Oy, it’s still this bad?

Both fathers and mothers pay dearly for the miracle of parenthood, but in most cases, it’s women who pony up for the bulk of those costs, even fifty years after Betty Friedan lambasted what she titled The Feminine Mystique.  I often think of a Census Bureau report released last yearon who provides care for our children. Suzanne Bianchi, who clocked in sixteen years as a Census demographer, discovered, stunningly, that mothers actually spend more time caring for a child today than they did in 1965, back when sixty percent of them stayed at home full-time.  In her book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, Bianchi reports that married mothers devote about thirteen hours a week to childcare, up from about ten and a half hours nearly a half century ago.  Additionally, she writes, women still do twice as much housework as men.

The parental breakdown of cleaning, cooking, bathing, playing, disciplining, story-reading, and so on is an exceptionally well-studied area.  Surveys have circulated in just about every demographic, statistics gathered and analyzed, papers presented.  And yet the results are remarkably even.  One study finds that fathers provide twenty-eight percent of active care.  Another declares that mothers provide more than two-thirds of care for kids under twelve.  A third asserts that when both parents work 52 hours a week, women commit an additional thirty-three hours a week to “nonmarket” work; men get it up for only twenty hours of dishwashing and homework-supervising.  That’s just in the U.S., which doesn’t even break into the top thirty in a study that ranked 134 countries by gender parity.   It’s worse in France where women do eighty-nine percent of housework and child care (who has time to get fat on a treadmill like that?). Not a single survey contradicts the finding that when women increase their work hours they never decrease the time they spend caring for and cleaning up after their kids. “They seem to do more housework, as if to compensate for their departure from traditional gender norms,” writes economist Nancy Folbre.  No wonder Mikko Myrskylä, in his 2011 Max Planck paper on global happiness and fertility, found that “women experience greater stress and stronger negative shocks in well-being” then men after becoming parents.

Recent U.S. studies show that men are doing more, at least—a third more than they did in 1965—but that doesn’t mean it’s making life easier for women.  Things are just harder for everyone now.   When the Families and Work Institute asked about 1,300 men if they were having a hard time juggling it all, sixty percent of men said they were struggling with the demands of work and family. The ever-deepening “work-life” conflict, is a major factor explaining why nearly every country in the western world reports declining levels of happiness—among both men and women. “No one wants to acknowledge the tradeoff, but there’s always an argument about who does what, and there’s always the potential for more argument in this crazy division of parenting roles.” Folbre says.  No wonder when Daniel Kahneman asked 900 working women to assess their daily experiences one of the only things they said they enjoyed less than minding their kids was cleaning up after them.  Science magazine may have made headlines when it reported his findings in 2004, but the misery of such drudgery is as old as dirt itself. As Simone de Beauvoir bemoaned in The Second Sex, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean become soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

In my own household, Justin happily shoulders equal, or more, of the burden.  This amazes friends.  They ask me how I managed to get him with the program, as though it was a question of whipping a rogue horse into shape.  My answer is simple: if you want equal parenting, have a kid with someone who wants it even more than you do.  They laugh and treat my statement as a hyperbolic quip.  The fact is, I couldn’t be more serious. Also, the truth is, it’s easier with one.  I’ve been thinking a lot about a terrific interview my dear friend Joanna Smith Rakoff did recently about balancing motherhood, work, and an inner life.   ”When we had just one child, we found ways to make things relatively equitable,” she said “but with two, some sort of dam burst, and I sometimes feel like my life is a page ripped from The Feminine Mystique.”

Perhaps without knowing it, the author–a public relations specialist and essayist–reveals what may be the two surest ways to lay the groundwork for unhappy onliness.  It starts a generation earlier than you’d think, with our parents’ longing. She writes: ”For my parents, having an only child was not a choice. They met later; my father was 41 when I was born, my mother, 36. My mother had two miscarriages, before and after me. I was the lone survivor, the longed-for child.”  Research shows that parents fo only children who can confidently own their one-and-done status, regardless of the reason for it, have kids who don’t pine for non-existent  siblings.  It’s when parents, especially mothers, mourn the children that aren’t, instead of celebrating the child that is, that kids mourn those children too.

