Friday, August 15, 2008

Children, Parents, Work, Guilt, Life....

I skate knowingly onto thin ice today in talking about marriage and children. Those who know me are already aware that I am childless, and that my only foray into matrimony was not a resounding success. I have though, watched the institutions of marriage and parenting from the sidelines for my adult life and have occasionally dipped my toes into the pool in relationships with women who already had children (including my engagement to the Kitten, who comes with two girls of her own). This article--and a conversation I had on the plane last night--have got me doing a lot of thinking about these great building blocks of the American way of life, and how they are under siege because of choices we are making every day.

Let's start with the conversation. As the plane filled with those joining up in Dallas (I was flying from BWI to Oklahoma City), one of the very last people to get on the plane was an attractive woman who looked to be not quite 30. Naturally, a cruel and ironic God chose to seat her next to me. I generally do not engage in conversation with strangers (see #8), but I tend to make exceptions in the case of attractive women. Actually, she apparently made an exception to her "no talking to lecherous looking older men rule", but I digress.

It turns out that this woman is a pharmaceutical rep who does a good bit of traveling throughout the innards of our great nation. (On a side note, I would wager that 5 of 10 attractive women you meet in airports and on planes are pharmaceutical reps. They seem to have cornered that market). She is the mother of two children, boys 1 and 3, and was married to a guy she deemed a "great father". During the course of our conversation, she began to tell me about how busy she and her husband were, each with jobs and parenting duties. She used the word "guilt" several times to describe the trades she has to make every day between time with her children, work, time with her husband and time for herself. She talked about how virtually every minute she is awake and not working is devoted to her children.

Again, I have observed the world she describes largely from without, much like the posture one takes while observing the big cat exhibition at the zoo. I respect their world, but I don't necessarily want to climb over the wall into the cage with them. In my time observing the phenomena she described, I have come to conclude two things: 1) that these harried, two working parent, shower attention and time on the Dauphins and Dauphines at night and weekends arrangements are bad for husbands and 2) that they are bad for children.

I have spent my entire adult life among adult men...at work and in recreation. And if there is one refrain I have heard more than any other from the husbands/fathers with whom I've associated, it is that "...I've lost my wife. She's a great Mother, but I don't have a wife anymore." These are the guys at the water cooler, at the cookout, along the sideline at the game. They are everywhere. Perhaps they are you. So I took the opportunity to talk to my attractive seatmate about this, wondering aloud (since we were so chummy and all) if she had heard or seen anything of this among her friends and relations. She admitted to it, fully. But her answer contained more honesty than I was perhaps ready to hear. She said, "well, that's just the way it is. Husbands have to get over the fact that it's not all about them. Things change when you have children." She wasn't saying it wistfully or regretfully; she seemed to say it with pride.

I was dumbfounded. There it was, the other guy's (girl's) playbook, right out there in the open like an old Brady Bunch episode. I wondered to myself how many guys would really...and I mean really...go for the whole act of fatherhood if they knew that this was the path. Stay with me here folks...I'm not trying to infer that having kids shouldn't or doesn't change a marriage. What I'm saying is that I think men wish that it changed things less. The men I talk to want to be fathers, they want to go to the school events, the tae-kwon-do sessions, they want to ensure their children have rich, interesting lives...but they also want to have a wife and partner and friend.

What I'm getting at here is that the two-income family has taken a recessive gene in women and made it a dominant one. Whereas the beauty and wonders of motherhood in a 1950's home provided the room and space to be both wife and mother, the rise of the working mother and our economy's reliance on the liquidity and productivity it provides has squeezed out the space available on the female hard drive for those functions associated with being a "wife". "Mother" is a role that will not be squeezed, as its biological strength and magnetism are well understood. Men however, seem not to have bought fully into this. There doesn't seem to be a diminished appetite among men for marriage, partnership, and all that comes with it. Either their hard drives are bigger (shocking!) or, the father functions are not quite as all encompassing (more likely).

