DadWagon + The Atlantic, Volume 2: Outearned but still a man

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Originally published over there at The Atlantic

Hey, guys,

My professional life has been, by most measures, an exercise in small-bore self-indulgence: modest in scope and ambition, of arguable intellectual merit, meagerly compensated. The carcasses of two novels and a collection of awful short stories rot, as they should, in a closet in my mother’s house. As the inspiration for my first book, she is understandably loathe to cast aside any potential hints of my early genius, so I can hope only that the ink will fade or the paper crumble before any of my children stumbles onto them. Sex Tourist, a satirical novel-in-stories set among the whoremongers loitering in Southeast Asia’s backpacker districts, is a literary experiment about which I prefer they remain unaware.

There were the obligatory Los Angeles years and the doomed foray into screenwriting, which mercifully concluded with my application, at age 30, to law school. (I was rejected.) My resumé would not be complete without a quixotic career divertissement, mine being a journey to the fringes of reality television. The fiscal highlight of this venture was $500, for the sale of a bank-heist game show called Mastermind, which was no such thing. It was optioned and then forgotten by the same company that had elevated this nation’s cultural conversation with American Gladiator.

When that fizzled, I vowed to give up creative pursuits and accepted a $25,000-a-year job as a secretary for an international non-profit. But who was I to keep a vow when an unpaid internship for a monthly magazine of fading literary glory was on offer? The magazine hired me as an editor not long after the internship, whence I embarked on a meteoric march to the middle of the masthead which halted when I was laid off while earning $45,000, the highest salary—by far—of my life to that point.

My book, of which I am proud, seems likely to prove an aberration. I found a reputable agent, who sold it to a good publishing house for far more than it was worth. Shortly after publication, I topped Amazon’s “Hot New Releases: Jewish biographies” for a day or so, and even now I occasionally zoom past the 400,000 barrier on the website’s rankings with a certain insouciant flair.

Did I mention that I have a master’s degree in something called “professional writing”?

Never fear that I have confronted this catalog of unrivaled success alone. Women do in fact exist willing (even eager, at times) to immerse themselves wholly in the financial quagmire known as Theodore Ross, potbelly, balding pate, and paucity of retirement assets be damned! Yes—pick up your jaw, please—I have been married on two occasions, to well-educated, high-functioning, practical, hardworking, successful women who have never—not for a month or a moment—failed to make more money than me. Some might reckon divorce as evidence of interpersonal shortcomings, but not in this context. Consider that two, living, breathing, actual women consented to a relationship with me; perhaps I should end the current one just to prove I could again do so successfully.

Last year, I happened by chance into an editorial job at a national magazine that pays well by the standards to which I’ve educated my women to become accustomed. That, combined with a tidy little book payment or two, has swollen the balance of my semi-hidden-checking-account-for-which-my-wife-lacks-the-password to levels she had never dared dream, even when we were dating and I wanted her to think I earned a living. And yet she still outdid me, without breaking a sweat, if one’s cold, hard cash could be said to sweat.

Which, leads, finally, to the subject I would like to address with my DadWagon colleagues. I understand, and am grateful for, my great connubial good fortune. To be blessed, as I am, with the affection of a woman who surfs and cooks, finds Jewish men attractive, and who will always make more money than I do and has yet to show signs of resenting that fact, would seem to preclude the possibility of complaining.

And yet.

The gentle kiss of undeserved providence has not relieved me of a fair amount of, say, irritation, at my wife’s enhanced procurative powers. I find it a little annoying that her bottom line is bigger than my bottom line (or whatever).

Before anyone overreacts, my spouse among them, let me be clear: I love my wife and I don’t begrudge her the success she has achieved, particularly in those moments when I am without regret spending her loot. She’s worked for everything she has, and she can hardly be faulted for having chosen a career—advertising executive—more pleasingly remunerative than mine. Likewise, she has never indicated any unease about my paltry earnings—although when my current job became available she didn’t talk me out of giving up my plan to write full-time.

These character traits are superb, hard to find, and not easily replaced. Yet, still, I continue to wish I made more money than she did, even if only once, and merely so that I could brag of it, in public, perhaps at a cocktail party, child’s birthday party, or some other peer-group social gathering.

I have only my uncorroborated word that I am not an inordinately competitive man, not blindingly macho, or sexist, or a misogynist. Yet these feelings persist. I suspect it has less to do with my relationship to my wife than with my chosen profession. For me, the writing life has been one of failure alternating with frustration mixed with dashed hopes combined, at long last, with a measure of success that I’ve never truly accepted as here to stay.

