No kidding
posted by bitchphd
Buy this book
. A reader sent it to me, and it arrived on my birthday--perfect timing! Even better, skimming through it helped clarify so many things; perfect timing, in light of my recent irritation with Near and Dear.
One of the challenges of having kids, maybe especially for marriages like mine, is that they exponentially increase the amount of work and committment within a relationship. Before PK, I had an astonishingly egalitarian marriage, one that was supportive enough of the mutual ambitions of each partner that we lived apart on and off for long periods of time while pursuing our careers, but one that was strong enough (in part because both of us were able to pursue our goals) that physical distance, though we missed each other, in no way threatened our mutual committment. I think, in retrospect, that this was a crucial phase of our relationship, because it confirmed for us both that it is possible to be absolutely dedicated to both one's partner and one's goals, and that the two things need not conflict with each other.
But then, we had a kid. This book points out in really clear language something that I think I intuitively understood about that: suddenly there was Something Else in the marriage, something that was bigger and more important than either our mutual committment or our independent goals. It also points out something that I don't think I understood very well: that suddenly my own bargaining power in the marriage was far less than it had been up to that point. In other words, despite the marriage we'd constructed, the introduction of a child in and of itself seriously lessened my autonomy. I remember consciously thinking, in the early days of PK's infancy, that suddenly I could understand not intellectually but emotionally why women in abusive relationships might stick around: if Mr. B. were to start acting like an asshole (which of course he would never do), I would seriously hesitate about just walking out. I remember thinking about everything that would be involved: obviously, I wouldn't leave PK, so I'd need to pack diapers, and baby clothes, and the car seat; I would probably have to drop out of my graduate program in order to get a job; how would I find a job without someone else to take care of PK? How would I balance my refusal to see an abusive ex (b/c obviously the only reason I'd leave Mr. B. would be if he were abusive) with the fact that PK would need, and be entitled to, a relationship with his father?
As I said, I had zero fear of any of that actually happening. But the reason I went through thinking about it was that I was processing an entirely new, and very unsettling, state of affairs: I no longer had the independence within my marriage that I had insisted on and come to take for granted. Freak. Out. And, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but it has only just occurred to me in the last few days, while reading this book (which does a fantastic job of talking about different kinds of bargaining power and negotiation within relationships--you really must read it, it even makes a point of not focusing only on educated, upper-middle-class heterosexual families), that the fact that I processed that realization in terms of imagining a scenario where Mr. B. turned into an asshole is significant; that is, I was taking a broad structural problem and making it personal.
Now, I think that doing that is imposible to avoid, entirely. And I think that in a lot of ways doing that is a good thing: it challenges the tendency to create cognitive dissonance ("in theory I believe this, but in my own personal case, it's not a problem"). And I will argue to my dying day, contra N&D's belief, that my ability to do that is one of my great strengths as a feminist and as a partner and mom. On the other hand, nothing is ever simple, and I think that my terror and anxiety about losing this autonomy--an autonomy that, it's important to note, Mr. B. wasn't losing, at least not nearly to the degree I was--got expressed in some really tense and rigid ways. Of course, I was also finishing my dissertation, being the primary caretaker, and hitting the job market at this time, so there was a ton of stress, which didn't help.
Here is why I really wanted to write this post. I think the really important thing is that even though, as an academic woman, this was about the best time to have a baby--Mr. B. was making good money, I could afford to take some time off teaching, we could afford childcare, having a baby gave structure and discipline to my writing day, my time was as flexible as it was ever going to be in my entire working career--these "advantages" were also disadvantages in terms of my bargaining power and independence within the marriage. I already had what Mahoney calls "a head start" in emotional bonding with PK, because I had borne him, and I was breastfeeding. I compounded this emotional bonding, which decreased my autonomy (love can trump a lot of other interests if push comes to shove) by taking care of him more than Mr. B. did. On some level, I think I recognized this, and I was, to be honest, pretty goddamn shrewish about insisting that Mr. B. limit his hours at a very demanding, 80-hour/week type of job, and about insisting that the fact that he was the primary breadwinner in no way let him off the hook in terms of being expected to do 50% of the childcare. Inasmuch as that was impossible, time-wise, I therefore expected, and tried to insist, that he do as much childcare as he was remotely capable of doing, which meant that he did not get a lot of "down time" when he got home from work. Caution, academic / career-oriented women: the "best time" to have a baby in terms of your career might also be the "worst time" in terms of equal parenting.
