ALSO BY JANCEE DUNN

Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask

But Enough About Me

Don’t You Forget About Me

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Epub ISBN: 9781473536791

Version 1.0

Published by Hutchinson 2017

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Copyright © Jancee Dunn 2017
Cover design and illustration: Melissa Four

Jancee Dunn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in the USA by Little, Brown in 2017

First published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson in 2017

Hutchinson
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Hutchinson is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780091959647 (hardback)
ISBN 9780091959654 (trade paperback)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Introduction: Maters Gonna Hate

WHEN I WAS six months pregnant with my daughter, I had lunch with a group of friends, all of whom were eager to pass along their hard-won scraps of parental wisdom. In the quiet café they noisily threw them down, with much gesturing, like street-corner dice players on a hot streak. There were so many tips flying at me that I was forced to write them on a napkin. Bring flip-flops for nasty shower at hospital, I scribbled. Huggies wipes are nice, thick. Freeze maxi pads in water for postpartum ’roid-sicles.

“Oh, and get ready to hate your husband,” said my friend Lauren. I looked up from writing If gas, pump baby’s legs like bicycle. Wrong, I told her calmly. I listed various reasons why our relationship was solid: We had been together for nearly a decade. We were heading toward middle age, and squabbling requires siphoning precious energy from waning reserves. Most important, we were peaceable, semi-hermetic writers who startled at loud noises, running madly away like panicked antelope.

I looked around at my friends’ carefully composed faces as they tried not to smirk. Over the course of a few months, I had already been privy to hundreds of parental decrees: Say good-bye to a good night’s sleep. You’ll never have sex again, and trust me, it will be a relief. Natural childbirth? You’ll beg for that epidural, especially if your pelvis separates like mine did.

My favorite edict was supplied by my friend Justin, father of three. “Better see all the movies you can now,” he said, shaking his head mournfully. “When the baby comes? Not gonna happen.”

I squinted at him. Parenthood was so overwhelming that I wouldn’t be able to sit on my couch and watch a movie? Ever?

As it turns out, my friend Justin was wrong—I was watching movies the week after I gave birth.

But my friend Lauren was right.

Soon after the baby was born, my husband and I had our first screaming fight as new parents. To be more precise, it was I who screamed.

What set me off was embarrassingly trivial, yet the source of a baffling amount of conflict in the first few weeks of parenthood: whose turn it was to empty the Diaper Genie. On that day, it was Tom’s. The coiled bag had grown to the size of a Burmese python, and was about to spring like the snake-in-a-nut-can gag. The stench enveloped our small Brooklyn apartment.

“Please empty that thing,” I called to him as I sat on the couch, breastfeeding the baby. “The fumes are making me dizzy.”

“In a minute, hon,” he said from the bedroom, his robotic voice a tip-off that he was playing chess on his computer. He has a handful of programmed responses on call, like tugging the string on an action doll: That’s interesting; Huh, really? and Oh wow, sounds great (his response when I told him I had a suspicious growth on my leg).

In seconds, I was flooded with molten rage. I carefully put the baby down, barged into the bedroom, and seared him with contemptible, juvenile invective, terms that had not crossed my lips since I was a New Jersey teen in the ’80s. Dickwad. Asshole. Piece-a-shit. The force of my anger surprised both of us. Almost immediately, I was filled with shame. True, I was reeling from hormones, sleep deprivation, and a sudden quadrupling of cleanup and laundry. But I love my husband—enough to have had him impregnate me in the first place. I knew within two weeks of meeting him that I wanted to marry him; he was the most interesting person I had ever met. I was charmed by the way he would blush and stammer when we talked, prompting me to lean in more closely just for the fun of making everything worse. During our tranquil nights at home in the early days of our marriage, I was often reminded of Christopher Isherwood’s description of a couple reading: “the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.”

I’m not sure what a dickwad is, exactly—but I know Tom isn’t one. He’s a sweet, caring spouse and father who spends hours with our daughter, Sylvie, patiently playing an eighth round of Go Fish. He refuses her nothing: when she begs him to ride bikes at dawn on a freezing Saturday, his standard response is what I’ve termed nokay. “No.” (Five seconds elapse.) “Okay.” He is almost comically protective of his only child. One day at our local playground, an older girl was taunting Sylvie as Tom watched grimly from the sidelines.