People who know me generally don’t rate me a monster. I am as good to my wife as I know how to be. Like her, I have worked hard, provided for our children and our household as best I am able, and struggled for whatever success I’ve been able to enjoy. But it’s never felt nearly enough. The question is why?

I am reminded of the concluding sentences of Ann Beattie’s famous 1979 short story, “The Burning House,” in which the husband, Frank, explains to his wife, Amy, why he will leave her:

“All men…I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.” He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

I have no super-heroic delusions of grandeur, and unlike Frank, I intend to stay with my wife for as long as she will have me. But I feel a form of grim and guilt-ridden satisfaction when she worries, as all modern-day Americans must, about losing her job. I reassure her, tell her that we will be fine whatever comes. We can, I say, betraying no irony, get by on what I make.

–Theodore

In the early evening of November 1, I rode my bicycle south from Times Square, dodging first the remaining tourists wandering in a post-Sandy haze, then slaloming through the lightless intersections, and finally powering past the legions of dilettante cyclists on the Manhattan Bridge. By the time I got home, the autumn sun was starting to set, and I climbed the stairs to my fourth-floor two-bedroom co-op with the glow of physical exertion in my chest.

At the top of the stairs, I opened the door, and my nearly 4-year-old daughter, Sasha, looked up, yelled “Daddy!” and sprinted into my arms. This was, of course, a heartwarming moment, but mixed in with my fatherly pride was a new and unusual feeling, one I didn’t quite recognize at first: not just happiness but satisfaction. And the source of that satisfaction? Readers, I had gotten a job.

In fact, I had been in Times Square nearly every day for the past two weeks, serving as the new editor for the website of a fairly large food magazine—the first full-time job I’ve had since 2004. And not just a full-time job but a job I liked, a job I was good at, a job that was earning me twice as much as I’d ever made before in my working life. This, I thought to myself as I hugged little Sasha, was what it feels like to be a man.

Now, it’s not as if I hadn’t worked in the intervening eight years between full-time gigs. For most of that time I was a travel writer, jetting around the world in the service of large, dying publications. It was glamorous, certainly. Also, extremely poorly paying. If it wasn’t for my wife, Jean, and her substantial salary, I never would have been able to indulge in that high-status, low-wage endeavor I loved. What’s more, I never resented Jean’s earning ability. I’d never needed to be a breadwinner, and I knew that my other talents—for cooking, for organization, for childcare—would make up for what I lacked in my bank account. I wouldn’t have minded being rich(er), but unlike my colleague Theodore (who I can aver is highly competitive and occasionally a monster), our internal income disparity didn’t bother me, and I wasn’t about to do anything that might begin to elevate my earning potential.

But then, a few months ago, my world shifted. At just about the same time Jean was preparing to give birth to our second daughter, I was growing frustrated with my inability to earn a living. After hundreds of articles and loads of appreciation from my peers, I was making less than I ever had. I was tired of it—tired of working as hard as ever, and writing as well as ever. With the new kid on the way, I would be neither able nor willing to travel like I had been, and full-time daycare would stretch our budget precariously thin. And so I made that momentous decision. I would get a job, any job. Who knew that I would not only find one in this economy but would actually like it, too?

Of course, I’m still nowhere close to making what Jean does (not that either of us particularly cares), but I am enjoying the satisfaction and freedom this new gig brings. Soon I’ll be able to cover my (modest) credit card bills without having to ask Jean for a loan against a coming freelance payment, and I’ll still get home in time to whip up dinner. (Tomorrow: seared Moulard duck breast.) One of these months, I might even pay the mortgage—just for kicks, you know. I wouldn’t want Jean to think she’d married a rich man.

–Matt

What does it mean to be outearned by your wife? I had better figure that out, because after some back-and-forth over the last 18 years—times when we were both broke, or living off of her student loans, or off my lousy salary—we have now reached what is likely a permanent income imbalance. As my colleagues here have pointed out, wordsmithing doesn’t pay what it used to. And my wife now has an advanced degree and an actual profession.

We are part of the vanguard, I suppose: as Liz Mundy recently pointed out in The Atlantic , nearly 40 percent of wives outearn their husbands, and that number is growing.

So, does income disparity flip some kind of gender switch? Do I take over that section of home life that my wife used to inhabit (among her duties: sewing, light cooking, choosing Pandora channels, putting the kids to bed, giving a shit about the PTA)?