I know this all sounds very pop-psychology, but that's the only psychology I know. I remember a few years ago, when I was getting serious about a girl who had a son, I asked my father what it took to be a good Dad. His answer was short, perfect, and obvious---"Love your wife". Make her and the relationship with her the center of your personal life. The rest will follow. This is the essence of my thinking here (sorry to have rambled so long)--that today's parents have largely forgotten who is the center of their lives. They have shifted (mostly women) that part of their available energy that was at one time devoted to the marriage to the new central focus of the American family, the children. And it is this focus that I believe is ultimately not good for the independence and character of the children it produces.

In a recent article in the Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein wrote about this phenomenon in what my brother Tom calls "the most important article" he has read in some time.

The concentrated, relentless attention showered upon the children raised within this new, two working parent paradigm has created an entire generation of dependent, entitled children (and a concomitant legion of frustrated Dads/Fathers). The article cited earlier from AOL, in which employers are increasingly having to deal with the parents of employees, reflects this paradigm. Also, though I am rarely one to support the whining of modern educators, parents of these children can be particularly annoying to teachers trying to educate these ADD-addled children. The "attention deficit" isn't an inability of the child to pay attention, so much as it is a child's reaction to having a deficit of attention paid to him!

Which brings us back to the cute pharma-rep sitting next to me. By the end of the flight, I had extracted from her a promise to schedule a quarterly date night with her husband. One date every 90 days. She really wrestled with this. They had never had a babysitter before (who wasn't a visiting grandparent). She wasn't convinced it was even a worthwhile goal. One lousy night.

I'm not saying we should go back to the 50's and women shouldn't work. I think work outside the home is all things considered, a benefit. What I am advocating is more balance...don't worry so much about making sure Junior has an unending palate of activities laid out for him on the weekend. Don't give in to the pressure to be like the other Moms and Dads. Maybe we can turn the corner on this generation of entitled kids and frazzled parents if we just let kids be kids.

But then again what do I know. I'm a childless divorced guy.

11 comments:

  1. Wahoo, referring to your last line, please give yourself some credit because you sound very astute-we learn a great deal by observing and clearly this is something you've done for some time. I agree wholeheartedly that it's important to kids that they see the relationship between mom and dad as the most important one in the family. However, for the men who claim they've lost their wife to their kids, I think that's a copout of those men. Face it (and these are generalizations): men don't have to worry about taking off work to get the kid to the dentist (yet the kid gets there), men don't worry about the kids' lunches getting packed (yet the lunches get packed), men don't traditionally worry about whether their kids' shots are up to date (but they remain up to date). They happily abdicate these things to their wives with no discussion at all. Perhaps if these women felt like their husbands were truly partners in parenting, it would strengthen the marital relationship. But that isn't traditionally the case Wahoo.
    This is NOT some anti-man, feminist screed. My point is only when men become fathers, they lament that they've lost their wives. When women become mothers, their responsibilities grow exponentially and the father's life experiences far fewer interruptions (other than the obvious). Certainly, some women could do a better job engaging their husbands in the process. You may want to dispute some of this, so here's a question for you: of the husbands/fathers you know, how much time has the average husband taken researching quality daycare? This is one example of many. Just my thoughts-what do I know...

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  2. Really good point...I definitely agree that you surrender your right to wank about it if you don't pitch in and help. I should have made that clear.

    The problem though, isn't that they aren't. By and large, men of my generation and younger are exponentially more involved in their children's lives than our fathers were. What is see though, is that total "capacity" has increased...that is, men want to be more involved in their children's lives (and are absolutely expected to be) AND they want to still have a wife/marriage. What I see (crudely put) with women is that total capacity hasn't increased...what work has taken that portion formerly alloted equally to children and husband. They're not going to take anything additional away from the kids, so which account does it come from?