Older girl: You can’t do the monkey bars! You’re too small. You’re not strong enough, like me!

Sylvie does not answer, so the girl continues in a singsong voice: You can’t do it, you can’t do it!

Tom materializes next to the older child, who squints up at his six three frame. Right. Let’s see you do it, then.

The child swings through three bars, falls, then hastily jumps back on.

Tom, with Vulcan calm: You fell off. Which is cheating. You’re the one who can’t do the monkey bars. Older child backs away.

Playground disputes aside, Tom finds fighting physically unbearable: the moment my voice begins to rise, he turns light gray and retracts into himself like a stunned gastropod. While I have threatened divorce and called him every name in the book, he has never—I mean never—done the same to me. It gives me no satisfaction to holler at a kind, gentle chess player who enjoys reading and bird-watching in his spare time.

And did the Diaper Genie actually need to be emptied right away? Were we really ready to haul out the HazMat suits? It could have waited until Tom had finished his game. But from that day on, my resentment has been on a constant lochia-like drip. Our daughter is now six, and Tom and I still have endless, draining fights. Why do I have the world’s tiniest fuse when it comes to the division of childcare and household labor?

I am baffled that things have turned out this way. I fully assumed that my very evolved husband and I, both freelance writers who work from home, would naturally be in tune. When we were a duo, he handled all the cooking while I did most of the housework; we grocery shopped and did laundry à deux. When I became pregnant, he confidently informed me he was ready for diaper duty.

Surely, we would figure everything out organically, as we always had.

I had read the encouraging news that modern men, unlike the distant breadwinners of previous generations, are more invested in their children than ever before. A Pew Research Center study shows that today’s working dads are as likely as working moms to say they would prefer to be home with their kids. We live in an era in which fathers-to-be throw all-male “man showers” for their babies (according to one party-gear designer, a popular theme is “barbecue, babies, and beer”). Websites aimed solely at dads are on the rise, such as Fatherly.com, which features, alongside more standard content (an illustrated guide to high fives, tips from a Navy SEAL on how to dominate hide-and-seek), numerous articles on how to raise strong daughters—a response, said the site’s founders, to reader demand.

Fathers’ attitudes about housework are changing, too. The same Pew study found that since 1965, the time that fathers spend doing household chores has more than doubled—from about four hours a week to roughly ten. Men, though, are selective about the ones they will do, according to sociologist Scott Coltrane. He has said that of the “big five” household tasks—cooking, meal cleanup, grocery shopping, housework, and laundry—men are more apt to balk at housework and laundry and more likely to go for cooking, meal cleanup, and grocery shopping.

Since Tom and I had already established fairly clear roles in our household—our generation is, arguably, the first to have expectations of splitting up the work—I assumed we would simply fashion new ones. But after our baby was born, we soon slid backward into the traditional roles we’d grown up seeing, which were clearly more ingrained than I’d thought (we’re just a grandma and grandpa away from the old model, after all). It wasn’t by any grand design; it just sort of happened. I was making food for the baby, so I started doing all the family cooking and food shopping. I did the baby’s laundry, so I began to throw in our clothes, too. When she was small, I stayed at home with her during the day and, out of habit, my caregiver duties gradually extended into the evening.

Our scenario is not uncommon: an Ohio State study of working couples who became first-time parents found that men did a fairly equal share of housework—until, that is, they became dads. By the time their baby had reached nine months, the women had picked up an average of thirty-seven hours of childcare and housework per week, while the men did twenty-four hours—even as both parents clocked in the same number of hours at work. When it came to childcare, moreover, dads did more of the fun stuff like reading stories, rather than decidedly less festive tasks such as diaper duty (not to mention that they did five fewer hours of housework per week after the baby arrived).

To their credit, the new fathers seemed to be clueless that they weren’t keeping up with the burgeoning workload, says study coauthor Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan. “We were surprised at the inaccuracies,” she tells me. “Both parents feel like they are doing a ton more work after the baby is born, but for men, that perception is especially inaccurate.”

These days, Tom does around 10 percent of our household chores. He maintains that he is consistent: as a bachelor, he did 10 percent of his household chores. (I can vouch for that: in our early days of dating, upon my first visit to his apartment, the only thing I found in his refrigerator was a furred 64-ounce jar of salsa from Chi-Chi’s, a brand I was not even aware still existed).

