All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (18 page)

And the market today, still hoping to appeal to women’s professional instincts, offers the same differentiation in baby products for mothers that it offered in cleaning products for housewives sixty years ago. Back in the fifties, women were told to master the differences between oven cleaners and floor wax and special sprays for wood; today they’re told to master the differences between toys that hone problem-solving skills and those that encourage imaginative play. This subtle shift in language suggests that playing with one’s child is not really play but a job, just as keeping house once was. Buy Buy Baby is today’s equivalent of the 1950s supermarket product aisle, and those shelves of child-rearing guides at the bookstore are today’s equivalent of
Good Housekeeping,
offering women the possibility of earning a doctorate in mothering.

The rebellious reactions to these different standards are tailored to their eras. In the late 1960s and ’70s, women rose up against perfect housewifery. Sue Kaufman wrote
Diary of a Mad Housewife
in 1967; in 1973, Erica Jong wrote
Fear of Flying,
which included a rant about the ideal woman: “She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems. . . . I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.” Today, on the other hand, the typical rebellion story is not about being a bad wife. It’s about being a bad
mother
—which in fact is the title of a 2009 book of essays by Ayelet Waldman.

Tales of maternal malfeasance capture our imaginations because the imperatives of “intensive mothering” still persist, driving mothers to seek moral reassurance in all sorts of ways. Hays, for instance, notices that whenever stay-at-home mothers confess to ambivalence about the choice they’ve made, they justify their decision by saying that staying home is best for their kids. But whenever working mothers confess to ambivalence about the choice they’ve made, they say the exact same thing:
working
is best for the kids. “The vast majority of these women do not respond,” Hays writes, “by arguing that kids are a pain in the neck and that paid work is more enjoyable.” Instead, she says, they argue that they are providing their children with added income for extracurricular pursuits. Or that they are modeling a work ethic. Or that work makes them more focused parents and improves the quality of the time they spend with their kids. They use the effect on the child, every time, to justify any answer.

the irreproachable single mom

“She might or might not wear this,” says Cindy Ivanhoe, pulling a dress from the rack at JC Penney. “Sar? Sarah? Sarita?”

Her daughter, arty and adorable, looks up from her own browsing. She wrinkles her nose.

“I can Botox that face for you,” says Cindy. She’s a doctor, which makes this a pretty good joke, though her specialty is brain injuries, not plastic surgery. For a long time, Cindy worked at Houston’s TIRR Memorial Hermann, helping to design the program in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords ultimately enrolled to rehabilitate after sustaining grave injuries in a mass shooting in 2011. A few years ago, Cindy transitioned to private practice, though she still writes and teaches at Baylor College of Medicine.

Sarah picks up a dress that’s black and white and somewhat provocative. “Uh-uh,” says Mom. “You’re
twelve.
” Her daughter needs something for a friend’s bat mitzvah.

Cindy turns to me. “I think the fatigue is the hardest part,” she says. “Because you don’t get to be the person you want to be. It’d be useful if I didn’t work, but on the other hand, I’d be crazed if I didn’t work. It’s become my break, which is pretty sick—”

Sarah shows her something that looks like a skirt, though it’s hard to tell for sure.

Cindy stares. “No. Those look like bloomers.”

“I have the shirt for it.”

“You have the shirt. But . . . no.” She sighs.

Who would she be, I ask, if she weren’t tired?

“I’d be less grumpy by the end of the night, when I have to check homework,” she says. “Or listen to her chant for her bat mitzvah, or try to get a teenage boy”—her son, she means—“to talk a little bit about what he’s really feeling, because he suppresses his stress. I’d have more time for it. But I have all the responsibilities.” Cindy and her husband separated in 2006. He no longer lives in Houston.

Cindy picks up a long, flowing, sixties-style sundress. “I promise if you like something like this, I’ll get it shortened.”

Sarah responds by holding up an abomination in tulle. “I’d honestly rather have
this
than
that.
” She’s smiling, not being insolent.