With us, so far, the answer is no.

Yes, I take the kids to school in the morning because she goes to work at first light. And sometimes I’ll have to cover things solo if she’s running late at the end of the day because her work schedule can be non-negotiable in ways that mine isn’t.

But when Mundy wrote in her same post that wives outearning husbands “can powerfully affect relationship dynamics,”,I don’t see it. My wife and I still maintain the same mix of unpredictable gender assignments. I still do the majority of the cooking, but that’s because I enjoy it and the men in my family have always been the cooks. My wife still puts the kids to bed, no matter her outside workload, both because she wants to, and because I usually have some sports that need watching.

A useful parallel for me is driving. My wife is a better driver than I. She’s from LA; she’s got smog and road rage in her DNA. I’m from Key West, a small island where traffic still stops for conversations between drivers and on the weekends many of us are too drunk to even ride bicycles. But when my wife and I are together, in big cities and small, I like to drive, and she likes to have me drive. Men have been driving their wives around since long before Apollonia Corleone got blown up, and that’s exactly what my wife and I do.

Gender is not a house of cards that collapses when you take away one element. I am still hotheaded, broad-shouldered, sports-addicted, and foolishly optimistic about home improvement projects. Those things and the other dozen typically male characteristics I have won’t change just because my wife makes more than I.

You know how some people like to talk about a post-racial society but it’s complete bullshit because no matter who is president, race still matters in this country? Well, it’s equally fallacious to think that changing income structure alone will change the power balance of the sexes, in the home or outside the home. We are not post-gender, no matter what the economic trends are. Women who earn more than their husbands still earn less than their colleagues. They still have their basic reproductive rights threatened constantly. They still are underrepresented in every level of leadership.

And on a more personal level, they still have to solve one of the oldest and most intractable problems of all: how to share their daily lives with men. That’s because, no matter what my wife says, I am still the man of the house, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.

–Nathan

DadWagon + The Atlantic, Volume 1: We Take Care of our Kids, Dammit

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Originally posted at The Atlantic

Hey, guys,

Several times a day, after my infant daughter, Sammy, finishes breastfeeding, my wife, Jean, will hand her over to me and say, “Can you burp her?” And I will duly pick Sammy up, put her over my shoulder, and lightly pound her back until she emits a belch. Done!

Now, Jean is not asking me to do the burping because she’s exhausted (although she is). No, she’s asking because, frankly, I’m better at coaxing bubbles from the baby’s belly, just as I’m better at certain of the other household tasks I’ve gravitated toward ever since our first daughter, Sasha, was born almost four years ago: planning and preparing our meals, getting Sasha up and dressed in the morning, arranging playdates, putting the kids to bed—all duties that, until not too long ago, were considered a mother’s natural province.

Today, of course, the End of Men has arrived, and we’re hip-deep in the swamp of the stay-at-home-dad trend. From enlightened-liberal metropolises to small-town U.S.A., fathers are voluntarily taking on the challenge of parenthood in ways that previous generations never could have imagined, and decrying media images of men as incompetent, bumbling, or, worse, absent from active parenting entirely. We exist! they seem to cry en masse. And more and more, that cry is being heard.

It’s now time for that cri de coeur to evolve, and for men to proclaim, gently and kindly, that we may be, in some cases, “better moms”—caregivers, that is—than moms. We are—if you believe the classical stereotypes—less emotional and more practical, approaching child-care problems with a perhaps scientific detachment not to be found in women who, having spent those long months pregnant, may take those problems personally. Whether it’s swaddling an infant, precision placement of a princess Band-Aid, or soothing hurt feelings (“Paige said she’s not my friend anymore!”), a little emotional distance, data analysis, and hardheaded strategizing can go a long way. And men are, supposedly, better at that stuff.

As provocative as I’m trying to make this argument, I’d like to think this is, in fact, a feminist stance. That is, if women can be as good or better—and better, as Hanna Rosin argues—as men at certain jobs, then why can’t we say the same for men, too? Equality of the sexes doesn’t mean we’re all actually equal. It means we all have equal potential to excel, independent of the shape of our genitalia. If that means that dads start outmothering moms, we have to look at that as progress. So when it comes time to bake cupcakes for pre-K (oh crap, that’s next week!), the other moms better watch out, because I make a mean buttercream frosting. Just don’t ask me to breastfeed.