I wish his 10 percent effort was enough, but it isn’t. I feel like he’s a guest at the hotel I’m running. I’m constantly taking a silent feminist stand to see if he’ll step up and lend a hand. The scorekeeping never ends. Adding to my resentment is that on weekends, Tom somehow manages to float around in a happy single-guy bubble. A typical Saturday for him starts with a game of soccer with his friends or a five-hour bike ride (he seemed to take up endurance sports right around the time our baby’s umbilical cord was cut, like the sound of the snip was a starter’s pistol to get the hell out of Dodge).

This is followed by a leisurely twenty-minute shower, a late breakfast, a long nap, and then a meandering perusal through a variety of periodicals. Meanwhile, I am ferrying our daughter to birthday parties and playdates. On weekend evenings, Tom doesn’t check with me before he meets friends for drinks; he just breezes out the door with the assumption that I’ll handle bath time and bed. Yet whose fault is that? In my deranged quest to Do It All, I have allowed this pattern to unfold—so is it fair of me to get angry when he ducks (or, as I view it, “skulks”) into the bedroom for a nap?

And so I fume, and then unleash the beast at the slightest provocation. A typical scenario: I am in the kitchen, simultaneously cooking dinner, checking our daughter’s homework, and emptying both her school lunch bag and the dishwasher. Tom heads into the kitchen and I brighten—Oh, good, some help!—but no, he is only wending through the typhoon in order to reach the refrigerator to pour himself a glass of wine.

As this little contretemps is unfolding, our daughter runs over, stands protectively in front of Tom, and tells me not to yell at Daddy. “We’re just working something out, honey,” I say quickly. In one of the many parenting books I keep piled on my bedside table, I read that if you squabble in front of children, you should make an elaborate point of making up, so that they can witness your “healthy conflict resolution.” “Here,” I tell her. “I’ll hug Daddy. We fight sometimes, but we always make up, because we love each other! You see?”

I move in for a hug. My back is toward her, so she doesn’t see that as I embrace my husband, I scowlingly give him the finger and mouth, Fuck you!

Of course, I overreacted. And Tom could have gone down to the store without an Edwardian harrumph and purchased a new bottle of wine. Instead, I’ve become this lurking harridan who waits for her husband to screw up (I suppose the legal phrase for this is “entrapment”). But when I explode—making a conscious choice to vent, rather than consider my daughter’s anxiety—is my “victory” worth it? My concern for her wellbeing turns out to be unsettlingly selective. While I carefully apply sunscreen to the back of her neck and shield her from the harms of too much sugar by scrutinizing the label of her Nature’s Path EnviroKidz Organic Lightly Frosted Amazon Flakes, I apparently feel free to trash her sense of peace by yelling horrible names at her father.

We save our best selves for our children.

What makes me especially sad about our endless bickering is that it drags down what is by all accounts a pretty wonderful life. Our daughter is goofy and easygoing (bursting with excitement over the Mother’s Day present she bought me, she says, “I’ll give you a hint—it’s soap!”). We live in a serene converted church in Brooklyn. Tom’s enviable magazine assignments barely classify as work: a mountain biking expedition to Mayan ruins where he drinks whiskey with shamans atop a pyramid, traipsing in remote Utah deserts in search of rare bird sounds, horseback riding in the pampas of Uruguay.

Meanwhile, I have, through careful maneuvering, carved out a part-time job as a freelance writer. During the six hours my daughter is at school, I park myself in front of the computer and industriously write about beauty and health for magazines such as Vogue (even if, in my limp ponytail and frayed yoga pants, I am easily the fashion bible’s least glamorous employee). During those hours, I barely rise from my chair—but the payoff is that when school is out at 3, I close my computer for the day and transform into a stay-at-home mom. Because I’m so demonically focused, my work output roughly equals that of my former job as a music writer at Rolling Stone magazine—I may have spent nine hours daily in the office, but a full third of it was dedicated to web-surfing, gossiping with coworkers, and debating what to have for lunch (if we weren’t on deadline, twenty minutes could be devoted to the topic of will Mexican food make us too drowsy?).

