everything and I don’t think that’s the benchmark of healthy co-parenting anyway. But neither of us has ever snatched our daughter away from the other.

Part of this may be ascribed to that dinner party and the aftermath, part of it may have to do with our respect for each other. But what she says she quickly came to realize was that if she became The Indispensable Parent she would be guaranteeing herself a burden that would be personally, professionally and emotionally crushing.

Gloria Steinem, among others, has been arguing for some time that equality in the professional sphere is ultimately predicated on equality in the domestic sphere. A wise woman, indeed. Calmly now, gently – don’t wake her, whatever you do! – just hand us the baby. We love her as much as you do. We promise we’ll take good care of her.

Donald N.S. Unger teaches in the Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His scholarly interests include tracking changes in the representation of men, masculinity and fatherhood in language use and popular culture. He is the author of Men Can: The Changing Image & Reality of Fatherhood in America.

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