–Matt

Some years back, in that gauzy era of irresponsibility and moral turpitude that I enjoyed before making babies, I visited a friend whose wife was pregnant. Now, one unhappy by-product of my current status as a volume kid-maker (I have three) is that I can no longer recall with clarity events that have occurred more than, say, 15 to 20 seconds ago. So I don’t remember how I let myself be drawn into a discussion about children with my friend’s wife. At some point, though, we reached the calamitous moment (for me) when she—a third-trimester, impregnated human female and former child actress with a decidedly still-dramatic temperament—declared that she would love her future child more deeply than her husband would. Indeed, she said, all mothers love their children more than fathers, largely because the twin burdens of pregnancy and childbirth cleaved them together in ways men could not match. The feeling, she further implied, was mutual: Children love their mothers more than their fathers.

Before I proceed with the remainder of this story, I’d like to point out that I’m an idiot. This is something that my fellow DadWagon colleagues will readily confirm, and I won’t belabor the page with substantial proof of this, other than to submit my response to my friend’s wife’s assertion. I laughed—one could even say I chuckled with some condescension—at a woman seven months pregnant, which means I crossed a seething cauldron of anger, resentment, back pain, urinary urgency, and ill restraint. I also let slip these words: Now, now—I don’t remember much, but I do remember that fucking “now, now”—That’s a bad way to think about parenting. Your kids, if they know you think that way, will learn to associate love with pain, and that’s not healthy.”

Do I need mention that she ordered me out of the house? Eventually, she forgave me, or at least she said she did, and now, with time and my own reproductive experiences highlighting my foolishness, I wonder if she was right. My children love me, and yes, like Matt, there are certain things I accomplish with them more easily (putting them to bed springs to mind) than their mother, but the maternal bond is powerful, something hardwired into their psyches, like the Love version of whatever goes on in the amygdala.

Here’s the thing, and I offer this question without truly knowing the answer: So what?

I am their father, I have their love, and they are tied to me in whatever way they are tied to me. If the nine-month swim in their mother’s belly, combined with the whitewater (sort of) rush out of her body and into the world, proffers some greater kinship, what possible difference can it make to me? They remain my children, nevertheless.

Let’s say my wife and I divorced. Would we line the kids up, like dogs, and call to them, vying for their loyalty, and whomever they came to got to keep them? (Efficient, yes, but think of the lawyers! They need to eat, too, no?)

Holding the upper hand in parental competence, affection, or connection strikes me as unimportant when compared to the greater task of raising them to know not to give advice to pissed off pregnant women. There are weightier issues demanding my guidance—who else will teach them dirty jokes, long division, the categorical imperative—and it does no good to get hung up on trying to outdo their mother.

So I don’t care who is good at what, who loves whom more than me, and I never, ever attempt to out-mommy Mommy. It is a game I suspect I can lose only by trying. And idiot or no, I know that however much love I receive is more, far more, than enough.

 

–Theodore

If we’re going to debate Matt’s insufferably squishy thesis that dads can out-mom moms, at least let me start with a memory from my time in construction, where gender issues are notably simplified. I was in my early 20s, installing insulation and sheetrock for $8 an hour in Florida. I had just-longer-than-shoulder-length hair (thank you, Tim Lincecum, for still trying to make that work), and a slight build. In the eyes of my foreman, this combination was downright womanly. He thought up a catchphrase for me. If I took too long on a smoke break, or was otherwise wasting time, he always growled the same thing: “Stop waiting to grow a pussy. Get to work.”

There was plenty to dislike about the guy—beyond the chauvinism and general cloddiness, he stiffed our crew out of a week’s pay and skipped town—but I hear an echo of the foreman’s, um, gender essentialism in Matt’s concept of out-momming moms. For the foreman, long hair=woman. For Matt, good parenting=mothering.

Saying that good fathers—the ones who get on the floor to play with their babies, who pack lunch for their preschoolers and help their second-graders with their homework—are just acting like mothers is demeaning to all sides. If men and women have proven anything in the last decade of bloggy introspection, it’s this chiasmus: Not all mothers are good parents and not all good parents are mothers.

In my post-construction life here in New York, I’ve got a fairly steady routine. I wake early, I pee standing up, I get the kids ready and take them to school. That is, I’m both a man and (hopefully) a decent parent.