When only children are raised to feel like it they would be better off with siblings, they idealize those imaginary siblings, and begin to tell a story about their lives that isn’t their truth, nor would it have been the truth of an actual larger family.  Siblings come with plenty of pain and loneliness attached.  But our fantasies of them rarely leave room for the heartbreak–or sometimes total disengagement–that occurs in those relationships.  Sometimes it’s great to have a sister or brother.  Sometimes it’s excruciating.  It’s a spectrum, either way.  And the notion that they keep us from the experience of loneliness has been thoroughly debunked in scholarly articles and clinical observation.

An Austin-based psychotherapist named Carl Pickhardt, who wrote an excellent book called The Future of Your Only Child, says that one of the “gifts” of only childhood is being “a good companion for yourself.”  He explains, “Only children are well self-connected in their primary relationship in their life.” Echoing the observations of many psychologists and researchers, and drawing from years of observation and analysis in his practice rather than quantitative research, Pickhardt has found, that “time alone, far from being painful, becomes rewarding because the only child is establishing a bond of lasting benefit—a primary friendship with himself,” he says.  “This bond creates a foundation of self-sufficiency that contributes to the only child’s independence, an enjoyment of solitude, and an affirmative relationship to himself.”

It’s grueling to feel that other people get something you want, which you’ll never have.  This sort of envy and resentment can take seed deep inside us and grow into thorny identities.  When most people have siblings, and we don’t, that outsiderness foments that growth. So I feel empathy, I truly do, when the author of this post writes:

“On a recent visit with my friend Dena, she pulled out “the beach picture,” the one where all the grandchildren are wearing white T-shirts and khakis. She and her three sisters have produced an impressive brood, and their holidays brim with the closeness of cousins who are as tight as siblings. Even now I can feel the sting of that photo in my hand. I miss the siblings I will never have, and now I miss their phantom children.”

I want to tell her that what she’s missing is a fantasy, a smiling-for-the-camera moment, which she’s populated with another generation of imaginary relatives, just as her parents did. I want to tell her that by making her feel less-than-enough, she was given an idealized sense of a happy big brood, which the culture and friends’ snapshots supports, but personal struggles may not.  We all have stories we tell ourselves to explain our struggles.  Hers is that she’s an only child.  Siblings I know have to reach for other narratives: divorce, career struggles, disability, various unquenched desires.  (Or having to dress alike in a family picture. Seriously, how did white shirts and khakis become the de rigeur family beach photo uniform?)

As parents, it’s incumbent upon us to protect our only children from our own struggles with having only one. And as onlies, we need to upend the story that siblings make a happy family, and own the joy and strength we make in our own lives, in our primary friendships with ourselves, and with everyone we bring into our chosen family.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

One and Only.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

One day I got an email from a friend telling me that she was pregnant with her second child.  “I know how you feel about that,” she wrote.  I thought, she does?  How do I feel about it? And only then did it occur to me that I had been unwittingly proposing a non-normative single-child way of living to all of my friends who at the time only had one child.  Since I’m an only child, it was as though they were asking for me for permission, to reassure them why it would be ok for them not to have another kid.  These conversations blossomed into a cover story for Time, which barely jabbed at what I had to say. Thus, a book.

What genre does your book fall under?