(Two of my in-laws saw this, and I think that to this day they still think that I was inexcusably demanding and unsupportive to Mr. B. In one sense, I absolutely was; in another sense, and this is what I believed at the time, I was being incredibly supportive, if not of his feelings at the time, then of his goals and development as a parent.)
So then we got this job, and we relocated, and Mr. B. quit working (as had been the plan all along), blah blah normal stresscakes life events blah. And I entered the treacherous ground of the ambitious career woman and ambitious mother trying to figure out how to be both without fundamentally compromising either one. And Mr. B. entered the learning curve--handicapped a bit by his gender, his upbringing, and his not having been the primary caretaker in the first couple of years--of becoming a homemaker and primary parent.
Where, in retrospect, I kind of fucked up was in being so deeply invested in figuring out my own shit, and in being terrified of fucking up, that I did not cut Mr. B. a whole lot of slack, shall we say, on the learning curve thing. I felt like I "didn't have time" in those first on-the-job years, in those early childhood years, to make many mistakes. And where Mr. B., to a far lesser degree, I think, fucked up was in, well, being behind the learning curve--not just w/r/t the child & homecare thing, which would have been okay, but w/r/t the feminist understanding of these problems and, I think, very importantly, in the "female responsibility" of doing the emotional work of figuring out "shit, there's a problem here, what's going on?"
That is to say, he knew there was a problem, and he was unhappy. But he didn't have the skill set that women (especially women who, like me, grow up being emotional caretakers for their fucked-up parents) develop in seeing "relationship problems," and tackling them by looking, first at their understanding of the issue, and then as much as they are able, at the other person's apparent understanding of the issue, and then trying to figure out where those two things overlap and where they differ, and what that means, and then trying to fit that into some larger understanding of how relationships work and what the usual pitfalls are, and what the particular pitfalls of this kind of relationship (feminist, ambitious, etc.) often are, and "here, honey, I see this, that, and the other thing as being issues, now let's talk about how to address them in ways that might take some of the pressure off."
And, frankly, I resented his not having that skill set. I saw it, rightly or wrongly (and admittedly, somewhat sexistly), as being part of the package of the primary homemaker/caretaker job, and I was pissed that he wasn't doing it, or at least not as much as I felt I was. And that didn't help things, of course. And my feeling overloaded led into depression, and led to me (and I'm amazed I wasn't more aware of what I was doing in doing this, now that I look back, but depression makes you kinda crazy) thinking "maybe I should quit this career," etc. etc., because I was casting about pretty desperately for some way to release the pressure on me, personally, and on the relationship as a whole.
But having said all that, throughout the entire thing, I had a huge advantage which I've only recently realized. Because I did have that skill set, even though it meant I was doing a kind of emotional labor Mr. B. wasn't doing (I'm sure he was doing other kinds, mind you), I did believe and realize, the entire time, that this problem was, somehow, structural. I never thought it was anything that fundamentally threatened the marriage, our marriage: I just felt like it was something we had to figure out, and I was impatient as hell to figure it out ASAP because I had a career to build. Mr. B., on the other hand, poor guy, felt like something fundamental had changed between us, and he was afraid that the realtionship wouldn't survive.
What reading Mahoney's book has helped me realize is that, to some degree, my fears about the imbalance of power in our marriage are heavily distorted. I had a headstart, but I didn't have a husband who was so silly as to interpret that headstart as an excuse to see the division of emotional labor (or economic power) as "natural," and who was determined to catch up--so much so that he responded to my pressure by trying harder and harder to do so (with the inevitable resentment). (I here have to note that Mr. B. is not, despite the picture I may be painting, a passive guy at all. He's a pretty damn strong and equal partner; I'm not into passivity, which is part of why I'm a fucking bitch, in the good sense, of course. Because I was flogging this thing so damn hard, and I had a head start, he was pretty much put into the passive position of reacting and trying to catch up, and being a not-passive guy, he didn't like that much, either.) In trying to recognize the structures of a larger feminist problem in my own marriage, I've failed to recognize the things we've done right, or at least, I've failed to give them as much weight as they really will bear.
So, hey. Onward and upward. The moral of the story is: don't get cocky.
