The division of labor among parents was, is, and likely always will be a deeply perplexing issue. The best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House, edited by Cathi Hanauer, illustrates that no matter the circumstances—the subjects of these essays range from husbands who don't help enough to those who help too much—behind every child are two disgruntled parents. "We are just like many two-career, multiple-child couples I know," writes contributor Kristin van Ogtrop. "I could write a script for one of our arguments and pass it out to half my suburban neighbors (the 51 percent in my town with working moms); simply change the names and everyone could act out the same neat little drama. Whereas [my husband] and I used to argue about money and where to live, we now bicker constantly about one thing: who is doing more."
Anne Roiphe, among other feminist writers, argues that this burden is actually a privilege, one she yearned for as a young mother in the '60s and '70s. "Now we can talk about self-fulfillment, career or profession, now we can have ambitions, disappointments, economic responsibility, lust, love," Roiphe points out in Fruitful. "Then we had only vicarious accomplishments, vicarious triumphs and failures. We had limits on our growth, limits on our potential, limits everywhere." She goes on to propose: "If having a baby were thought of as a true partnership, ... a responsibility held by two people, then the self-sacrificing involved would be halved for each and the child would be doubly strengthened."
Trouble is, even in Roiphe's paradise—where mother and father are both involved in the child-rearing as well as pursuing their dreams in the work world—guilt and alienation still abound. "There is little loose time anymore. Each second is accounted for," Lauren Slater acknowledges in her memoir, Love Works like This. "We practice what I call tag team parenting. While one of us is on shift, the other is pursuing the old life. This brings freedom, and great gaps. We are rarely together anymore."
Even Philip Roth, not exactly a guy you'd expect to see on a panel about 21st-century parenting, spends a page or two on the controversy in The Human Stain. "Anything other than these Athena [College] men—all of them so earnest and so emasculated. She is revolted by the fact that they pride themselves on doing half of the domestic work," Roth writes of his character Delphine Roux. "Intolerable. 'Yes, I have to go, I have to relieve my wife. I have to do as much diaper changing as she does, you know.' ... Why make such a spectacle of yourself as the fifty-fifty husband? Just do it and shut up about it."
The riddle of it—equality among the sexes, among parents—seems so perfectly unsolvable, I long for a voice of reason. I want someone to silence us, to tell us all to shut up already as Roth does, but then also to offer a substantial revelation, to draw deeper meaning from this gender-bending squabble. We're not having children as a reason to lunge for each other's throats; we're having children because we have hope—enough to bind ourselves genetically and emotionally for the rest of our lives.
Tillie Olson provides just that kind of no-nonsense honesty in her 1961 novella "Tell Me a Riddle," an incisive portrait of an elderly couple, married for 47 years. "How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say," she writes, "but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, and split the earth between them." To make a long, wonderful story short, Olson offers a nuanced warning about wasting a marriage away with petty arguments that feel like, in the words of Eva, the oppressed wife, "vinegar poured on me all his life." In the end, as this story tells, the current demands of your family will disappear—children will grow up, spouses will grow old—and, through the strange alchemy of nostalgia, soon you will miss this dreamy, bygone time.