I recently met a woman who is writing a sci-fi erotic novel set in international banking.  Now that’s genre. This book’s genres? Social science, women’s studies, family studies, psychology, parenting.  Next time I’ll try to fit in a little futuristic sex.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Good luck with that. My Hollywood dream for One and Only would be Tina Fey voicing the audiobook.  But to play along:  For my role, Rachel Weisz or Carrie Brownstein, perhaps, depending on the glam v. indie factor.  To play my mother, I’d cast Debra Winger, if we can’t bring Anne Bancroft back from the dead.  My daughter: the young Drew Barrymore, pre-addiction issues.  My husband?  Most days he’s such a dreamboat I think he could get away with playing himself—though I suppose I just talked myself out of a chance to kiss Clooney.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Investigating what only children are really like and whether stopping at one child is an answer to reconciling motherhood and modernity, I learned a lot about myself—as an only child and the mother of one—and a lot about our culture’s assumptions.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It will be published by Simon and Schuster in June.  Which, though it’s two seasons away, according to my agent is extremely soon.  Thus, I’m doing things like this.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Between reporting and writing, about a year and a half.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

There’s a German tome from the thirties called My Struggle, which might make sense in title, but the content of the book turns out to be quite different.  Go figure. Closer books are Perfect Madness by Judith Warner, How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, The Price of Motherhood by Ann Crittenden, Maybe One by Bill McKibben.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I constantly reflect on the fact that people have been telling Gallup pollsters for years that they have their first child for themselves, and their second so as not to screw up their first—based on completely erroneous and long-disproved (but never acculturated) notions that only children are worse off.  In fact, in most ways, the data shows that we’re better off.  So why do we continue to tell ourselves that bigger families are the answer?  I believe that you should have only as many or as few children as you want—but it should be what you want, not what the culture is telling you to want. My mother’s choice to stop at one child to live a more fully self-actualized life is certainly inspiring to me. Plus, it was powerful to realize that Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, and so many other women writers I venerate made the one and done choice.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

In all seriousness, I think my book might offer the single best solution to managing the conflict between motherhood and modern life.   And if that isn’t enough for you, I’ll try to add a futuristic sex afterword into the paperback.

Otis reading my Time article on only children.

From the when things start getting real files: I wanted to share an email exchange I had with my dear friend Julia this morning. Julia is a psychologist in Santa Cruz, married to a singer-songwriter named Nels, raising an awesome kid names Otis.  We met in pre-natal yoga in Brooklyn (still the only yoga class I’ve taken—I think I have 9 sessions left on a 10 pack if anyone in Brooklyn wants it).  The six of us, would have dinner on Friday nights, a little chosen family, until Julia’s work moved them across the country.  We are sisters in angst. Today, Julia more than myself (I have dibs on tomorrow).  I thought these angsty missives might be relatable.  Lord knows I’m feeling it today.

Julia:

I just got word that Otis’ old nanny share buddy is expecting a baby brother.  Which makes Dahlia just about the only “Only” left in our world (minus a kid in his class here).  Certainly the only Only above age 4.5.  I get such a rush of feelings whenever I learn about someone being pregs.  And yet still it’s not enough to move me to become so myself, though always enough to re-visit the question.    I know I’m always pretty struck by it, by what I believe to be a big mixed bag of emotion.

Lauren:

I KNOW.  My god I know.  Dahlia’s two dearest dear friends were the last ones standing in the neighborhood.  Suddenly each has a brand new sister.  She’s the only one left, other than Otis.  It’s crazy–all the data shows that only children are on the rise, but not in our orbit.  She, of course, declares this unfair on a weekly basis.   She wants a brother, she wants a sister, she wants someone who she imagines will be a 24/7 happy slumber party.  She loves babies, she loves teaching, she loves leadership, she dotes on every younger kid she crosses paths with. If she can’t have that, she wants a dog.  (We’re both allergic.) But I know how I get her love her, what she gets to have from us, and who she gets to be raised by would change.  I know what it was like last night for the three of us to go out for ramen in a dimly lit new joint on Lorimer and Devoe, what fun we had.  I know what it was like to snooze and read and whisper the afternoon after in bed together yesterday.  I know she’s happy, and we’re happy, and this is the best shot at living our own lives on our own terms, all three of us.  But I know how hard it is, and the pain of being the last ones standing. I wish you three would just move the hell back to Brooklyn so we could buck the systems in liberated happiness together.

Julia:

Sadness, as if I am not getting something important that I will never have.

