The “His” and “Hers” of Sharing: Greg and Carol Alston
AT 7:45 one Sunday morning I slowly drive my car up a newly paved street lined with young trees and clusters of two-story homes that form a curving line up a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It has the feel of a new housing development; along each street the shrubs are sculpted with the same taste. Streets have names like Starview, Overlook, Bayside, and though the traffic goes back and forth only within the development, there are ten-mile-an-hour signs every half block, as if an informal understanding could not be trusted. Between groups of every six houses, ivy lawns sprawl into large communal spaces, and mailboxes are clustered under a small, communal mailbox roof. It was a developer’s attempt at community.
At this hour the empty sidewalks are strewn with Sunday newspapers. Other times of day I see only employees—a Chinese gardener trimming, a Chicano handyman fixing floodlights, two white workmen carrying rolls of carpeting from their truck to a home. Half the units are filled with retired couples, Carol Alston tells me later, and the other half with two-income families. “The elderly don’t talk much to the young, and the working couples are too busy to be neighborly: it’s the kind of place that could be neighborly, but isn’t.”
Greg Alston answers the door. At thirty-seven, Greg is a boyish, sandy-haired man with gold-rimmed glasses, dressed in well-worn jeans and a T-shirt. Also at the door is Daryl, three, with a dimple-cheeked grin. He has bare feet, and shoes in hand. “Carol’s still asleep,” Greg tells me, “and Beverly [their three-month-old baby] is about to wake up.” I settle in the living room, again the “family dog,” and listen as the household wakes up. At 7:15 Greg has risen, at 7:30 Daryl, and now, at 8:00, Beverly is up. For a while, only Greg and Daryl are downstairs. Greg is talking to Daryl about tying shoes, Daryl is discussing the finer distinctions between Batdog, Spiderbat, Aquaman, and Aquababy. Soon, Carol has dressed and calls out to me; I help her make the bed. She breastfeeds Beverly and puts her in a swing that is hung near the dining-room table between two sets of poles; the swing is kept in motion by a mechanical bear, whose weight, as it gradually slides down one of the poles, drives the mechanism that moves the swing. As Carol cleans off the dining-room table and does the dishes, she tells me about a wild two-year-old child of friends whom they had taken to Marine World Saturday, and who had thrown a metal car at the baby. She begins making pecan and apple pancakes for breakfast. Greg is repairing a torn water bed downstairs. Each parent has one child.
Carol, thirty-five, is dressed in a jogging suit and sneakers. She has short-cropped hair, no makeup, tiny stud earrings. There is something pleasantly no-nonsense in her look and a come-on-and-join-me quality to her laugh. She and Greg have shared an extremely happy marriage for eleven years.
Carol is not trying to integrate family life with the demands of a fast-track corporate career like that of Nina Tanagawa. Three years before, she had quit what she called her “real” job on the fast-track as a systems analyst and begun freelance consulting for twenty-five hours a week. As a child, Carol had always envisioned having a career, and, as an adult, she’d always had one. She says she’s always divided the work at home 50-50. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a feminist,” she tells me, as if studying the term from a distance, “but yes, Greg and I have always shared at home, no discussion about it, up until I went part time, of course.”
From the beginning, Greg wanted Carol to work and, in fact, told me he felt “upset” when she went part time since he missed her income. For seven out of their eleven years together, Carol earned as much as a systems analyst as he earned as a dentist. In fact, she now earned part time almost as much as Greg earned full time. “The more income she makes,” Greg said, “the earlier we can retire.”
For the past three years, since having Daryl, Carol’s strategy has been to reduce her hours and emotional involvement at work, and to do most of the second shift. But the couple would share again after next November, she said, when they planned to fulfill an eleven-year dream of escaping the gridlock traffic and drugs and racial violence of the urban schools to move to a tiny town in the Sierra mountains called Little Creek. There Greg, too, would take up part-time work. The Alstons have always loved boating and camping; in Little Creek they could enjoy the outdoors in a 50-50 version of a Rousseauist retreat from modern life. They are among the lucky few who could afford this. In short, the financial and ideological stage was set for them to really share the work of the home.