These days, a delightfully surreal workday might involve dropping my daughter at school—a three-minute walk through a leafy park—hopping on the F train to Manhattan to meet up with Jennifer Lopez, and then heading back to Brooklyn in time for school pickup. Whenever I interview celebrities, I often warm them up with a softball question in which I have them describe for me the happiest time of their lives. If they are parents, their inevitable answer is this: Oh, the period of time when my children were small, no question. I am fully aware that this should be a golden era for me and Tom—we have our health, fulfilling jobs, the child we have longed for. And we are squandering it.

Our situation is certainly not unique: this simmering resentment dominates mom blogs. Get a group of mothers together, uncork a bottle or three of sauvignon blanc, and the scattered sniping will soon rise to a thunderous crescendo of complaint as everyone clamors to share their stories:

A friend just wrote me this: “I’m running on 5 hrs sleep and irrational anger at Adam while cortisol pumps itself into my breast milk. He just asked me what I wanted for our anniversary, and I tell him a weekend at a hotel, alone. I wasn’t kidding. The words ‘weekend alone’ feel like porn to me.”

Perhaps the single most widely cited piece of research on marriage and children comes from eminent couples therapists Julie and John Gottman. They found that 67 percent of couples see their marital satisfaction plummet after having a baby. No surprise there: your bundle of joy brings a boatload of additional stresses such as hormonal zigzagging, work schedule upheavals, money worries (the cost of diapers alone is panic-inducing), a sex drought, and, as one paper I read pointed out, “increased interactions with medical professionals.”

And the significance of chronic sleep deprivation on a new parent’s temper cannot be overestimated. Lack of sleep makes us focus on negative experiences, pick fights, and become irrational. Research shows that after sleep deprivation, the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala, is much more reactive. Normally, the more rational prefrontal cortex works to put everything into context, but when your brain is sleep deprived, this relationship breaks down—and often, so do you. Suddenly, your responses are way less controlled—and you rip your husband a new one when he unthinkingly slams a door after you’ve just gotten the baby to nap.

When people miss sleep for one night, they feel the effects the next day—but one study shows that if sleep loss continues, people report that they actually feel just fine: I got this! You know what? I don’t even need sleep! When I chat with Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, he compares this mind-set to that of stubbornly confident drunk drivers. “After five drinks, they may think they’re fine to drive home, but they’re markedly impaired in their brain function,” he says. “The same is true of sleep: when people regularly get less than seven hours, we can measure significant cognitive impairment.”

Before I had a baby, I would roll my eyes when I’d hear a new mom lamenting that she didn’t have time to shower for days on end. Please, I’d think. Doesn’t a newborn sleep all the time? Drama! Now that I’m a mother, I roll my eyes when I hear the oft-repeated advice urging moms to “nap when the baby naps.” The effort required to keep a tiny new being alive is bizarrely immense—and, at least when it comes to childcare and housework, women are bearing the brunt of it. Over a quarter century ago, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this disparity the “stalled revolution,” and it still holds true: while the lives of women, who now make up almost half of the US labor force, have radically changed, the behavior of their mates has not changed quite as much.

Working mothers are now the top earners in a record 40 percent of families with kids—yet a University of Maryland study found that married mothers are still doing nearly three and a half times as much housework as married fathers. And when you’ve been picking up nonstop after a two-year-old, your husband’s formerly innocuous habit of shedding his socks into a bounceable ball shape—within view of the hamper—is suddenly deeply irritating.

Comedian Dena Blizzard, a New Jersey mom, says she would bristle when her husband would return home from work, look around at the chaos wrought by their three children, and ask her, “What happened here? Who pulled all this stuff out?” “Every day, he would say it,” she tells me. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this? Yeah, I pulled all this shit out. I was really bored today, so I thought I’d throw everything on the floor.’”

Then he would follow with the question dreaded by stay-at-home mothers worldwide: What did you do all day? “I did a hundred things, but none of them added up to anything,” Blizzard says. “I vacuumed, I called Poison Control because my son ate a plant, and I think I took a shower. I’d tell him, ‘We have three kids. This is as far as we got.’ He would always be surprised. It was hard not to want to punch him in the face.”

