Per every metric I’ve come across, men who live with their children today are more involved than the fathers of fifty years ago. Co-residential dads have tripled the amount of time they spend with their kids since 1965.1 Thirty-two percent of fathers in the most recent census reported being a regular source of care for their children, which is up from 26 percent a decade before.2 The National At-Home Dad Network estimates that there are 1.4 million stay-at-home fathers in the U.S., and that this is twice the number there were ten years ago.3 Roughly the same percentage of fathers as mothers report that parenting is extremely important to their identity.4 Mothers spent four times as many hours on child care as fathers in 1965, and only twice as many hours in 2010.5 Cross-nationally, between 1965 and 2003, men’s portion of unpaid family work went from under 20 percent to almost 35 percent,6 where of course it has remained ever since.7
Historians have documented significant changes in fatherhood in the last five hundred years. In colonial times (~1600–1800) work took place on family farms, and men were responsible for their children’s education and moral upbringing. During industrialization (~1800–1950), waged work moved outside the home, bifurcating the lives of Western men and women into separate spheres, the public and the private. Women were tasked with unpaid domestic duty even when they also brought in wages with home-based or other often marginalized efforts. Men went to work in factories and stores. Fathers became distant and uninvolved. Finally, with urbanization in the last half-century-plus, there was an increase in maternal employment and earnings, creating the conditions that spawned the modern, involved father.8 He takes his kids to school. He knows where they keep their socks. He’s responsive to nightmares and to vomit. He does not refer to being alone with his children as babysitting. He attends parent-teacher conferences. He makes dinner some of the time.
The arc of the moral universe is long, and it has bent toward justice, and now women have it better than their mothers and than theirs. You don’t have to be a history major to have absorbed this merciful fact. It wasn’t so long ago that married women had no legal rights at all because they were their husband’s property.9 (Single women belonged to their fathers: The honorifics “Miss” and “Mrs.” serve to clarify whether a woman is beholden to a father or a spouse.)10 Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it was legal for certain classes of employers to fire or refuse to employ a married woman because she already had a job—as the physical and emotional laborer of her family.11 Only in 1980 did the U.S. Census officially stop calling every husband “the head of household.”12 I came of age in a time of equal opportunities in education and entry-level employment for young women, and I assumed this trajectory to have a boundless run. In podcasts, I’d hear women like Sheila Nevins, the longtime president of documentary films at HBO, born in 1939, explaining the difficulty of beginning a career in theater after finishing her MFA at the Yale School of Drama: “[My husband] wanted me home evenings. And he wanted me home weekends. So like theater is evenings and weekends so that nixed any chance of theater.” (This was her first husband, whom she “long ago divorced.”13) But that was marriage in the 1960s. A man could assert his desires and expect his wife to cede to them, no matter the cost to her personhood. It sounded just so very long ago.
Or did it? When George and I moved into our first one-bedroom walk-up a few years before we got married, he soon after volunteered that he would do the vacuuming and the dusting. He liked those things, he told me, and he’d do them every week. What I didn’t say in response, because I was a woman and he was a man, was that being left to clean the bathroom and the kitchen did not float my boat. He could have dusting, which I’d never bothered with anyway, but I wanted vacuuming. If I was going to scrub the bathtub, he needed to do the kitchen floor. I thought to say these things, but time froze, and instead, I didn’t speak because wasn’t I lucky that he wanted to do anything at all. We silently agreed upon the last part. This was in the year 2005.
It’s easier to feel grateful for all that has changed than to acknowledge all that has yet to. Gratitude is the precursor to less conflict rather than more. For women raising children with the modern, involved father, there is some pressure—self-imposed and otherwise—to land on the side of appreciation, of sugar and spice and everything nice. (“When a dad comes, we clap,” reports Jay Miranda, a mother and blogger from Los Angeles, describing her weekly mommy-and-me class.14)
How lucky to share egalitarian ideals about marriage, even if they don’t always manifest in behavior. After all, those ideals are still not universal. Molly, twenty-seven, a foster care worker and mother to a toddler in Tennessee, tells me, “It’s unusual to see equal partnership around here. Even my friends without kids yet will say, ‘I’m working late, so I have to make sure I have dinner prepared for my husband.’ I would die if my husband ever threw a fit because I was working late and he had to feed himself. So when I say I’m grateful to be married to him, I mean it, even though I’m really spent from doing most all the work for our son.”