Apart from work at home, Greg and Carol shared the life of the home. If a home could talk, the Alstons’ place would say a lot about their closeness and the importance of their children to them. Theirs is a comfortable, unpretentiously furnished, ranch-style home, designed so that if you close all the doors, Greg in the kitchen can see Carol in the dining room or living room. A picture over the mantel shows a dreamy child blowing at a balloonlike moon. Beneath it are porcelain ABC blocks, a German beer stein, and wedding photos of brothers and sisters. Each sitting area throughout the house shows some material indication of the presence of children: a crib in a circle of living-room chairs, a tiny rocker in an alcove, Daryl’s pictures taped to the refrigerator, and a hook to hang his Batman cape on. Upstairs, above Carol’s desk, hangs her framed college diploma, her CPA certificate, her state board of accountancy certificate; and beside these are corresponding documents for Greg, a picture of Daryl, and a photo of Carol and Greg white-water rafting. Hanging in the garage are two homemade “dancer” kayaks. (“We made them with a group of boating friends,” said Carol. “A girlfriend and I made meat loaf and we just kept painting all day.”) Daryl’s room is a cooperative effort too. Carol had hung a “star chart” on computer paper on Daryl’s door; he had earned one star beside BRUSH TEETH, three beside PICK UP CLOTHES, and none beside PUT NEWSPAPER IN BOX, CARRY BEVERLY’S BAG, or GET UNDRESSED. Greg had designed Daryl’s walnut built-in crib and ladder, and set up the electric car tracks. Carol had bought the elephant lamp with the party hat between its ears and the colored beanie on its rump. Everything seems integrated with everything else.
There is only one sad note: hanging in the hallway is a framed, glass-covered composition of the wedding invitations of four couples, their closest friends. In the middle, as if joining the couples together, is a $20 bill. It captures a moment of whimsy and exuberance, and expresses the idea of a gamble. “We made a bet that whoever got married last had to pay the others twenty dollars,” Carol explained. Then she grew quiet. “Tim and Jane—the ones in the right top—are divorced, and Jim and Emily, on the bottom left, are in trouble.” The Alstons’ move to Little Creek would certainly solve the traffic problem, but perhaps they also hoped it would remove them from today’s strains on marriage.
Either member of the couple was often doing something for the other. If Carol was holding Beverly she might ask Greg, “Could you feed the cat the dry food?” When Greg was hammering on a fixture in the bedroom and the phone rang, he said, “Can you get it?” One adult was as likely as the other to answer the phone or chat with a neighbor.
They handled the usual tensions at dinnertime in a similar way. Whenever his parents cast out a line of marital communication over the dinner table, Daryl would grab it. “Michael hasn’t signed the contract yet,” Greg would say to Carol. “The Michael from my school?” Daryl would butt in. “No, a different Michael that Daddy and Mommy know,” Carol would answer. At dinner, it was as often Carol as Greg who answered Daryl’s questions.
When he was home, Greg spent as much time involved with the household as Carol did; and he tried to maximize his time at home. On the weekends, whatever each was doing, they invested the same amount of time in their work. In all, Greg contributed more time to the second shift than Evan Holt, Frank Delacorte, Peter Tanagawa, Robert Myerson, or Ray Judson. Both Carol and Greg felt the arrangement worked well.
On the other hand, in some ways they did not share. Carol cut back her hours of work and changed her philosophy of work after Beverly’s birth, whereas Greg told me that not much changed for him. If real sharing means sharing the daily or weekly tasks, then again, they didn’t really share. Whether she worked full time, time and a half, or half time, Carol was responsible for the daily and weekly chores such as cooking, shopping, and laundry in addition to such nondaily chores as shopping for children’s clothes, remembering birthdays, caring for house plants, and taking family photos. Greg’s housework list was mainly made up of nondaily chores: household repairs, paying bills, and repairing both cars.