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  3. CW - Perhaps your best post yet. As the son of a man who left home when I was 9, never to have contacted me again, and having no children myself, I have quite possibly been observing fatherhood from the "outside" even longer than you. Although I am married and, as such, do get to, almost daily, reflect on all the rewards of having uttered the two most expensive words of my life nearly 29 years ago, but I digress. When I was a teenager, I was particularly fortunate to have some really great male role models who took time to look in on how I was doing. One of them, one of my football coaches and, more importantly, the dad of my best friend, was perhaps the most influential of those men. He was a man's man, a weathered farmer who tended his crops before and after school and throughout the weekends, a calm, wise man who always had a countrified quip with an embedded life lesson appropriate to the mistake(s) his son or i had just made and, i will always remember, he was a gruff, no nonsense coach who was, paradoxically, one of the most gentle men I have known. I remember one day telling my friend how fortunate to have a dad like him. I mentioned that while my dad was around he used to be pretty physical with my mom and with me and how great it must be to have a father who would clearly never lay an angry hand on him. At that point, Frankie, said, "You know, Dad only hit me one time...and he nearly knocked me out when he hit me." When I asked what could possibly have brought that on and exclaimed that I couldn't begin to reconcile that with the man I knew his dad to be he said, "I told Mom to go to hell." "And he nearly knocked you out over that?", I asked. "Yes, it was the first and last time I ever spoke to my mother that way and it was the best lesson he ever taught me." "How is that?" I asked. "After, he picked me up off the floor he looked me right in the eyes and said, 'Son, you are my only son and I love you more than anyone else in this world...EXCEPT your mother. No one, not even you, gets to talk to my wife that way. Ever." and with that he hugged him with the tightest hug he said he'd ever given him. Today, some 35 years later, Frankie's mom is severely disabled having barely survived a brain aneurism over 15 years ago. His dad, now past 80, tends to her every need, feeding her, bathing her, and you might imagine the "etc" and has not in that entire time been out of earshot of her. I am convinced that he will live until she dies and that he will follow immediately thereafter. And Frankie, and his friends, have seen the very finest example of fatherhood that I can imagine seeing. How could any son find fault in such a man who so loves his (the son's) mother? Your dad's advice about making your wife and your relationship to her your number one priority and the rest will follow is, to me, so accurate. I watch too many parents forget when they criticize one another in front of or, worse yet, TO their children that they are denigrating one of the two people that child loves more than anyone else in the world. Try to reconcile that as a kid. It doesn't usually turn out too well. Again, great post, CW, thanks.

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  4. This post is a three-bagger, a good original post and two good followups by sally and anonymous.

    The Pharma rep saddened me. You basically asked her to spend roughly 1/100th of available evenings each year with just her husband, and she "...wasn't convinced it was even a worthwhile goal."

    My lovely bride and I are looking forward to dropping our future engineer off at university tomorrow morning. There's been talk about some of the things we'll do now that the nest is empty (except for summers, holidays, some weekends, etc). Nothing has been too radical only because we've made time for each other - lots of it - for the last 26 years. The poor Pharma rep and her hubby are one day going to look at each other after the kids have flown the coop and ask, "Who are you?" Sad, very sad indeed.

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  5. Anon...fantastic story. Your friend Frankie was truly lucky to have grown up in that house.

    Doc...congratulations on raising such an amazing daughter.

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  6. Half the female pharmaceutical reps one meets are exactly as you described your seatmate.

    The other half are worn-out, bitter, middle aged divorcees clad in ill-fitting black pantsuits.

    Cause and effect?

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  7. Well.

    My wife and I both work. I am an engineer (and once a month put on the Navy uniform) and she stays at home and takes care of it and our son. She definitely has the harder job. I have always placed a great deal of importance on being involved, paying attention to what is going on, going to doctor's appointments, school functions, being a Cub Scout den leader, taking him fishing/hunting. But I always put my wife first: going out on dates on a regular basis, taking my son to do things (manly things) on the weekend so she can have time to herself, taking care of the things around the house that the man is supposed to take care of. We have a great relationship.

    I know a number of folks I work with who only have one spouse working. This includes two women I know whose husbands are "stay-at-home-dads."

    By the same token, I know folks such as you describe, but to a lesser degree.

    Ultimately, its what you make of it. You have to constantly work at a relationship to make it successful. You have to communicate.

    I think that's what most folks screw up...

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  8. Bull..sounds like you've cracked the code. Continued good luck to you.

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  9. Best post so far.

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