Shannon, forty-two, an Oklahoma City mother who works as a court liaison, explains to me, “Where I live, it’s still very backwards and old-school. My husband thinks he is supposed to bring home a check and do nothing else. He makes no bones about it. It’s not that bad. He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t drink excessively. I’ve learned how to manage things to where I can keep everything done. There’s no point in fighting about it now, it’s not going to change.” Though she adds, “In all honesty, life would be easier if I were single. I wouldn’t be expecting anyone to help me, and I wouldn’t be upset if they didn’t.” Oklahoma, it’s worth noting, is among the U.S. states with the highest divorce rates.15
Given that there is always a nameless, faceless partner in the background whose laziness or inattentiveness is worse than your husband’s, women who appreciate their lives and their relationships feel reluctant to acknowledge their displeasure. Sociology explains this with relative-deprivation theory: Only when one feels more deprived than other members of her reference group will she feel entitled to adamant protest. Michelle, forty-four, a Portland, Oregon, marketer and mother of a nine-year-old, says, “I don’t know how equitable we are. But I do feel really lucky when I hear about other people’s husbands. I have so many friends whose husbands have never put their child to bed because it’s her job, because she’s the mom.”
Laura, thirty-eight, a New York City business owner and mother of a four-year-old, tells me she feels like a single parent but agrees with her husband that things could be a lot worse. Indeed, her partner’s standard response whenever she tries to address their imbalance is “I do a lot more than other men,” a sentence much easier to utter than “Yes, our arrangements are unfair to you, but that is the lot of women, so suck it up.”
Erica, thirty-eight, a project manager in Portland, Oregon, and the mother of two kids under seven, expresses her mixed feelings like this: “He’s great with the kids when he’s here, and from friends I talk to, my husband does a lot more.” She interrupts her thought to make sure I’ll be changing her name (I am changing all parents’ names). They’ve just started couples therapy, and she feels guilty talking about this. “He’s on his phone or computer while I’m running around like a crazy person getting the kids’ stuff, doing the laundry. He has his coffee in the morning, reading his phone, while I’m packing lunches, getting our daughter’s clothes out, helping our son with his homework. He just sits there. He doesn’t do it on purpose. He has no awareness of what’s happening around him. I ask him about it, and he gets defensive. It’s the same in the evening. He helps with dinner, but then I’m off to doing toothbrushing and bedtime, and he’ll be sitting there on his phone.”
Why do men act this way? Why do women tolerate it?
“Conventions embodying male dominance have changed much less in ‘the personal’ than in the job world,” New York University sociologist Paula England, author of The Gender Revolution, Uneven and Stalled, tells me from behind the desk in her wide-windowed office overlooking Greenwich Village. “If you get down to it, we talk about equality, but the part people grasped on to was women changing. Women can have careers, be in the military, become clergy. But the fact is that all of that doesn’t work if household stuff doesn’t shift. And some things are more impervious to change than others. The implicit assumption that change is continuous is probably unrealistic.”
Indeed, many of the women I spoke with—the partners of the modern, involved fathers—remain in what journalist Jill Filipovic, in her book The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, refers to as “a strange limbo where men’s actions haven’t totally caught up to women’s expectations.”16 Or, as Berkeley psychologists and pioneering family researchers Carolyn and Philip Cowan have put it, the ideology of the new egalitarian couple is way ahead of its time.17 Monique, thirty-two, the mother of a toddler in Queens, New York, explains how her husband sees the problem: “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about. I think he feels like there’s nothing he can do. In fact, he’s told me this before. There’s nothing he can do, so it would be helpful if I wasn’t so bothered by it.”