Carol was not a supermom like Nina Tanagawa. Nor did she passively renegotiate marital roles, as Carmen Delacorte did “playing dumb.” Nor did she stage a “sharing showdown” as did Nancy Holt through her Monday-you-cook, Tuesday-I-cook scheme. But, over a period of time, Carol pursued several other strategies. First, when the demands of work went up, her production at home went down. As she explained, “When I worked full time, we both ate a big lunch at work, and Daryl eats at day care, so I didn’t cook.” Carol also cut back at work, and from time to time renegotiated roles with Greg. These were her three strategies, and Greg had a fourth. He evened out the score, it seemed, by seeing how long Carol was taking with the cooking, cleaning, and tending the children, and kept at his woodworking until she stopped. That way, Greg was working “as long as” Carol, only on his projects. These were not hobbies like Evan Holt’s projects “downstairs.” Greg often checked his projects with Carol, did them in an order she would suggest, or consulted her on the colors, sizes, and shapes of the things that he made. What Greg did profited them both, but it was not sharing the daily chores and did not take the pressure off Carol.
Compared to Carol, Greg did less with the children and more with the house. He was the handyman. He looked at the mantelpiece with a carpenter’s eye; he thought about repairs on the septic tank in the backyard of the house in Little Creek. Carol was the parent who noticed a developing hole in Daryl’s trousers. At one point, as Greg pulled out the vacuum cleaner, he quipped, “Carol’s just a woman. She hasn’t vacuumed for so long, she’d have to relearn. A man better handle this.” But, in fact, 80 percent of his tasks that day put him on the male side of the gender line.
Too, Carol was more child-centered than Greg when she was with the children. For example, when each parent stopped occasionally during the day to talk with me, usually Daryl was there, trying to join in (he loved talking into my tape recorder) or to get his parent’s attention. Carol would give Daryl time. (“Yes, Daryl, I think that Superman can fly higher than Batman. What do you think?”) But Greg would tell Daryl, “Daddy has to talk with Arlie,” or “If you don’t stop making that noise, you’ll have to go to your room,” or “Go see Mommy.”
Carol’s breast-feeding of Beverly gave her a natural advantage in forming a close bond with the baby. Some fathers of nursing infants gently rock them, burp them, change them, and do everything they can until the baby drinks from a bottle, at which point the male disadvantage disappears. Other men seem to avoid their infants, focusing on older children, if they have them, until the baby is weaned. Greg took a middle path. He focused his attention on Daryl. It was he who usually helped Daryl put his pajamas on, had a “peeing contest” with him in the toilet (Daryl loved that), and tucked him warmly in bed.
Greg would take care of Beverly when Carol needed him to; but he held her like a football, and when she cried, he sometimes tossed her in the air, which made her cry more. Now when Greg picked her up, half the time she was calm and half the time fussy. The family explanation for this was that “Beverly doesn’t like men.” As Carol told me flatly, “Beverly fusses when men pick her up, except for her grandfather.” But the only men who picked Beverly up were Greg and her grandfather.
Was this constitutional with three-month-old Beverly? Or was it “natural” male ineptitude on the part of Greg? I was wondering this when a telling episode occurred: Beverly was in her rocker in a pink dress and booties. Carol was cooking. After a while, Beverly began to fuss, then cry. Greg unbuckled her from the bear swing and held her, but she still cried. He sat with her at the dining-room table, trying to read over a dentistry magazine. She wailed. Greg called out, “Mom, come!” and explained to me again that “Beverly doesn’t like men.” I recalled a certain way I used to comfort my sons, bobbing slowly up and down as well as forward and back (we called it the “camel walk”), asked if I could try, demonstrated it, and she calmed down. Greg replied, “Oh, I know about that one. It works fine. But I don’t want to have to get up. See, when Carol teaches night class Tuesdays, I have her all night and I don’t want her getting used to it.” To relieve Carol, Greg very often took care of Beverly “anyway.” But however unconsciously, he seemed to resist the extra effort of taking care of three-month-old Beverly in a way she liked.