Jealous, as if the 2nd implies more $, time and general ability.

Inadequate, why DONT we have more $, time, etc. (relatedly, how to pay for 4 airplane seats if we stay across the country from family??)

And yeah, your feeling. what we have now is NICE. it’s just been getting better, we do fun stuff, go back to diapers?! what?! babyproofing?!

Aware that a main reason for Otis’ onliness is our general lackadaisicalicality, we never ‘planned’ our family, we just knew it was time for me to be pregnant. And by we I mean me. My body said so. But we had never (as apparently many do, decided, we shall have 2. OR we shall have 1.)

Also aware that having another would make for a ROUGH few years, followed most likely by quite a few lovely ones.

Also aware of the anxieties of pregnancy, who wants that again?? All those things that could go wrong. And we got such a good one! Could another be so amazing??

Lauren:

Listen, if we lived in Scandinavia… if we had great, state-sponsored child care from morning until the end of the workday, and great, state-sponsored schools, and great, state-sponsored health care… perhaps.  You, in part, are facing an individual crisis in response to a structural problem.  You and Nels are also unwilling to sacrifice meaningful creative work and a degree of freedom.  You are also crazy about your kid and aware of risks.  To me, it’s a question of really examining *why* it’s something you might want.  And whether the costs are worth it.  For us, it’s not: we are happy as we are, and accept the anxiety and longing as the price we pay.  We own it. Allowing myself to fawn over the six month old who sat on my lap for an hour yesterday morning, feeling present with that desire, with that part of myself, allows me to handle it better.  And allows me to then fully indulge my love for dahlia. I’m not going to get it both ways, and neither is she.  And it’s hard to pick the less popular route, its hard to silence the voices, its hard to see hat everyone else gets to have.  But its hard for them to see what you get to have, what Otis gets to have, what Nels gets to have.  Now please move back to Brooklyn so we can have our Friday nights again.

Were I seeking sisterhood in my rancor, I wouldn’t need to search far. The new vogue of decrying the realities of childrearing seems to gain weekly momentum. A few days ago, one woman posted “I hate being a mom” on Yahoo Questions to an empathic chorus of comments. The week prior, on Urban Baby the very same words were offered up to couple of dozen virtual amens. Of course that’s nothing compared to the two-thousand odd responses to that exact “secret confession” from a few years ago. In August, a writer at Daily Kos Googled “I hate being a mom” and found about 57,600,000 results.

Such confessions have long existed outside such pixilated provinces, in a growing book industry dedicated to such post-lactic breast-beating. A decade ago Rachel Cusk’s fearsome memoir A Life’s Work spawned the hating motherhood genre. I read it five years ago, while massively pregnant; it had been a gift from a (childfree) friend who suggested I break my personal ban on any books about what to expect when I was myself expecting. “She’s British, cranky,” her card said in understatement. Cusk’s unmitigated anguish suggested I was sure to despise the whole impending enterprise.  In spite of myself, it turns out I don’t.  In fact, I find all the snuggling and silliness to be obscene amounts of fun, far outweighing the few holiday parties I missed, and the occasional naked toilet tantrum.

Journalists have joined the motherhood-sucks march.  Most notably Jennifer Senior’s divisive New York Magazine cover story “All Joy and No Fun” which added reported data to the angst, and landed a deal for a forthcoming book of her own. (I think Senior is fantastic, and yet I felt ambivalence about this article; I’m very excited for her book) In the meantime, Jessica Valenti’s rushed screed Why Have Kids: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness, was released this fall, claiming to explore structural issues alongside its detailed episodes about how motherhood sucks, yet delivering only vagaries instead of investigating solutions.  (I expressed my displeasure with this book in a review for the Boston Globe.)