I’ll take the time to state here—and then, because it is obvious, I will not repeat it again in the course of this book—that the vast majority of modern, involved fathers are well-intentioned, reasonable human beings. Today fewer men are in touch with their children than at any time in history since the U.S. began keeping reliable statistics.18 While father involvement in two-parent families has increased in recent decades, there are also fewer father-present families.19 Clearly, the men who stick around to love and shepherd their offspring are not only to be maligned. Right now it is a Saturday, and George is spending the day with our daughters so that I can write. Earlier, he managed to find Liv’s lost ballet slipper, saving her from missing her first class after summer break.
I’m at a neighborhood coffee shop, and sitting across from me are a father and son having hot chocolate, the dad’s arm affectionately cast around his young son’s shoulder. When they leave, they are replaced by another father-son pair, this boy a little older, these two arm-wrestling (really, they are). I get a text from the father of Liv’s best friend who is sleeping over tonight for her birthday. Should he bring Maya’s sleeping bag by this afternoon, or do we want to pick it up on our way home from dinner? Men are among the 3 to 5 percent of male mammals who contribute anything at all to their children post-insemination.20 Fathers in the U.S. work for pay three hours more per week than men without kids.21 A majority of U.S. men in relationships now report the belief that the egalitarian division of domestic labor is very important to a successful marriage.22 This is the glass half full. Amen.
But slow your roll. Reports of the modern, involved father have also been greatly exaggerated—or at least, as some researchers have argued, “this change is more in ‘the culture of fatherhood’ than in actual behavior.”23 According to a 2018 Oxfam report, women around the world do between two and ten times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men (the global value of this work annually is estimated at $10 trillion).24 The ratio of women to men’s free labor is smallest in the Scandinavian countries. In Norway—where, in 1993, the government earmarked a portion of paid parental leave exclusively for fathers25—women spend three and a half hours a day in family work compared to men’s three.26 This ratio is the largest for women in underdeveloped nations.
UN Women, a branch of the United Nations focused on gender equality, estimates that the unpaid labor gap is the largest in South Asia, where women carry out 90 percent of unpaid familial care work.27 In India, women perform six hours of free labor a day and men only one.28 These tasks can be particularly grueling in the third world. A woman with a family in Uganda is likely to spend six hours each day collecting water.29 Research from the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggests that there is an important relationship between the gender gap in unpaid care work and prosperity—the smaller the gap, the wealthier the country.30
MenCare, a global fatherhood campaign working toward child care parity in forty-five nations, estimates that at the current rate of change, it will be another seventy-five years before women worldwide achieve gender equity in their homes.31 The first world may be leading the way, but that does not mean we’ve arrived. This is easy to lose sight of in countries with modern infrastructure, in households without daughters or sons. Before kids, there just isn’t all that much that needs to get done, and it seems harmless to let little things, like who spends more time scrubbing bathtubs and floors, pass by without remark. But as Mount Holyoke social psychologist Francine Deutsch puts it in Halving It All, her close study of the uneven distribution of unpaid labor between dual-earner American couples with kids: “Children . . . create an inequality of crisis proportions.”32
Monique in Queens appreciates her circumstances. Hardworking and smart, she’s built the life that middle-class girls like her, growing up in the last third of the twentieth century, knew was accessible to them. Interesting job in public service, loving marriage, one child and trying for another. “She’s perfect,” Monique tells me, referring to her daughter, “so I guess that means things are going well.” She hesitates. She’s ducked out of her office to meet me at a sleepy food court in Jamaica, Queens, in order to discuss her feelings about the inequity in her home life since the birth of her child—a wrench in her expectations, a thing that is not going quite very well at all.
She’s adjusted to the demands of parenthood by making changes to her work life. She transferred to an office closer to home and has become less available to her clients in the evenings. She also enlisted both paid and unpaid child care—a part-time babysitter and her daughter’s grandmothers. She loves her evenings with her toddler. That much she wouldn’t change. But she’s struck by how little her husband’s priorities have shifted. She resents the liberties he continues to take with his time, his assumption that his involvement at home remains discretionary, and that all the many tasks invariably fall to her. “It’s frustrating that I don’t feel like we have the same responsibilities. He has a cushion that I don’t have. If he has a big project at work, he’s just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to work late.’ He doesn’t have to worry about getting home so the nanny can leave in time to get back to her own kids. If something comes up for me at work, I’ve got to figure out, can my mom come, and if she can’t, how is this going to go. For him, it’s just, ‘I’ve got to work, and someone else will take care of it.’ It’s a strain.