. A reader sent it to me, and it arrived on my birthday--perfect timing! Even better, skimming through it helped clarify so many things; perfect timing, in light of my recent irritation with Near and Dear.One of the challenges of having kids, maybe especially for marriages like mine, is that they exponentially increase the amount of work and committment within a relationship. Before PK, I had an astonishingly egalitarian marriage, one that was supportive enough of the mutual ambitions of each partner that we lived apart on and off for long periods of time while pursuing our careers, but one that was strong enough (in part because both of us were able to pursue our goals) that physical distance, though we missed each other, in no way threatened our mutual committment. I think, in retrospect, that this was a crucial phase of our relationship, because it confirmed for us both that it is possible to be absolutely dedicated to both one's partner and one's goals, and that the two things need not conflict with each other.
But then, we had a kid. This book points out in really clear language something that I think I intuitively understood about that: suddenly there was Something Else in the marriage, something that was bigger and more important than either our mutual committment or our independent goals. It also points out something that I don't think I understood very well: that suddenly my own bargaining power in the marriage was far less than it had been up to that point. In other words, despite the marriage we'd constructed, the introduction of a child in and of itself seriously lessened my autonomy. I remember consciously thinking, in the early days of PK's infancy, that suddenly I could understand not intellectually but emotionally why women in abusive relationships might stick around: if Mr. B. were to start acting like an asshole (which of course he would never do), I would seriously hesitate about just walking out. I remember thinking about everything that would be involved: obviously, I wouldn't leave PK, so I'd need to pack diapers, and baby clothes, and the car seat; I would probably have to drop out of my graduate program in order to get a job; how would I find a job without someone else to take care of PK? How would I balance my refusal to see an abusive ex (b/c obviously the only reason I'd leave Mr. B. would be if he were abusive) with the fact that PK would need, and be entitled to, a relationship with his father?
As I said, I had zero fear of any of that actually happening. But the reason I went through thinking about it was that I was processing an entirely new, and very unsettling, state of affairs: I no longer had the independence within my marriage that I had insisted on and come to take for granted. Freak. Out. And, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but it has only just occurred to me in the last few days, while reading this book (which does a fantastic job of talking about different kinds of bargaining power and negotiation within relationships--you really must read it, it even makes a point of not focusing only on educated, upper-middle-class heterosexual families), that the fact that I processed that realization in terms of imagining a scenario where Mr. B. turned into an asshole is significant; that is, I was taking a broad structural problem and making it personal.
Now, I think that doing that is imposible to avoid, entirely. And I think that in a lot of ways doing that is a good thing: it challenges the tendency to create cognitive dissonance ("in theory I believe this, but in my own personal case, it's not a problem"). And I will argue to my dying day, contra N&D's belief, that my ability to do that is one of my great strengths as a feminist and as a partner and mom. On the other hand, nothing is ever simple, and I think that my terror and anxiety about losing this autonomy--an autonomy that, it's important to note, Mr. B. wasn't losing, at least not nearly to the degree I was--got expressed in some really tense and rigid ways. Of course, I was also finishing my dissertation, being the primary caretaker, and hitting the job market at this time, so there was a ton of stress, which didn't help.
Here is why I really wanted to write this post. I think the really important thing is that even though, as an academic woman, this was about the best time to have a baby--Mr. B. was making good money, I could afford to take some time off teaching, we could afford childcare, having a baby gave structure and discipline to my writing day, my time was as flexible as it was ever going to be in my entire working career--these "advantages" were also disadvantages in terms of my bargaining power and independence within the marriage. I already had what Mahoney calls "a head start" in emotional bonding with PK, because I had borne him, and I was breastfeeding. I compounded this emotional bonding, which decreased my autonomy (love can trump a lot of other interests if push comes to shove) by taking care of him more than Mr. B. did. On some level, I think I recognized this, and I was, to be honest, pretty goddamn shrewish about insisting that Mr. B. limit his hours at a very demanding, 80-hour/week type of job, and about insisting that the fact that he was the primary breadwinner in no way let him off the hook in terms of being expected to do 50% of the childcare. Inasmuch as that was impossible, time-wise, I therefore expected, and tried to insist, that he do as much childcare as he was remotely capable of doing, which meant that he did not get a lot of "down time" when he got home from work. Caution, academic / career-oriented women: the "best time" to have a baby in terms of your career might also be the "worst time" in terms of equal parenting.