Parents can offer contact to the child in the very way they talk. Carol could be saying, “You have your gray pants on today,” or “Do you want your apple cut up?” Her voice conveyed a sense of welcoming attachment. She used a “primary parent voice.” Along with making one’s lap available for sitting, or rotating one’s head to keep sensing where a child is, it is this primary parent’s voice that makes a child feel safe. Greg used it intermittently in the course of the day; Carol used it all the time.
One Tuesday, when Carol was teaching an evening class in a business school, I could hear the garage door closing, and the sound of Greg in the kitchen scraping the pizza pan in the kitchen sink. Soon Daryl came into the kitchen and the two went to watch TV. Once Mousterpiece Theater was over and an absorbing documentary about an expeditionary team climbing Mount Everest had caught Greg’s attention, Daryl moved to imaginative play with a car. He began to tell a long tale about a frog going “fribbit, fribbit” in the car. The documentary was now at a dramatic moment when the team had nearly reached the top. The expedition’s doctor was telling an indispensable team member that his lungs could not take the climb. Greg was listening to “fribbit, fribbit” with half an ear. He tried to draw his son’s attention to the program with fatherly explanations about yaks and snow caves, but no dice. Daryl brought out some cards and said, “Dad, let’s play.” “I don’t know how,” Greg replied. “You can read the directions,” Daryl suggested. “No,” Greg said. “Wait for your mom. She knows how.”
During the season when she was working longer hours than Greg, Carol said, “There have been nights when I’ve come home and Daryl’s dinner was popcorn.” “Does he do that as a treat for Daryl?” I asked. “No, just lazy,” she said with a laugh.
Greg was a very good helper, but he was not a primary parent. Many of his interactions with Daryl took the form of inspiring fear and then making a joke of it. For example, one evening when Daryl had finished dipping his dessert candies into his milk, and was waiting to be taken out of his high chair with milky hands, Greg playfully wiped his hands with a cloth, took the boy out of his high chair, and held him upside down. “I’m going to wash you off in the dishwasher.” “No!” “Yes! You’re going to be shut inside to get all cleaned off.” “Haah.” The boy half-realized his father was joking, and was half-afraid. Only when a sound of alarm continued in Daryl’s voice did Greg turn him right side up and end the joke. Again, when Greg was fixing the water bed with some pliers, he held the pliers up to Daryl. “These are good for taking off eyelashes.” “No!” “Yes, they are!” Only when the boy took the pliers and held them toward the father’s eye, did Greg say, “That’s dangerous.”
There were safer jokes that Daryl always got. “Daddy’s going to take off Daryl’s nose and eat it.” Or, “I’m going to throw your nose down the garbage disposal.” But another often-repeated joke was a less sure bet: “Ow. You kicked me. I’m going to kick you back.” As often as not there was a scuffle, serious protest from Daryl, and serious explanation from his father that it was “just a joke.” All these were gestures unconsciously designed, perhaps, to “toughen” him up, to inoculate him against fear, to make him into a soldierly little man.
Carol warned me early on that “some people think Greg has a disquieting sense of humor.” When I talked to him alone, Greg said spontaneously, “Sometimes Carol doesn’t understand my sense of humor. Daryl doesn’t either. But it’s how I am.” Greg’s “humor” was unusual among the families I studied, but only in degree. Fathers tended toward “toughening” jokes more than mothers did.
Some fathers answered children’s cries less readily, and with a different mental set. One father worked at home in a study looking out on the living room where a sitter tended his nine-month-old son. When asked whether his son’s cries disturbed his work, he said, “No problem, I actually want him to fall and bang himself, to get hurt a little. I don’t want him to have a fail-safe world.” When we’d finished the interview, the husband asked his wife (who also works at home) how she would have answered the same question. She said immediately, “I hate to hear him cry.”
Many parents seem to enter a cycle, whereby the father passes on the “warrior training” he received as a boy, knowing his wife will fulfill the child’s more basic need for warmth and attachment. Knowing she’s there, he doesn’t need to change. At the same time, since the husband is rougher on the children, the wife doesn’t feel comfortable leaving them with him more, and so the cycle continues. Greg carried this warrior training further than most fathers, but the cycle was nearly obscured by the overall arrangement whereby Greg and Carol “shared” the second shift.