“When I was pregnant, we were talking about how it was going to go, and we ended up deciding on a babysitter for three days, and my mother would come from upstate to be with our daughter Thursdays and Fridays, and then my mother-in-law would leave work early on Fridays to watch the baby so that my mom could catch her bus back home. At some point I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work, this is just too many things,’ and he was like, ‘I don’t understand why you can’t make more of an effort here,’ and I was like, ‘You’re the only one who’s not ever coming home early or altering your schedule at all!’ Eventually, this was the plan we settled on, and usually, it does work. All of the women have come together to make this work.”
Monique and her female peers—like mine, like theirs—grew up with the heady rhetoric of gender equality. Girls can do anything boys can do. We got Title IX. We got grad school. But the rhetoric stopped with us, the obvious and necessary corollary never to be uttered. “Boys can do anything girls can do” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So now Monique is a lawyer, but her husband is not a primary parent.
The changes in their lives after the birth of their daughter more or less began and ended with her. “There’s definitely resentment,” she says. “It’s not a deal-breaking kind of resentment, but it’s there. So when the three of us are together, I’m edgy. If he suggests that our daughter needs something, I have an immediate visceral reaction, and it’s hard not to start an argument because the implication is that I’m supposed to take care of it. I try to say something nicely. But I don’t always say it nicely.
“Whenever we come up with ways we’re going to change this or fix this, it doesn’t stick for him, and I don’t hold him to it. At one point we arrived at an agreement—he would be home and in charge Tuesday and Thursday evenings. And then it wasn’t happening because he’d stay late at work or he’d schedule something. And then, like, ‘Yes, yes, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.’ But then it does. It’s gone. I worry about the idea of us just arguing all the time about it. He knows how I feel, and it hasn’t produced any meaningful, consistent change. How much convincing of the other person can you do?”
She continues, “I went to a liberal arts school, and I took a ton of women’s studies courses. And there was all this conversation about the dynamics of marriage and how things just automatically tended to fall in a certain way, and I remember when I was in those classes being like, ‘I don’t know why they do that. That’s not going to be me.’ And then that’s just the way it happened.”
When researchers ask expectant fathers today how they anticipate dividing chores and child care, most say their wives will do a bit more, often because of nursing, but that they will not lag far behind. Six months into their children’s lives, these same fathers report that mothers are doing more than expected, while they themselves are doing less.33
What begins as a potentially time-limited necessity because of breastfeeding becomes precedent. Fathers have assumed a larger share of child care in recent decades, but the amount of change has been quite modest, even when compared to how much more housework men have taken on. Between 1980 and 2000, when women’s labor force participation rose most dramatically, men’s self-reported share of housework increased by ten percentage points, going from 29 to 39 percent.
That is in stark contrast with a self-reported increase in child care at the same two junctures: In 1980 fathers reported doing 38 percent of child care, and in 2000 they reported doing 42 percent. Mothers in 1980 estimated that their husbands did 31 percent of child care, while mothers in 2000 guessed they did about 32 percent. Today, per a range of studies, working women devote about twice as much time to family care as men.34 And in case you’ve considered moving to a more progressive nation to escape the problem, even in gender-egalitarian Sweden, fathers spend only about 56 percent as much time as their female partners do caring for their kids.35
There is actually no known human society in which men are responsible for the bulk of all childrearing. Cross-cultural anthropologists report that in every part of the world, across a wide range of subsistence activities and social ideologies, mothers are more involved than fathers with the care of their young.36 In a 2018 report, the United Nations estimated that women average 2.6 times the amount of housework and child care that men do.37
In the last seventy-five years, women with small kids throughout the developed world—in the collection of thirty-six countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—began working for wages in steadily increasing numbers. Across the OECD today, 71 percent of mothers with one child and 62 percent of women with two or more children are now employed for pay.38 Still, comparative-time-use studies suggest that fathers in these countries (which include the U.S., Canada, and most of Europe, as well as Mexico, New Zealand, and Japan, to name a few) spend less than a quarter of the time their female partners do in routine housework, and less than half as much time caring for children.39 A 2017 OECD report called the unequal distribution of unpaid work between men and women in the home one of the most important gender-equality issues of our time. In recent history, fathers all over the globe have made small changes in the face of greater demands from breadwinning mothers. But the story we tell ourselves—the one about great leaps toward the achievement of equally shared parenting—is a glass-half-full interpretation. Must we continue to be only grateful?