Cindy nods. “Agreed.” We head into the dressing-rooms and take a couple of seats in the common area. Sarah disappears behind one of the curtains. “It took me years to turn off work when I got home,” Cindy continues. “Partly, it was having kids that gave me that. But because of other stressors—financial and whatever—I’m still . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence, but the word is implied:
tired.

Sarah starts to yo-yo in and out of the dressing room, modeling dresses. (“No.” . . . “No.” . . . “Maybe.” . . . “Cute.” . . . “Too short.” . . . “You’ll outgrow it in weeks.”)

“And I kind of worry,” says Cindy, “that their memory of me—what’s it going to be? ‘Mom was always trying to get her work under control. Mom was always trying to get the bills paid on time.’ Or whatever. ‘Mom was always trying to get it better
.
’ ”

Then out pops Sarah, this time without a hint of irony on her face. It’s obvious why: she looks terrific. Funnier still, she had grabbed this dress as a joke. It’s “froufrou,” as she likes to say, a traditional satin number. She’d taken it to amuse herself. Now she’s dazzling us.

Cindy beams. “Let me fix your straps.” She fiddles with them. “Do you feel pretty?”

Sarah nods, still shocked.

“Turn around.” Cindy admires her. “Do you want it for this Saturday night’s party?”

“Yes.”

Sarah spins on her heel and struts back into the dressing room. Cindy’s eyes follow her. “You know, you bring kids into the world. You love them. You’d
die
for them.” She shakes her head. “I just wish I got more rest.”

STUDIES ABOUT HAPPINESS AND
parenting are tremendously complex, and often problematic. But no matter how they’re done—no matter what methodology researchers use, or what data set, or what piece of the heart or soul they attempt to translate into numbers—single mothers do not do well.

The reason for this, most likely, is economic. Single mothers include not just divorcees but women who have never married. As a rule, mothers who have never married have also never gone to college and therefore have dramatically foreshortened economic horizons: they have less than one-fourth the income of two-parent families, they have more health problems, and they have fewer social ties. Given these brutal facts, it stands to reason that never-married women would affect the results of any survey that attempts to gauge maternal happiness.

Cindy’s case is different. She is divorced, not never-married. She earns a good living, lives in a fine house, and has a loyal circle of friends. Yet her life, which is filled with middle-class comforts, shows why divorced mothers, too, may still suffer more than their married peers. It’s true that they’re more likely to receive child support. But their income, on average, is still only half that of two-parent families. (Cindy is also wrestling with some tricky finances right now, having signed a lease on a new medical office just before the crash of the real estate market.) Because their children spend more time under their roofs than their fathers’, single mothers bear the brunt of the emotional work that comes with easing kids through the divorce—a special variation on what Arlie Hochschild calls the “third shift,” in which mothers are the designated family empaths. And middle-class single mothers are burdened by the same intensive parenting pressures as married mothers, but with less time and flexibility to manage them. Suzanne Bianchi, who has so agilely crunched numbers from the American Time Use Survey, notes in a recent paper that single parents often “have as many demands on their time as married parents but half as many adults to meet those demands.”

Changing Rhythms of American Family Life,
a 2006 compendium of data about family time-use co-authored by Bianchi, tells this story in numbers. Single mothers are more apt to report having too little time for themselves than their married peers (especially married fathers), more apt to report multitasking “most of the time.” They spend four and a half fewer hours each week on socializing than their married counterparts, and one and a half fewer hours having meals. “Sometimes I’ll meet a friend for a drink,” Cindy tells me. “Verrrrry rarely I’ll get to a movie. But I’m always behind.”