Primary parenting has to do with forging a strong, consistent trusting attachment to a child. For small children, a steady diet of “toughening” is probably not good primary parenting. But Greg could afford his “jokes,” because Carol would come forward with her warm, outreaching voice and watchful eye, to neutralize their effect.
Ironically, Greg felt more confident about his parenting than Carol felt about hers. For Greg compared himself to his father, who was less expressive than he, while Carol compared herself to the baby-sitter, whom she thought more patient and motherly. Neither drew a comparison to the other.
The main strategy that either Carol or Greg pursued was Carol’s quitting her full-time job, and this had important consequences for her. As she explained: “After Daryl was born, I stayed home for six months, and I discovered how much of my self-esteem was wrapped up in money. Being out of work, I felt really inferior. When I went out to the supermarket in the morning, I felt fat [she hadn’t lost the weight from her pregnancy] and dumb. I wanted to go up to the people in the aisles and say, ‘I have an MBA! I have an MBA!’ I didn’t want to be classified as a dumb housewife.”
Like an urbanized peasant might feel returning to a land he had ambivalently left behind, Carol now felt a mixture of scorn, envy, and compassion for the housewives shopping in the market. She mused: “I learned not to judge. Whereas before, if I saw a woman with a kid, I would think, ‘What is she doing? Why isn’t she doing something productive with her life?’ I think I was partly jealous, too. You go into the store in the middle of the day, there are all these thirty-year-olds shopping. I mean, where do they get the money? It made me wonder if there’s some easier way to do this.”
After a while, Carol began to feel an affinity with women who didn’t work outside the home:
I don’t know whether I’m rationalizing in order to feel good about myself while I’m not working, or whether I’m on to the innermost truth. But I’ve changed my perspective. I’ve missed the sexy part of business, going out to lunch, talking about big deals, talking about things that “really mattered.” Only over the past few years have I realized how superficial that life really is. In the long run, what’s important is Daryl, Beverly, Greg, and my friends—some of those friends are work friends whom I will carry in my heart to the grave.
I have a different identity now. I don’t feel like I have to have a job. Greg shouldn’t have to have one either.
Meanwhile, Greg’s routine didn’t change much, nor did his perspective.
Carol would have preferred for Greg to go light on the “pliers jokes,” the “you-hit-me” jokes, the fatherhood of toughening. She would have preferred that Greg give Daryl something more than popcorn for dinner. In short, Carol wanted Greg to act more like a primary parent. But she didn’t press him to change his ways. She was grateful that he woke up with Daryl Saturday mornings, and worked the second shift as hard as he did.
Carol and Greg present a certain paradox. Both believed in sharing both housework and child care. This is the first side of the paradox. On the other hand, in the psychological fabric of home life Carol was far more central. Each side of this paradox poses a question. First, why did they believe in sharing? After all, the Delacortes, the Tanagawas, and indeed 40 percent of the women and three-quarters of the men in this study did not believe in it.
In Carol’s background was hidden an important experience that may have fueled her strong desire to be an independent career woman, and to adopt the view of sharing that, in the late 1980s in her professional circle, went with it. Carol remembers her mother—a navy wife left alone for six months at a time to care for two small children—as an example of womanhood to avoid. As Carol realized: “I remember her dressed all day in her nightgown, sighing. My sister says our mother was suicidal. I don’t remember that. But she did try to leave us. My sister and I were into normal mischief and wouldn’t go to bed. My mother said, ‘Well, I’m leaving.’ And she walked out the door. I can remember telling my sister, ‘Don’t worry. I know how to make soup.’”
Through her early twenties she had few thoughts of marriage or children, and Greg won her heart only by gallantly declining a big job offer in another city in order to be with her. (Many happily married women described some early gesture of sacrifice that convinced them this was the right man for them.) “I was strong-minded,” she said, “and I wanted a man who would never let me down.” Part of “never letting her down” was probably connected to Greg’s continued involvement at home.