There is a raucous B-side to the gratitude. Research from cultures all over the globe consistently finds that new parents experience a qualitative change in their relationship that is, to quote one team, “abrupt, adverse in nature, relatively large in magnitude.”40 Longitudinal studies find that marital satisfaction peaks around the time of the wedding and then declines, and at twice the rate for parents as for nonparents.41 Some work suggests that the steepest drops occur before a child’s first birthday, others that they come later.42 Research out of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, Washington, where they’ve been studying families for twenty-plus years, has found that two-thirds of couples experience both a significant drop in relationship quality and a dramatic increase in conflict and hostility within three years of the birth of their first child. And as the number of children increases, so, too, does the discontent.43
There are a number of reasons why this is so, including the buffeted pressures of time and money and sleep deprivation. As University of California, San Francisco, health psychologists have verified in the lab, “People who are sleep deprived tend to experience more negative emotions, are more reactive to negative events, and are worse at problem solving.”44 But there is also the fact that the transition to parenthood is “a critical moment in the development of an unequal gap in time spent on routine household labor.”45
A 2008 study out of the University of Queensland, Australia, found that women increase their time spent on routine housework by about six hours a week following a first birth, “compared to the flat and static average housework hours for men.”46 It doesn’t get better from there. While a first child has no effect on men’s time in housework, a second leads to its reduction. The Australian researchers “find evidence that men’s time on routine housework declines as more children are born, suggesting that the gender gap in housework time widens as the demand for time on domestic work increases.” Across the life cycle, only the transition from married to widowed, divorced, or separated significantly increases a man’s time in unpaid domestic labor.47
Child care is similarly skewed. Australian time-use data from a different study, also around 2008, showed that mothers compared to fathers spent more overall time with children, engaged in more multitasking, operated with a more rigid timetable, spent more time alone with kids, and had more overall responsibility for managing the care of their children. This is consistent with time-use data in the U.S. and elsewhere.48
The persistent disparity between the shiny conception of the modern, involved father and his actual contributions has confounded scholars for years.49 Spend much time digging into the past decade’s sociology journals, and you’ll unearth a trove of phrases like these: “we are just beginning to understand why men do so little”50 and “we do not yet have a very good understanding of which men—or the conditions under which men—involve themselves in the care of others”51 and “increasing levels of maternal employment . . . have not resulted in more equitable gender distribution of housework and child care time”52 and “gender specialization is least pronounced when both spouses are employed full time, but even in these households, women generally do most of the housework and child care” and “fathers are changing . . . but change is gradual at best.”53 One UCLA research team analyzed fifteen hundred hours of videotape from the homes of middle-class dual-earner couples with kids. They found that father-in-a-room-by-himself was the “person-space configuration observed the most frequently,”54 a piece of data that now pops into my head whenever I’m in the living room with the kids while my husband camps out in our room playing Game of War on his phone.