Sociologist Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities (yes, this exists) at Stony Brook University, says that men tend to pitch in more with childcare than with housework—but as with housework, they’re selective about the kind of childcare that they will do. “What happens in a lot of middle-class families is that Dad becomes the Fun Parent,” Kimmel tells me. “So Dad takes the kids to the park on Saturday mornings to play soccer, and Mom cleans the breakfast dishes, makes the beds, does the laundry, makes lunch. Then the kids come home at noon and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we had such a great time with Dad in the park—he’s awesome!’”

This unfair dynamic is neatly summed up in an article from the satirical online newspaper the Onion: “Mom Spends Beach Vacation Assuming All Household Duties in Closer Proximity to Ocean.” As the “mom” puts it, “I just love that I can be scrubbing the bathroom, look out the window, and see the tide coming in. We should do this every year!”

And even though fathers have stepped up considerably in sharing childcare duties—since the 1960s, nearly tripling the time they spend with their children—mothers still devote about twice as much time to their kids as fathers do. Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the US government’s American Time Use Survey, women reported feeling significantly more fatigued than fathers in all four major life categories—work, housework, leisure, and childcare. (I read these statistics and think of Tina Fey’s tip in Bossypants for carving out “me time” after a baby: “Say you’re going to look for the diaper cream and then go into your child’s room and just stand there, until your spouse comes in and curtly says, ‘What are you doing?’”)

When journalist Josh Katz crunched the numbers from the most current Time Use Survey, he found that even when men didn’t have jobs, they still did half the amount of housework and childcare that women did. A large survey of US mothers by NBC’s Today program revealed that for nearly half of them, their husbands were a bigger source of stress than their children. Some of them commented that the fathers acted more like kids than equal partners.

“If I let my husband and baby have their way, I’d never pee, brush my teeth, shower, or eat again,” says Leyla, a friend of a friend. When she went out one night for an hour-long meeting, she soon received a text from her husband about their daughter that read, ominously: Witching hour just began but don’t worry. Moments later, a more urgent message arrived: This is the worst I’ve ever heard it. “Seconds later my phone beeps,” she says. “He has sent an iPhone recording of the baby screaming bloody murder.” Leyla quickly said her good-byes and hurried out the door. The iPhone, alas, is every parent’s electronic parole bracelet—and in life, there is no “airplane mode.”

I certainly feel like Tom’s mother when I have to nag him to do a task—especially when he treats it as an option by saying, “In a minute,” or simply ignores me completely. (At least he doesn’t do what my friend’s husband does: salute and shout, “Aye-aye, sir,” to make their kids laugh. At her.) Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, explains to me that couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.

My friend Jenny, mother of two, recalls one Saturday morning when it became clear that the baby had a dirty diaper. “My husband chirped, ‘Your turn—I did the last one,’” she says. “As a stay-at-home mom, I was up a ballpark three thousand lifetime diaper changes on this guy. I think my head rotated 360 degrees.”

When men do help around the house, says Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan (with the very term help, she says, indicating that we have quite a way to go), they often choose chores with a “leisure component.” This would include yard work, driving to the store to pick up something, or busily reordering the family Netflix queue—quasi-discretionary activities that have a more flexible timetable than more urgent jobs such as hustling the kids out the door for school or making dinner (and often, many of those “leisure component” chores involve getting out of the house).

Smock, a leading expert on the changing American family, who is equally at home discussing gender inequality as she is true crime novels and ’70s rock bands, says that on top of basic duties such as cooking and cleaning, women do countless invisible tasks. This is the time-gobbling labor that will likely never show up on any sort of time use study. One is “kin work,” which Smock defines to me as “giving emotional support to relatives, buying presents and sending cards, handling holiday celebrations, things like that.” (Which is why a certain page in the gift book Porn for New Moms always gets a laugh: a smiling, hunky man sits at a desk and says, I’ll be right there, hon. I’m just finishing the last of the baby shower thank-you cards.)

Then there’s “emotion work,” the constant checking on the wellbeing of everyone in the household: Is your tween still feeling excluded in the school cafeteria? The dog seems under the weather—is it time to get his kidney medication refilled? Did your husband hash out that issue with his boss? Yet another kind of invisible work is called “consumption labor”—buying the kids’ underwear and school supplies, researching the car seat and the high chair. “This often falls to the woman,” says Smock, “unless you’re talking about big-ticket items like a large-screen TV and the refrigerator.”