More recently, Michelle Cove’s I Love Mondays: And Other Confessions for Devoted Working Moms landed on shelves, and on Katie Couric’s televised couch. Cove offers helpful, if pedestrian, advice structured around the most common confessions and “bad–mommy stories,” she has heard interviewing mothers, like “Confession: ‘I hate missing my kid’s big moments, but not enough or quit my job,’” or “Confession:  When I travel for business, I feel guilty for leaving the family but happy to get away,’” none of which could horrify even Carol Brady, much less Ayelet Waldman. But despite the extent of the maternal “crime,” women feel they are criminals, beset by anxiety over their own imperfection. “It’s really liberating,” Cove told me, “To know you’re not alone in the struggle. Truly freeing to know that you’re not crazy, you’re not just alone in your head.” I wonder, though, how many people actually feel isolated from a perceived universe of perfectly satisfied parents.  Don’t we all know that childrearing sucks, at least some of the time?  Haven’t shows like “Parenthood” and “Up All Night” confirmed this for us culturally, if not the actual parents who emote to us at the playground or at dinner parties?

It strikes me that there’s something self-congratulatory about all this confession, as though we’re partaking in a radical act.  But confession is not the same thing as liberation. We go all riot grrl on motherhood, offering up a primal scream, feeling badass about our noncompliance with the mystique, but really we’re just bitching.  And just bitching is hardly radical.  Nor does it change a thing.

Or does it?  I called up Elizabeth Podnieks at Ryerson University in Toronto, who edited a collection of essays called Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, and she suggested that there’s power in voicing hatred of motherhood.  “Maybe the bad mommy voices out there are what’s needed to drown out the supermommy voices which are so unrealistic and untenable,” she said. Like all things related to women, she told me, we get offered versions on the virgin or the whore, on adoring motherhood or hating it. “It’s hard to have a calm rational conversation where everywhere we look we are bombarded by one dimensional images—like when the announcement that Kate Middleton is pregnant is treated like the world has been given a gift—so we have one dimensional responses.”

True.  But, as Victoria Budson, who directs the Women and Public Policy program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told me, confession “obfuscates the fact that the problem that they’re discussing is not an individual problem but a structural problem. Confession does not move is to the broader policy discussion which is where the answers lie.”  Still, Budson believes that all this public avowing means that we’re pacing the narrative arc of social change, and that makes her hopeful.

As one demographer who works on policy issues quipped to me last year at her office in Paris, “What we need is a feminist government to help women because in France we can’t find feminist husbands to help us do it.”  Here, we have none of the former, and too few of the later.  In Europe, German kindergartens stay open until dinnertime, Norway requires paid paternity leave, France offers fifty shades of post-natal care from lactation consulting to vaginal reconditioning (not to mention pediatrics), and so on.  But in the U.S. and E.U. alike, women do most of the work that men did two generations ago at the office, plus most of the work that women did at home.  Cri de coeurs about our personal wretchedness aren’t going to change the social structure that maintains that despair.

Sociologist Robin Simon, whose research on parental misery has become a fixture in the new hating motherhood literature, once told me something that often I think about.  She said, “we are the only country that gives people no support in raising kids, and the only on that tells them they have to love it.”  She’s right.  No wonder we want to tell everyone how much we hate it. Now let’s continue the arc, and finally shift our structure so we can have less to confess.

Despite my crankiness, this video iteration of complaint is simply awesome.

This month, the Center for Disease Control reported that birth rates had dropped again, for the fourth year in a row, bottoming out under 4 million babies born for the first time since 1998.  Commentators immediately rushed to their laptop, ringing the alarm bells to fault the economy for our flaccid national desire to procreate. To be sure, low fertility accompanies a weak economy without fail. But to blame the markets for what happens in our bedrooms misses a radical reshaping of our worldview. It’s not just the economy, it’s liberation. The pursuit of happiness has emerged as our new national ideology, trumping the age-old belief that parental duty is the very definition, of adulthood.  Some think it’s the height of selfishness; I say it’s progress.

