Equality Now
Today's men do it all. Where does that leave women?
by Jessica Francis Kane
February 8, 2007
I know how privileged this all sounds. I'm one of the lucky ones, a mother who gets to choose whether she works or not. My husband, a law professor, provides the steady income. I'm a writer, the wild card. I'm working on a second book and freelancing, but for the moment the pressure is personal, not financial. What a luxury it must seem to single parents that I have time to wring my hands over how much my spouse does. All I'm saying is, the parenting package I signed up for turns out to have a few costs I hadn't expected.
For example, just about the only thing I do exclusively in our house besides laundry is put barrettes in my daughter's hair — and she doesn't even like them. It turns out that accepting help from a willing husband is a slippery slope — before you know it, the two of you possess identical skill sets and have become nearly interchangeable. Sometimes when my daughter falls, she cries for me. But often she cries for Daddy. What astonishes me is that I wish she wouldn't. I thought I'd always be the one she'd come to for that kind of comfort, a sudden hurt needing soothing. That she thinks of me fI'm still surprised that having a capable husband doesn't just mean more time and freedom for me.irst only some of the time has been a blow to my confidence.
There's been a lot of talk about the many highly educated women opting out of careers to be full-time mothers. Maybe it's just too hard for them to let go of the fantasy we have of being the primary parent. I had to work at it. Ultimately, I wanted help from my husband more than I wanted to be the essential comforter, but I'm still surprised that having a capable husband doesn't just mean more time and freedom for me. If my husband and I were going to be equal partners in the parenting adventure, I secretly thought of myself, like the former Chief Justice, as first among equals. As the mother, I figured it went without saying that I was the primary parent. Unlike
Rehnquist, it didn't occur to me to sew special stripes on my bathrobe to prove it. (Good thing, because I can't sew.)
Early on, my husband played a secondary role brilliantly. Pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding seemed to him a tyrannical triumvirate and he was happy to simply step in wherever he could. He started doing more and more, but for a long time I was still able to pretend I was in charge. Then, suddenly, my daughter was old enough to start talking about the arrangements as she saw them, and not just with her grandmother.
©2007 Jessica Francis Kane and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Jessica Francis Kane is the author of the story collection Bending Heaven. Her work has been broadcast on BBC radio and has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, and Brain, Child. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is a contributing writer for The Morning News.org. |
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