Let us not forget the schlepping: a study in the journal Transportation found that women shoulder most of the load in the drearily named “average daily household support travel time” category (the school run, grocery shopping, hauling kids to piano lessons). Women do this an average of eleven minutes more per day than men—even when both spouses are breadwinners.

Perhaps the least visible but most pervasive job is that of household manager. “That one is constant,” Smock says. “It’s the person who remembers everything: that Joey needs to have a dentist appointment, what foods each child likes, that a babysitter needs to be hired for the weekend. If a mother is handing her husband a grocery list, he is given credit for going shopping, but she has done the work of constructing the list. Giving direction to the husband is labor. It’s in every area in terms of childcare, and it’s always going on in your brain, even if you’re not aware of it.”

And mothers resent it, says New York psychotherapist Jean Fitzpatrick. “What I hear most often from women,” she says, “is ‘I do not want to be the boss here, I do not want him coming to me and asking me. I want him to take ownership.’”

My friend Marea says that this is a constant struggle in her house. “Oh, if I don’t mention it, it doesn’t happen,” she says. “Our daughter is seven, and it’s like my husband still doesn’t know the flow. If I happen to be doing something for myself near her bedtime, unless prompted, he won’t get her ready for bed. And having to prompt—and prompt—raises my stress level.”

After my chat with Smock, I start toting up all the invisible work I do as I go about my day. It’s maddening. If Tom takes our daughter to swim lessons, I remind them when it’s time to go, pack her bag, empty her bag when they return, dry her wet clothes, and give her a snack and a bath while Tom collapses on the couch. Invisible work stays hidden until it’s illuminated—even Smock wasn’t aware that her own mother did virtually everything in their household until she was in graduate school. “Looking back, I think, ‘Oh my god, how could she have done her job teaching all day, and then come home to a second job and handled everything?’ No wonder she would go to the bedroom and lie down for a while. How could it have been so invisible to me, even?” I ask Smock which jobs her father did around the house and she laughs. “My dad did car stuff, and stuff with the dog,” she says. “Oh, and he liked to put wallpaper up.”

For all my complaints that I want Tom to be more involved, he counters that I jump in and micromanage when he does—for instance, I would hurriedly check after he had changed a loaded diaper for what is colorfully known in my circle of moms as “butt rust.” I must admit that when it comes to kid-related tasks, I feel I do a more conscientious job.

You can’t have it both ways, says Chris Routly, a blogger from Portland, Oregon, and full-time caregiver dad (a term he prefers to stay-at-home dad). He says that he understands why women are hesitant to hand over power in an area where they have traditionally held more control. “But if we are going to have equality in parenting, it is going to mean that women are going to be mindful of letting go of that,” says the father of two, who wears a “Dads Don’t Babysit” T-shirt and posts impressive shots of the Ninjago cake he baked for his son’s birthday on Instagram. “We’re all figuring it out as we go along, so I think this idea that women have this built-in superpower where they just know how to take care of children is a lie. We need to do away with it.”

He is right. There have been plenty of times I’ve waved Tom away when he tries to get involved, because I get a distinct thrill out of being in charge, as I capably knock down one kid-related task after another. Pediatric dentist appointment—check! Permission slips signed—check! I enjoy the constant buzz of organizing, researching, scheduling—a point I bond over with feminist icon Caitlin Moran, mother of two and author of How to Be a Woman.

Give a mother a sleeping child for an hour, and she can achieve ten times more than a childless person, she tells me when we meet before her book reading in Philadelphia. “Motherhood is really like being in an action movie that goes on for your whole life—but with all the boring, everyday bits left in,” she says. “Mothers have to do a poo in four parts because a child will cry, and then they try and finish off but the child needs them again! A new mother will work far harder, more creatively, and more effectively than people who don’t have children—because she has to.”

But I can pinpoint the precise moment that my careful, complex balancing act blew up in my face. It occurred when Sylvie was in preschool. She was running a fever, so I kept her home. She was thrilled, and happily binge-watched Martha Speaks in her pajamas while I prepared for my phone interview with Jennifer Hudson for the cover story of a major magazine. I informed Tom that I would tend to Sylvie all day except from 5 to 6 p.m., when I had to chat with Jennifer. “I just need that hour,” I told him, as I, ever the household manager, arranged a snack tray for Sylvie and pulled out a board game for them to play.