On the heels of the birth rate report came a paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family, in which sociologist Julia Mcquillen wrote that the ever-growing population of women who choose not to become mothers feel just fine about it.  She found that when women feel it’s a choice they have no control over, that’s when regret creeps in.  Misreading choice as a lack of control, and sending that message reverberating through a culture, is especially poisonous to women, McQuillan tells me.   Furthermore, she believes that there a correlation between “the advice at the cultural level that you need to invest in your kids,” that motherhood should be a consuming endeavor,” and the number of women opting out of it entirely.  “If we make motherhood unrealistic why would we want to do that job?” she wonders.  In other words, if it seems like such a struggle cloaked in unhappiness, why wouldn’t women choose to be happy?

When we seek self-fulfillment on a societal level, demography transforms. There’s a grand theory that supports this concept, called the Second Demographic Transition (stick with me here, it’s fascinating).  Belgian sociologist Ron Lesthaeghe first introduced this concept in 1986 in a Dutch sociology journal. The First Demographic Transition was a shift away from high birth rates afforded by medical and industrial advances—the move from my grandmother’s ten siblings to my mother’s two. The second one, however, is born out of a battle of ideas:  a shift from duty to self-actualization, from a circumscribed domestic existence to one that finds purpose and pleasure in the world outside.  It’s what it means to pursue romantic love, to work on a screenplay, to go rock shows and Central American beaches—not to mention to choose a career, not just a job. It is why my mother chose to stop at one child, why I am making the same choice, and why so many of my friends are planning their fortieth birthday parties without hiring babysitters.

How did we get here?  A history: As civilization advanced, and industrialization relegated most subsistence concerns to the past, our needs changed.  No longer did we worry about infant mortality, the boll weevil, the violence of weather.  Instead, our focus shifted to Maslow’s higher order needs, the theory suggests, or what we require when the lower order needs—physical safety, financial security—are met. Individualistic and expressive, these higher order needs essentially add up to self-actualization: creativity, spontaneity, confidence, achievement. (Some academics swear by this thinking and others growl that our diverse developed world can not be explained by a single blanket concept.)

This march toward fulfillment doesn’t stop short in times of economic struggle, despite common thinking.  We tend to accept a single assumption explaining why fertility tanked during the Great Depression: that parents chose to radically limit family size because of economics. But in the decade prior, the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties told its denizens to just kick up their heels and live. It was an era of redefinition—women wore pants, Edith Wharton exquisitely blasted the loveless marriage—and one that wasn’t immediately erased in the crash of 1929.  As several demographers have asserted—such as Jan van Bavel in Population Studies—the economic crisis was only part of the rise of only children during the Depression; modernity was the cause as surely as money. Gender roles began to shift, and with them, the cost of children began to mount:  in the U.S. and abroad, women began to work outside the home, raising the opportunity costs of remaining homebound. Religious identification declined, and with it, the notion of absolute familial duty.

Twenty years later, the post-war baby boom reversed this fertility decline.  But in spite of a new breed of conservatism, we continued a march toward familial transformation.  Divorce, the vanguard of the fifties, stood in legal and cultural defiance of strict morality.  On its heels came the Pill, the IUD, the mass-sanctioning of non-procreative sex. It took less than a century to reverse the millennia-old definitions of what a woman was, what a mother was, what a life was. It was the age in which Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” could reach the top of the Billboard chart, and Susan Brownmiller could become Time magazine’s “Woman of the Year.”  By the mid-seventies total fertility in America sank to the 1.8 mark and remained there well into the eighties.  But then came the backlash: after the Equal Rights Amendment failed in Washington, and the Christian Coalition began to succeed, the traditional mother-of-two-or-more became deified once more. That Free to Be era can feel like a fever dream in these days of “legitimate rape” and Mitt’s binders full of women.

We still have the highest fertility rate in the developed world—where our numbers tend to lag is in happiness and well-being data.  This is what women are getting hip to, and, as McQuillan has found, are doing so without the existential costs—forget economic ones—so many have predicted.  This is why I’m doing my part to keep the birth rate low:  it’s less a question of whether I want to scrape the bottom of my bank account for motherhood, but whether I want to put my liberated adulthood in hock as well.