I’ll also take issue with Theodore’s anatomical absolutism. I can’t presume to know what special bond arises from carrying, or having been carried, in utero. But there are plenty of orphans and adoptees who form full relationships with non-biological parents. And if you start defining parenting through genitalia, before long, you’re Little Hans’s father, promising your son that you won’t cut his balls off because Freud thought the boy needed to hear that.

And I don’t know of any parent who wants to go there.

–Nathan

Tonight, Murders

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From the NYT website: Lucia Krim

It’s late and I just finished watching a baseball game that I was pretty psyched about until a couple minutes afterwards when all my Twitters and Facebook timelines seemed to light up with this news:

2 Siblings Killed in New York City; Nanny Arrested

I didn’t know the family involved, although apparently the father was a media executive. He has a Twitter account that he fills with links to CNBC articles. I live close to them, but not that close: about 20 blocks away. We once thought about sending our daughter to the same Spanish-language school they sent their daughter Lucia to.

On the other hand, they likely had more money than me. Maybe they voted Republican or ate different ice cream flavors than I do, or perhaps there were other reasons why I might see myself as different from this family.

But I am actually not at all different from these people. Neither are you. Neither is anyone who has ever placed their children in the care of strangers: just left them with a nanny or a camp counselor or a teenaged babysitter or teacher taking a class to the park, or even an in-law or some other relative. I can’t say I’ve ever entertained the idea that you might come home and find your children murdered. But I have had a much less articulate sense, when I’m paying attention, that there is risk in all the choices we make. I choose to go for drinks with my wife and hire a babysitter while we’re out?  Risk. You make one decision, one trade-off, in a lifetime of compromises and small risks, and something like this can happen.

Do what this mother did, which was to take her middle kid swimming, and that can be that. This transcends neighborhood or income: in the Upper West Side, it’s a swimming class; in the Bronx it’s a basketball tournament (where four-year-old Lloyd Morgan was murdered earlier this summer). I’d guess that these murders will get more ink than those in the Bronx, which also sucks, but for reasons that seem best talked about another time.

Something else that is terrible: blogging. We do it here. The mother of these children did it on her blog. The link is here. I could hardly even bear to look at it at first, because the kids are in there walking around the neighborhood and I was especially transfixed by the oldest girl, who is exactly as old as my daughter, and looks just like any other kid anywhere. The thought of her murdered is just a bit overwhelming.

There is, though, another side to looking at the blog. Those kids were happy. I don’t understand the spiritual mechanics of how kids arrive on this earth, and I certainly don’t understand how they get chosen for a death like that. But I do understand happy kids. They were lucky kids, for those weeks, months, and years that their happiness lasted. They never knew bitterness or hunger. And then, mercifully quick, it was all over.

Brooklyn Celebrity Parents: The Big Question

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Not all that long ago, Jean, Sasha, and I were having lunch at Bark, the actually kind of awesome hot dog place on Bergen between Fifth and Flatbush. As we were eating—or, I guess, as we cajoled and threatened Sasha into eating her hot dog—I glanced over my shoulder and noticed a woman talking with the owner/manager. She had one preschool-age kid running around her, and another, younger kid strapped to her chest. She looked awfully familiar—something about the set of her mouth, her height, the fair color of her skin.

Oh, right: Maggie Gyllenhaal.

This being Brooklyn, it was no surprise to see a celebrity parent in our midst, and I did nothing whatsoever to react to the sighting. What could I say, anyway? “I loved when James Spader jerked off on you in Secretary!”? Not cool. Maybe I could tell her how much I like her Björn, but she’d probably understand I was really talking about that scene in Secretary.

And, as I said, this is Brooklyn—and the Park Slope/Bocococococan part of Brooklyn, too. This is supposed to be the place where parenting makes you special, not which Batman films you’ve appeared in and which movie stars have pretended to masturbate upon you. Ignoring the obvious is how we all get along.

But it did make me wonder: With so many celebrities in this part of the borough, how do they interact with each other? What happens when Maggie Gyllenhaal bumps into, say, Michelle Williams over at Trader Joe’s, with all their kids in tow? What about when Adrian Grenier checks out Patrick Stewart’s groceries at the Park Slope Food Co-op? Do they acknowledge each other, assuming that their common life in the spotlight bonds them together? Or do they ignore each other entirely, since this is Brooklyn, after all? Or maybe they do as we’d do and interact in a sidelong way, by complimenting the kids’ outfits or gossiping about the Montessori kindergarten teachers?

Or do they just go home and post about it on their little-read blogs?