At 4:45, Tom and Sylvie were peacefully immersed in a game of Enchanted Forest as I crept upstairs to our office, where I had attached my tape recorder to the phone. Jennifer, whom I had interviewed a few times before, was delightful, as usual—charming and down to earth.

When I do phone interviews, I am intently focused so that I can quickly cover all the questions I need to get to during my allotted time—generally forty-five minutes to an hour. We had just moved on to dieting tips when Sylvie suddenly appeared next to me.

Poo, she breathed. At three, she was in the midst of potty training, and preferred that I finish the job. We had one bathroom, and it was downstairs.

I waved her away. Where’s Daddy? I whispered.

“—my biggest thing is banana pudding, but it’s the devil!” said Jennifer. “So no one is allowed to bring it into my house.”

Poo.

“I’ll say, ‘It’s not on my Weight Watchers radar,’” said Jennifer. I laughed too heartily while frantically waving Sylvie away. Have Daddy do it, I mouthed. “It’s not tolerated! It will be thrown away! Because I can’t control myself. So why put it in my domain?”

“Exactly!” I nearly screamed, as sweat pooled in my bra.

I have to poo. I have to poo now.

Desperately, I took off my shoe and threw it downstairs to catch Tom’s attention.

Daddy will do it, I whispered.

Poo. Poo. Poo. Poo. Poo.

Finally I asked the Academy Award and Grammy–winning star if she could hold for “just a quick sec.”

I grabbed Sylvie’s hand and raced downstairs, passing Tom on the couch. His blank eyes were bathed in the soft glow of his smartphone. He quickly knotted his forehead in a feigned look of earnest importance, as if he was attending to some pressing work matter. But I knew exactly what he was doing. He was playing SocialChess with some guy in the Philippines. I was just playing for a minute, he tells me later. During our fight.

Of course, when parents battle repeatedly, no one emerges unscathed—including, depressingly, babies.

Even when they are asleep, infants as young as six months react negatively to angry, argumentative voices, as University of Oregon researchers discovered by measuring brain activity of babies in the presence of steadily rising voices. Babies raised by unhappily married parents have been shown to have a host of developmental problems, from delayed speech and potty training to a reduced ability to self-soothe.

The longer marital fighting goes on, the worse it is for kids. At ages three to six, say the Gottmans, children assume they are the cause of the fight. By ages six to eight, they tend to side (as my daughter does) with one parent. Notre Dame University psychologist E. Mark Cummings found that kindergartners whose parents fought frequently were more likely to struggle with depression, anxiety, and behavior issues by the time they reached seventh grade. Cummings likened children to emotional Geiger counters who pay close attention to their parents’ emotions to ascertain how safe they are in their family. He cautioned that he was not recommending that parents never fight—if kids are never exposed to conflict, they might not develop the coping skills to handle it themselves. They just have to work it out in a fair and healthy way. You know, like grown-ups.

There is no way around it: the quality of your marriage is closely tied to the bond you have with your child. Consider the surprising finding from psychologists at Southern Methodist University that when parents battle, it is the father’s relationship with his kids that takes a major hit. They found that the day after a parental skirmish, most moms were able to compartmentalize and reported a quick recovery, and even an improved relationship with their child. But fathers had a much greater tendency to let the negative marital tension spill over into the rest of the family. Insidiously, the conflict from these parental fights would resurface on the first or even second day after the fight, in the form of friction between father and child.

When I tell Alan Kazdin, a Yale University psychology professor and director of the Yale Parenting Center, that Sylvie jumps between us when we fight, his reaction is sobering. “Well, it puts children in a horrible situation, because they see their stability being threatened,” he says. As I describe the escalating tension between Tom and me, Kazdin drops his professional demeanor. “Look,” he breaks in gently. “You’re not asking for my opinion, but I’m going to give it. You sound like a nice person. Life is unpredictably short, and you and the person you have chosen to be with for the rest of your life are arguing about housework. It’s not worth it.” He pauses. “Am I lecturing too much?”

Not at all, I tell him.