For his part, Greg wanted Carol to work and to share the second shift. Carol speculated that it was because Greg’s mother had worked full time from when he was five years old. “I thank Meg [Greg’s mother] for setting him an example of how independent a woman can be.” After Greg was five, his father retired from the army, got a teaching credential, taught math and wood shop in middle school, and was home when Greg returned from school. His mother worked overtime as a secretary in order to make ends meet and his father shared the second shift.
The other side of the paradox is that, despite their modern belief in sharng work at home, Carol and Greg implemented this belief in a traditional way. Some traditional men such as Peter Tanagawa actually parented their children in a more “motherly” way than Greg did. Again, why? Greg commented:
My dad never touched me much. He was probably afraid. Plus, my dad is quiet, like I am. He doesn’t express himself. I have reflected upon the fact that I don’t embrace my dad. About six months ago, when he was here, I accidentally embraced him. I’m glad I did. He commented on it. He said that I hadn’t hugged him for years. He used to wrestle with me a lot but that stopped after I started to beat him at fourteen. After that we didn’t really touch. I don’t know whether it was him or me, but it stopped.
Perhaps Greg’s awkward way of holding his daughter and his aggressive joking with his son expressed a fear of getting close. Perhaps his jokes were a verbal stand-in for the old boxing matches. But time had brought change.
Greg would plant many small kisses on Daryl’s cheek each night, and from time to time hug Daryl in the course of tussling with him. Greg was, he felt, far more physically affectionate with Daryl than his father had been with him.
Greg was not as much a primary parent as were some men nor was Carol as ardently committed to getting him to become one as some women were. Part of the reason seemed to be that Carol discovered she enjoyed parenting. After all, she had completely put off thoughts of children until her thirties, and a few months after her son was born, she’d put him in the care of a baby-sitter for ten hours a day. (Even now she urged Greg’s mother to live near them in Little Creek to help “raise the kids.”) Unlike some women, Carol had not been attached to the idea of being the main parent until her second child was born. Now parenting was more important, perhaps because she found in it a way to reparent herself.
The greater importance of parenthood for Carol may illustrate the theory Nancy Chodorow offers in her book The Reproduction of Mothering.1 Chodorow argues that women develop a greater desire to be a mother than men do to be fathers. This is because as children most boys and girls are both brought up by mothers. Socially speaking, this need not be; after a child is born, fathers can care for children as well as mothers, she argues. But as long as it is women who mother, boys and girls will develop different “gender personalities,” which alter their later motives and capacities. Both girls and boys first fuse with the mother. But when girls grow up, they seek to recapitulate this early fusion with the mother by becoming mothers themselves. When boys grow up, they try to recapitulate that early fusion by finding a woman “like mother.” The reason girls and boys recapitulate this early fusion in different ways is that girls are females, like their mothers, and can more readily identify with her than boys can. According to Chodorow, because mothers are the object of the child’s earliest attachment, boys and girls differ in another aspect of “gender personality.” Girls are more empathic, more able to know how others feel than boys, though they are less able than boys to maintain a clear boundary between themselves and others.
Chodorow’s theory deals with the familial origins of men’s and women’s motives for becoming parents. By her mid-thirties, motherhood was a more central identity to Carol than fatherhood was to Greg, and perhaps this was one reason why.
But in Chodorow’s theory, all women come out pretty much alike. Her theory doesn’t explain why some women like Adrienne Sherman felt no urge to be the primary parent, while Carmen Delacorte had always felt a strong urge, and Carol Alston only came to feel it in her middle thirties. Carol didn’t want her husband involved at home as ardently as Nancy Holt did, but she clearly didn’t want to “protect” her husband from the burden of parenthood like Ann Myerson, nor did she want him in the picture mainly to exert authority, as did Carmen Delacorte. Clearly women’s motives differ enormously because of other things.