(Two of my in-laws saw this, and I think that to this day they still think that I was inexcusably demanding and unsupportive to Mr. B. In one sense, I absolutely was; in another sense, and this is what I believed at the time, I was being incredibly supportive, if not of his feelings at the time, then of his goals and development as a parent.)
So then we got this job, and we relocated, and Mr. B. quit working (as had been the plan all along), blah blah normal stresscakes life events blah. And I entered the treacherous ground of the ambitious career woman and ambitious mother trying to figure out how to be both without fundamentally compromising either one. And Mr. B. entered the learning curve--handicapped a bit by his gender, his upbringing, and his not having been the primary caretaker in the first couple of years--of becoming a homemaker and primary parent.
Where, in retrospect, I kind of fucked up was in being so deeply invested in figuring out my own shit, and in being terrified of fucking up, that I did not cut Mr. B. a whole lot of slack, shall we say, on the learning curve thing. I felt like I "didn't have time" in those first on-the-job years, in those early childhood years, to make many mistakes. And where Mr. B., to a far lesser degree, I think, fucked up was in, well, being behind the learning curve--not just w/r/t the child & homecare thing, which would have been okay, but w/r/t the feminist understanding of these problems and, I think, very importantly, in the "female responsibility" of doing the emotional work of figuring out "shit, there's a problem here, what's going on?"
That is to say, he knew there was a problem, and he was unhappy. But he didn't have the skill set that women (especially women who, like me, grow up being emotional caretakers for their fucked-up parents) develop in seeing "relationship problems," and tackling them by looking, first at their understanding of the issue, and then as much as they are able, at the other person's apparent understanding of the issue, and then trying to figure out where those two things overlap and where they differ, and what that means, and then trying to fit that into some larger understanding of how relationships work and what the usual pitfalls are, and what the particular pitfalls of this kind of relationship (feminist, ambitious, etc.) often are, and "here, honey, I see this, that, and the other thing as being issues, now let's talk about how to address them in ways that might take some of the pressure off."
And, frankly, I resented his not having that skill set. I saw it, rightly or wrongly (and admittedly, somewhat sexistly), as being part of the package of the primary homemaker/caretaker job, and I was pissed that he wasn't doing it, or at least not as much as I felt I was. And that didn't help things, of course. And my feeling overloaded led into depression, and led to me (and I'm amazed I wasn't more aware of what I was doing in doing this, now that I look back, but depression makes you kinda crazy) thinking "maybe I should quit this career," etc. etc., because I was casting about pretty desperately for some way to release the pressure on me, personally, and on the relationship as a whole.
But having said all that, throughout the entire thing, I had a huge advantage which I've only recently realized. Because I did have that skill set, even though it meant I was doing a kind of emotional labor Mr. B. wasn't doing (I'm sure he was doing other kinds, mind you), I did believe and realize, the entire time, that this problem was, somehow, structural. I never thought it was anything that fundamentally threatened the marriage, our marriage: I just felt like it was something we had to figure out, and I was impatient as hell to figure it out ASAP because I had a career to build. Mr. B., on the other hand, poor guy, felt like something fundamental had changed between us, and he was afraid that the realtionship wouldn't survive.
What reading Mahoney's book has helped me realize is that, to some degree, my fears about the imbalance of power in our marriage are heavily distorted. I had a headstart, but I didn't have a husband who was so silly as to interpret that headstart as an excuse to see the division of emotional labor (or economic power) as "natural," and who was determined to catch up--so much so that he responded to my pressure by trying harder and harder to do so (with the inevitable resentment). (I here have to note that Mr. B. is not, despite the picture I may be painting, a passive guy at all. He's a pretty damn strong and equal partner; I'm not into passivity, which is part of why I'm a fucking bitch, in the good sense, of course. Because I was flogging this thing so damn hard, and I had a head start, he was pretty much put into the passive position of reacting and trying to catch up, and being a not-passive guy, he didn't like that much, either.) In trying to recognize the structures of a larger feminist problem in my own marriage, I've failed to recognize the things we've done right, or at least, I've failed to give them as much weight as they really will bear.
So, hey. Onward and upward. The moral of the story is: don't get cocky.
Posted at 10:30 AM
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