“Then I’ll tell you that you don’t want that in your life,” he says. “And that’s better for your child, too.”

Enough. It is time to set the bar higher—for myself, for our daughter, and for our marriage. It is impossible to stuff the genie back into the bottle after you have children, and go back to the way you used to be. Life has changed, and we have to change with it. Denying this reality courts misery, and even disaster. It is alarming that I no longer think it is insane to tell myself, “When we’re not fighting, we get along great!” I want to fully enjoy the family I have been yearning for all my life, and to take active notice of the many good things that my husband does. Our home should be a place of safety and comfort for all of us.

Since I make a living delving into research, why not try it on my own relationship? I decide to plunge into self-help books and speak directly to those who make scientific findings. I will quiz psychologists, parenting experts, neuroscientists, and fellow parents. I’ll try anything. I will bring—okay, drag—Tom to couples therapists. We will test every strategy we can find to restore harmony to our marriage and, by extension, our family life.

Sylvie has just turned six. There is still time to fix this.

Mothers, Fathers, Issues

THE WEEKEND AFTER I craft my plan to mutually draw down our hostilities, Tom, Sylvie, and I are at my parents’ house in New Jersey, joined by my two younger sisters and their families. Dinah, a book editor, is the sort of generous, kind person who says troublesome tasks are no trouble and always totes a treat in her purse—for the adults. Her husband, Patrick, a boisterous, burly Marine veteran and school chef, can be counted on to get silly if an unhappy child needs distracting.

Heather, the youngest, loyal and thoughtful, was the most sought-after babysitter in our neighborhood and is now a beloved elementary school teacher whose students hang on her like baby possums. Standing nearby is her husband, Rob, a chef—a tattooed cool guy on the outside, inwardly a sweetly easygoing dad prone to halting, sentimental family announcements after a beer or two.

As usual, we are all bunched in the kitchen. Various nieces and nephews wander in, rummage through my parents’ fridge or pantry, then furtively race-walk out of the kitchen with elaborately casual expressions, clutching jars of expired Marshmallow Fluff and boxes of ancient Pop-Tarts.

My parents’ pantry doubles as a food museum, because my father, ever alert to scams “they” won’t tell you about, claims that expiration dates are “bunk.” Dad is a retired J. C. Penney manager whose name happens to be J. C.; his father, J. C. Senior, was also a J. C. Penney manager who once hosted the Great Man himself for lunch. I trust I need not mention where my cousin Penny worked.

Along with the unreliability of food expiration dates, my father will bring up at least a few of the following topics at every family gathering: the hidden costs buried in phone bills (“Consumer Reports did a big feature on it—I have it on file”), the ten-day forecast, tarps, People Are Nuts and They’re Only Getting Worse, the superiority of Costco gin (he funnels it into a Beefeater bottle, claiming guests can’t tell the difference), the mandatory retiree-dad family genealogy project he’s “definitely going to get to one of these days,” and fluctuating gas prices.

After you arrive at my parents’ house, the first thing my father will inquire about is the traffic (“How was Route 80? Bad? Well, they’re doing construction—it’s terrible.”). Of course he hopes we have had an easy ride from “the City,” but it’s so much more exciting when he can offer theories about the traffic jam we have endured. Then, after a decent interval of niceties, my dad, an exemplar of preparedness, will reliably bring up a disturbing news story and relate it to our own safety. “You probably read about that family in West Orange? A real shame.” Mournful head shake. “Of course, it wouldn’t have happened if they just had a radon detector/proper snow tires/an emergency survival rescue blanket/electrical outlet covers.”

My father has one setting, and it is Dad Mode. He sees everything through a fatherly lens. If a child clamors for an expensive toy, he will helpfully offer that the money would be better spent buying stock in said toy company. If he is standing in front of any man-made wonder—the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal—he can be relied upon to immediately speculate on the cost of maintenance. When my father beheld the Château de Versailles, his imagination skipped past the Sun King’s dazzling vision and landed squarely on the palace’s heating bills (“Just look at all those windows! Guaranteed they’re leaching heat.”).

Viewing the world through a Dad lens means turning any request from a child into a useful, practical action. Like my father, Tom has now adopted this habit with our daughter.

For fathers like mine, the world teems with danger, so they are mindful at all times of an emergency escape plan.