In Chodorow’s theory, all men are pretty much alike too. So we don’t know why Evan Holt and Seth Stein are so disinterested in fatherhood while Art Winfield and Michael Sherman have immersed themselves so passionately in it. Clearly, other factors—the quality of a person’s early bonds with their mother and father, and broader cultural messages about manhood and womanhood—enter in. The concept of gender strategy adds to Chodorow’s theory an interpretation of the remarkable differences we find between some men and other men, and between some women and other women.
To understand why Carol and Greg Alston’s approach to parenthood is different from that of other couples, we need to take account of other kinds of motives—Carol’s desire to be different from her own mother, unfused with her, joined instead with Greg. It is probably true that, for better or worse, Carol’s mother was a more important figure to her than her father. She criticized her mother. She didn’t like her. But she talked about her mother far more, and with greater feeling, than she talked about her father. So, in that respect Carol fits Chodorow’s theory. But because this fusion was problematic for Carol, she had invested a great deal of energy in her early adulthood avoiding motherhood. Now that she was trying it out, it was not so easy for Carol to become a mother-not-like-her-mother; it was frightening. Every bit of Greg’s support helped; and perhaps that was why she wanted Greg by her side at home and believed in 50-50 parenting.
By happily sharing the job of earning money, by not caring much about material things, she freed Greg from worry about being the provider. By expressing gratitude for all he did around the home, she encouraged him to do more. Consciously or not, Carol pursued a strategy of bringing Greg to her side to support her in the task of being a mother-not-like-her-mom.
To understand Carol and Greg, we need something else missing from Chodorow’s theory: culture. Carol’s mother didn’t offer a good example of mothering, but even as a small child Carol had some idea about what “regular” mothers do; there was a culture of motherhood outside her home, and she grew up in it. For some periods of Greg’s boyhood, Greg’s father was a primary parent to him—and thus an exception to Chodorow’s theory—but a primary parent who could hug his son only in a boxer’s clench. This way of being a dad surely has much to do with Greg’s father’s notion of manhood.
Although the cultural shifts and opportunities of the 1980s had led Carol and Greg to a life ideologically and financially removed from patriarchy, that older, entrenched system influenced them anyway. Because conditions were worse for women in general than for men in general, Carol felt more grateful to Greg than he did to her. The love ran both ways, but the gratitude ran more from Carol to Greg. Although Carol had for years earned more money than Greg and taken most of the heat off the second shift, Greg did not spontaneously talk about being grateful for this.
Carol had catalogued a series of “miserable boyfriends” she’d met in college whose laundry she’d washed and whose weekend dinners she’d cooked. Compared to these other possible men, Greg was wonderful. Greg hadn’t washed any girlfriend’s laundry; for him the pickings weren’t so slim. Again, Carol explained: “My God, these single mothers whose husbands don’t see the kids or pay child support. I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t. Being a single mother is the worst thing that can happen to you, next to cancer.” Greg would never leave; Carol was grateful for that. But Greg didn’t feel haunted by a dread of abandonment, by the sense “that could happen to me.” He didn’t picture himself as a single dad. The general supply of male commitment to shared responsibility was far lower than the female demand for it. Through this fact in the wider society, patriarchy tipped the scales inside the Alston marriage. It evoked Carol’s extra thanks.
And her extra thanks inhibited her from making further demands on Greg, who was already doing comparatively so much. Carol had a “wish list” on which sharing primary parenting was probably fourth or fifth after the desire that Greg be healthy, faithful, mentally sound, and able to help provide. Greg had a wish list too, with many of the same wishes. But given the generally worse lot for women, Carol’s extra sense of gratitude and of debt inhibited her from going as far down her wish list as Greg went in his. In this different rate of climb up each wish list, Carol and Greg were like nearly every couple I met. Greg really was unusual, and given the scarcity of such men, Carol was “right” to be grateful. She had fewer options. Equal as they felt they were, the burden of the second shift fell mainly on Carol’s shoulders. And it was the larger, societal support of inequity between the sexes, a system outside of their stable, happy marriage, that indirectly maintained the “his” and “hers” of sharing.