We need to talk. I saw your wife at the playground the other day, and it was 7,000 degrees outside, and she was there with all three of your kids, dispensing snacks, sanitizing hands, applying sunscreen, sweating through a game of red-light-green-light, and, yes, making not one but two trips to the port-a-potty with your youngest, who appears not to realize yet how with each terrifying journey to that fetid little box, life loses another ounce of its mystery. Anyway, I was sitting on a bench nearby, and your wife was talking to a couple of friends. I could overhear them. "Where's X?" one of her friends asked, referring, of course, to you. She was asking because it was Saturday at noon and your wife was there with the (again: three) kids and you ... weren't. "Work," she said, and I could practically hear her eyes roll. Seriously, the way she said it, she might as well have responded, "Who the hell knows? I've stopped trying to figure him out, stopped wondering how I ended up with a guy who seems like he'd rather be at work than home with his kids, who thinks his job is too important to take a day off, who still refers to an evening at home alone with his own kids as 'babysitting,' who is incapable of taking care of our kids by himself for two nights so I can go to my 20th high school reunion—really, I fear for their safety—who plays golf for six hours on Sundays, and who doesn't know what his kids like to eat for dinner and wouldn't know how to make it if he did." (Maybe I'm exaggerating, but not by much.)
I'm not telling you this because I want you to feel bad about yourself or because I'm making some judgment on your marriage—we all make our own deals, and I won't presume to get in the middle of that. (This kind of subterranean resentment, though: not good.) I'm telling you this for a purely selfish reason: Your do-nothing-ness is affecting my life. It makes me look bad. It forces me, a father who at least tries to be an equal partner, to overcome this persistent baseline assumption that I'm some disengaged, borderline-non-compos loser who can't pull my own weight. Thanks to you, when the pediatrician calls our house, she asks to speak to my wife—who, I might add, gave our son Benadryl the last time he had a cough. When we go to our school conferences, the teachers don't make eye contact with me when they talk, because they just assume that my wife does everything and that my presence there is purely ceremonial. When I pull my daughter's hair back in a ponytail, other moms at the playground look at me like I just split a friggin' atom. You perpetuate all the old stereotypes, that's the problem: He's clueless; I can't ask him to do that; he doesn't know how; he's way too busy; he's not good at the "hands-on" stuff; he'll put the diaper on backward; he'll never be able to find Tumble Bunnies on his own.
What I'm trying to say is this: You need to try. You have hands, right? You presumably have a heart inside your chest that yearns for something beyond your own personal happiness. You have a wife, who probably has a job of her own and definitely has worries of her own and would appreciate a little help. And you have kids, who will repay you for your involvement in ways beyond imagining. So please, make an effort. For me.
Sincerely,
Your Fed-Up Friend
Dear Enabling Mom,
This is going to sound harsh, given all that you do and all that he does not, but you're making things worse. That look of surrender on your face right now—it's part of the problem. You're holding the family together, it's true, and your ability to juggle 17,000 things (plus your job) at once is amazing, and your tight-lipped frustration is well-earned, but—don't hate me for this—you're complicit too. By tolerating disengagement, you're encouraging disengagement. Being a man, I know a little bit about how men think, and I think it's fair to say we like to do nothing. We tend toward inertia. We hide behind our work and our "stressful" jobs, which, deep down, we realize is just a way to not participate in the far more stressful and difficult work of raising children. These things aren't true of all men, of course, but they're true of the man you married.
So: If you want help, and help is not forthcoming, then help must be demanded. (You're the one in control, right?) Remember those nights, early on, when the baby woke up at 3 a.m. and your husband was next to you, bolted to the bed, either sleeping soundly or pretending to sleep soundly? You should have made him get up and feed the kid. Remember that morning last week, when your babysitter called in sick and you were swamped at work, and yet there was never even a question as to who was going to stay home with the kids (you), never even a question as to whose job took priority (his)? You should have told him you really needed him to stay. You know that 20-year high school reunion you wanted to attend but didn't because you were petrified of leaving him alone with the kids? You should have gone. Because your happiness is just as important as his, and he would have found a way. I'm not saying it's easy, but it ain't rocket science, either: If he can hold down an actual job with actual responsibilities and live human beings who depend on him—in other words, a job that requires some adult-level competence—I'm pretty sure he can learn to run a bath and wipe an ass and pack some snacks and dream up something fun to do for an afternoon. He'll never do any of this on his own, though—not with you continuing to be so selfless, doing all the work, picking up his slack, just doing it yourself because you know he'll mess it up anyway. And the more you coddle him or work around him or allow your resentments to fester or, even worse, resign yourself to his do-nothing-ness, never challenging him to actually do anything, the tougher it's going to get. His opting out of the real work of parenthood will become the natural order of things, rather than a conscious act on his part. And thus it will never occur to him to feel guilty about it. And thus you will continue to find yourself alone with all three kids at the playground on a broiling Saturday afternoon, while your husband is away. Working.
Sheepishly,
Your Fed-Up Friend