These issues of time, which translate so quickly into issues of stress, spill over into other areas of life. Like dating. “I had gone out with someone I met this summer,” Cindy tells me as we’re sitting in the dressing room, “and I said to him, ‘You know, by the time school starts, you’re going to run from the burning building. Come September or the end of August, whatever freedom I have right now goes
poof
.’ ”

A few minutes later, she gets a text from her son, whose knees have been bothering him—he runs cross-country at school.
Can you pick up a ton of ice on your way home?
She looks up from her phone and stares into space. “Like I’ve told many a friend, I wouldn’t date me,” she says. “It’s like
,
‘Sorry, I have to go get ice now.’ ” As soon as we leave JC Penney, she runs off to go get it. Who else is there? Then she goes home and carefully wraps her son’s knees.

a man’s work is never done

It’s not just women experiencing undue pressure to be perfect mothers (“the mommy mystique,” as Judith Warner calls it in
Perfect Madness
). Men are experiencing these pressures too. The Families and Work Institute calls this phenomenon “the new male mystique” in a report by the same name issued in 2011. Based on a large, nationally representative sample of the American workforce, the organization found that today’s fathers work longer hours than their counterparts without kids (forty-seven hours per week versus forty-four) and that they’re far more likely than non-dads to do fifty-plus-hour workweeks (42 versus 33 percent). Most surprising, however, is the report’s finding about work-family conflict: today men are more apt to experience it than women, especially if they’re in dual-earner couples.

Part of the reason men feel this way can be explained, not surprisingly, by the uncertainties, rigors, and excesses of the modern economy. The men in this study fretted much more about losing their jobs than they had in previous studies by the Families and Work Institute. In 1977, 84 percent of male respondents believed themselves to be professionally secure; in 2008, even before the recession, that number was down to 70 percent. Today’s workers also have to withstand ritualistic work intrusions into their homes at all hours via technology: 41 percent of the sample reported getting office messages during non-office hours at least once a week. And in 2008, far more men agreed with the statement “At my job I have to work very hard” than in 1977 (88 percent versus 65 percent). More also agreed with the statement “At my job I have to work very fast” (73 percent versus 52 percent).

But Ellen Galinsky, a co-author of the study and head of the Families and Work Institute, suspects that fathers today are also experiencing a shift in cultural priorities, and with it, a shift in internal priorities. “They don’t want to be stick figures in their children’s lives,” she told me.

No one showed this more vividly than Steve Brown as he sat there on the soccer field, watching his son. His phone was a pinging, buzzing pinball machine, and he was scrolling through emails throughout the practice. (“This is usually BlackBerry time,” he apologized.) At some point, I asked him what he found hardest about being a parent. “Finding the time to do everything you want to do,” he immediately answered. “Work-life balance. And even community balance now. Sometimes all three of those things.” Community, because Steve could be attending fundraisers and political events five nights a week, if he chose. “And it’s really a challenge for us to figure out,” he says. “Like, which weeks can I be Mr. Chairman? What days do I need to come home? And what days does Monique need to go somewhere? I have to pick and choose.”

And Steve has more job flexibility than most men. As the head of his own shop, he sets his own hours; he’s able to work on weekends if he can’t compress the load into the normal workweek. But the thing is, Steve doesn’t
want
to work weekends. He wants to be on the soccer field, because it’s game season and his older son is a good soccer player. But that means refraining from pursuing larger political aspirations—which he has—for the sake of family stability. “Now’s not a good time to go to DC or Austin,” he told me. “At some point, we’ll make that decision, but when these guys are a little older.”

A previous generation of men never thought this way. Some men still don’t. And for all his progressive instincts, Steve readily concedes that Monique still does most of the work around the house. She does most of the child care too, though one of his favorite jokes is to make the deadpan declaration, “I’m the primary caregiver,” just to see how Monique will react. She cooks, though he does the dishes. She tends to bathe the boys and prepare their outfits for the following day, though occasionally it’s the other way around. Later that evening, when I speak to Monique, a social worker in downtown Houston, she tells me the exact same thing that Kenya, one of the ECFE mothers, told me: “The most stressful part of my day is from five, when I leave work, until ten.”

This past year, the boys spent two weeks at her parents’ in Baton Rouge, going to tennis camp. “And we worked late every day instead of going out,” she says. “We were catching up on meetings we never had and errands we never did.”

I ask how her professional life has changed since having children. “I used to work with foster kids,” she says. “That required a lot of evening work. I could never do that now. But I
loved
working with them.”