My husband, Michael, posted recently about how we redesigned our household model 20 months ago when our son (who I’ll call V) was born, and I wanted to add my perspective.
Most days, I feel profoundly lucky to have created an approach that, for all of the logistical acrobatics it requires, has held together nicely. Creating our particular household model has also highlighted the differences in our struggles as men and women to find fulfillment, to make sense of our world, to fit in.
Professionally, I’m lucky to have a flexible, reasonably well-paying, “knowledge worker” sort of job. My employer has created a non-standard, part-time, open-ended arrangement to accommodate our household model. Yet career-wise, I’m standing still, unless I agree to work many more hours and to travel far more frequently. Breastfeeding has kept me close to home, closing off interesting career directions that would have involved travel. Plus, Michael’s job involves trips, and there’s only room in a household for one parent with a travel-intensive gig (absent a substantial babysitting budget or a surplus of 24-hour-a-day grandparent availability). When Michael is traveling, it’s up to me to arrange and manage backup childcare so that I can work my daily afternoon shifts in the office in our basement.
At the same time, becoming a parent has raised the bar on the personal meaning I expect from my work. My feeling is something like this: In the hours I spend away from V each day, I had better be doing something that matters in the world and that ultimately helps me to bring more of myself – not less – to my parenting job.
Socially, I often encounter an identity struggle that’s about being between worlds. In groups of other mamas, I am neither full-time caregiver nor career gal, an inscrutable hybrid who can’t make afternoon playgroups nor has a reliable daycare arrangement. To my full-time mom friends, I never talk about my job. To my colleagues, I regularly find myself saying that I am “transitioning back to work from maternity leave.” Even to my own ears, this is starting to sound a bit ridiculous (at least by American standards) a full year-and-a-half after returning to work. And, well…it’s a lie, designed to communicate that my career is a priority and that I should be taken seriously. In fact, given that part-time work and part-time caregiving are central tenets of our household model, I am quietly hoping to be able to maintain part-time work indefinitely.
On the parenting front, Michael and I have both gotten to experience the joy of being primary caregivers for V, and to feel pride in our unique relationships with him. Reducing outside childcare costs (which Michael described as a founding principle of our model) wasn’t what originally mattered to me, though. I was motivated more by modeling for our son a balance between caregiving work and professional work, so that he would perceive each of us as part nurturers, part bacon bringers. I’ll admit that I feel a small twinge of feminist pride when I head down to my office and V tells his father, “Mama working down there!” As if to say, she’s down there doing something independent and important, and it isn’t to be interrupted.
In making our household model, some of what Michael and I experience is surely idiosyncratic and particular. A large part of it is bound up in our privilege as middle-class people in America. Yet even with these privileges, we still encounter disappointment, the rending and tearing of the compromises we are making to try to strike a balance. We’d be exceptionally lucky if creating a fulfilling household model is the hardest thing we ever face.
At the same time that our model is personal, the parameters we’ve chosen are inherently a critique. Much of what we’ve battled to make this model work is thematic, generational, and cultural. The universal part of our experience has been that we are navigating without a map. And so the process of creating and retooling the model has provided a site for resisting the dominant templates that we’re all starting from. We are actively trying to shape something that could be a template for living – if every household had access to critical cultural and institutional support (e.g. guaranteed health insurance, affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements).
Back to our model. Despite the fact that Michael and I are both professional meal makers, diaper changers, bruise kissers, and feeling soothers, I end up doing the majority of what I’ll call the “default parenting.” When neither adult is clearly on their parenting shift, I am typically the first one in charge of V’s needs. This has nothing to do with maternal confidence or competence. Perhaps it’s because of the clear physical role I still play as the nursing parent, or because the division of labor in terms of project work versus logistical and emotional work is somewhat gendered in our home. But when both of us are around, Michael can accomplish household chores, start and complete projects, even take phone calls, knowing that I will automatically step in to meet V’s emotional and physical needs. I can’t undertake a project without specifically tasking Michael with childcare – both because he’ll need to actively manage the attention of V, who wants to be a part of everything I’m doing, and also because Michael assumes I’m handling V unless otherwise notified.
Additionally, instead of glowing with pride at the accomplishments and rewards of our household model, I am sometimes consumed by classic feminine guilt (in its modern maternal version) about what I’m not achieving. I frequently find myself feeling that a less-than-perfect performance in all spheres of life is a clear sign of personal ineptitude. The most painful part of this is that many days half-time parenting feels like it’s just not enough – neither as much as I want or as V deserves, particularly for the short time that he is so young.
Our model is, for us, a site for experimentation and iteration. It’s also a dynamic organism that, like a sourdough starter, has required a great deal of reflection and tending in order to survive. We talk about our model a lot because we have to, tweaking it frequently based on what we are learning.
In answer to a need we’ve both identified for more continuity of selves (pre- and post-baby), we have instituted a small but reliable chunk of paid childcare for a few shifts each week. This allows for some personal creative time – “studio time,” we call it – which is how both this post and Michael’s next book are slowly getting written. Despite my wish for more time in my parenting job, a few consistent hours to myself have resulted in a much saner and more present mother for V.
In answer to the call for more meaningful professional work, I have joined the board of a parenting-related nonprofit, Birth Roots, about which I am passionate; career growth and parenting meet there, which I like. The board work somewhat offsets the need for my day job to carry the utmost meaning, and to be the single place that I both sharpen my skills and simultaneously change the world. Though this extra gig doesn’t mean more hours in the day for parenting, I can bring V along so he can see me flex my professional muscles. Somehow when V and I are at Birth Roots, the disparate parts and pieces of the patchwork household model are actually sewn together into something integrated. For awhile, I’m not running from one shift to the next, but actually achieving a simultaneous footing in several of my worlds.
Michael and I often refer to each other as business partners, not because our professional lives intersect, but because we have this joint enterprise that requires craft (and craftiness) to make and sustain. It’s the place to try out what we think this experience could and should be. I wish more households were so lucky.
Misty McLaughlin is a parent by vocation, a nonprofit web consultant by trade, and a writer and seamstress by fits and starts. Among other topics, she’s passionate about exploring issues of gender and generation, helping other households to find cultural loopholes that allow them to make their own models, and promoting institutional support for rebooting our roles. Follower her on Twitter @mistymclaughlin.