B-Rant

- submitted by L. Keenan on 06/16/2008

  

When Mom and Dad "Share It All," They Pretty Much Fail

By Linda Keenan

Didn't I tell you men kinda suck? A few weeks back I wrote a piece about the reason I felt I could not go back to work: because, as wonderful as my husband is, he is never going to keep on top of the minutiae of making sure our adorable savage is an accepted member of little boy society. The parenthood/work imbalance is such that work for me is always going to lose out.

And so my BFF Rachel, super-duper crazy-smart policy wonk and mom herself, called me last Thursday night and said something like "Oh, the New York Times did a story that was sort of like that thing you wrote about, how men don't do anything, did you see it?"

I say, "Ummm, I'm watching ‘Kathy Griffin - My Life on the D-List' (barely listening to Rachel here). You mean, a magazine piece from a few weeks ago?" And she says, "no, it's the upcoming Times Magazine. It's already online."

I'm thinking, OK, I worked in news and I'm sitting here laughing my a** off at Kathy Griffin and my friend, who didn't work in news, is reading the New York Times for me 3 days ahead of time. Obviously my own junk TV/cultural literacy balance is skewed heavily towards Bravo and its seductive, tranquilizing programs.

Finally, at the Kathy Griffin commercial break, I start focusing on Rachel. After she described the article, I said, excitedly, "oh, is it Lisa Belkin?!"

I've always enjoyed Lisa Belkin's articles about work and family and the push and pull between the two, well before I had a baby, back in the days when all I had to balance was a wine glass (and that stemware didn't always stay in happy equilibrium either).

Her latest article is called "When Mom and Dad Share It All" but really should be called "When Mom and Dad Share It All, and Pretty Much Fail". She profiles 3 couples who work as strenuously at parenting equality as those hardy folks recommending sex, like it or not, every day of the year (frankly, I'd rather have a Pap smear every day than Business Time. Every day? Christmas Eve too? With Santa there? Yuck.)

One couple admits to the division of labor ending up at 60-40% with a lot of "outsourcing" as well (I guess I don't have to tell you who's doing the 60 percent). Another gave up on the dream of equal parenting, and Mom left the work force completely.

Only one of three seems to have struck a balance that allows them both to focus on career and parenthood equally, but it seems to require more talking and hashing out in a week than I've done with my husband in 16 years (granted, neither of us are hashers. We are smolderers. Blame the nuns. I do.)

But rally on, Amy and Marc! Props to you for trying, because the stats Belkin offers up for the vast majority of the rest of America are devastating for anyone dreaming of equality for mothers. "Any way you measure it...women do about twice as much around the house as men {even with both parents working}......Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one."

And that's just housework. As for childcare, when both parents are working, the moms outparent the dads by nearly four to one, in terms of hours spent with the kids. And then comes this clincher quote from a sociologist, and all I can say is, thank God, in her infinite wisdom, that Betty Friedan isn't around to read this one: "The most striking part...is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago."

We've come a long way, Baby! Psych!

And how did I come upon this article again? As you'll recall, it was my super-duper crazy-smart and adorable friend Rachel, Harvard and Cornell grad and full-time mother, who was outside her Upper West Side apartment, and I was at home with Kathy Griffin manning the fort because my husband was doing martial arts.

Why was she outside her apartment? Rachel says she sent the article to her husband just because she thought he would find it interesting, but he seemed to take it as a message. He came home, and said "do you need to go out and take a walk?"

Linda Keenan is a contributing writer at Burbia. Linda worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at Thoroughly Modern Mommy.