The liberties fathers take with their time are meticulously chronicled by social scientists. They have found, for example, that fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care, while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more and watch lots of television;55 that working mothers with preschool-aged children are two and a half times likelier to get up in the middle of the night to tend to their kids;56 that fathers with babies spend twice as much weekend time engaged in leisure activity as mothers.57 Still fathers do not feel their privilege. Data from 335 employed, married parents suggests that women perceive the distribution of housework and child care activities to be significantly more unequal than men perceive it to be.58
The stark reality is that it is only when husbands are unemployed and their wives earn all the income that ratios of mothers’ to fathers’ time in child care almost converge. The most egalitarian caregiving arrangement is between sole-breadwinner wives and unemployed husbands, though even that earnings arrangement fails to reach parity.59 In homes with stay-at-home fathers, mothers continue to take on more managerial care of their children—otherwise known as scheduling and keeping track of stuff.60
Unlike housework, which goes down for women as paid work hours go up, mothers maintain their child care time almost regardless of their employment obligations. They accomplish this by cutting back on leisure time, personal care, and sleep.61 This hardly varies by race or ethnicity. Studies of African American and Hispanic American families replicate the pattern found for white Americans. Comparisons across ethnic groups reveal few differences in levels of co-residential father care,62 though African American men and women both tend to be more critical of gender inequality than whites, who tend to be more critical of gender inequality than Hispanics.63
Way back in 1992, family psychologists the Cowans wrote that over the course of fifteen years of research, it became clear to them that behind the ideology of each egalitarian couple lies a much more traditional reality.64 All the talk about men and women sharing the responsibility, noted one mother in their study, “is just bullshit!”65 Two decades on, research from far and wide continues to support this observation. It is women’s, rather than men’s, daily lives that differ the most according to whether or not they’re raising kids.66 Recent time-use studies by Pew Research and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. consistently estimate that women employed outside the home shoulder 65 percent of child care responsibilities, and men 35 percent. To recap, those percentages have held steady since the year 2000. In the last twenty years, that figure has not budged.67
Despite changing economic realities, we have one foot grounded in the past. The nuclear family with a breadwinning father and a homemaking mother was a historical anomaly steeped in race and class privilege. This cultural ideal has long been at odds with reality. Postwar, when women went back to the home—often after being forced out of their jobs in favor of the returning soldiers—their labor force participation figure hovered around 30 percent. That steadily rose between 1970 and 2000. In 1975, 39 percent of women with preschool-aged children worked; since 1994, that percentage has remained above 60 percent. In 1975, 54.9 percent of women with school-aged children were in the labor force; since the 1990s, that number has held around 75 percent.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 70 percent of married women with children between six and seventeen work outside of the home (and 60.8 percent of married women with children under six do). According to the institutions that track such things, decade by decade, no group has ever seen labor force increases of such high magnitudes in such brief time increments.68 Living through it, you felt the cataclysm of those shifts.
Men’s and women’s home lives started to look more similar in two ways: First, over the last fifty years, there have been modest increases in men’s housework and steep declines in women’s. Second, men and women both have increased their time in child care.69 Still, gender remains the most salient predictor of family work performance.70
We could chalk it up to biology, to gestation and lactation, in which men cannot partake. Once it is your job to nurse the baby in the middle of the night, it continues to be you who awakens with her in the darkness far past the point of midnight feedings. A body in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest. Data from countries with generous maternity-leave policies support this idea—by inadvertently reinforcing women’s role as caregiver in the first year of a child’s life, they’ve seen decreases in the recent gains made in fathers’ unpaid work time.71 Women do less housework and men do more in countries with shorter maternal leaves.72 If it was more complicated for George and me early on, well, certainly, I couldn’t remember.
To get the perspective of some new moms, I went to a meeting of a new-mothers’ group in my neighborhood. The five women gathered that day had been getting together for a couple of months, led by a local doula who spearheaded discussions on topics from postpartum body image to returning to work. Their babies ranged from twelve weeks to ten months. I told them about my project and asked them to talk about their experiences.
Anne, forty-two, a vice president of operations for a small company whose firstborn had just turned seven months, said, “Sometimes I look at my husband after he’s gotten up from a four-hour nap on a Saturday while I’ve been with the baby or taking care of things, and I really need a nap, too, but now it’s too late in the day to take one, and I think, What is wrong with me, and us, that we’re living like this?” She continued, “In our house, my husband pitches in financially, and I do everything else. We’ve been living together for eleven years, and for most of those he traveled a lot for work, so all the housework fell on me based on proximity. I never felt angry about it—that’s a strong word. But when I would get frustrated, I’d let him know, and he would help out.”
The others also described having been in charge of more of the housework before having children. “Before I was pregnant, I was doing everything,” said Amber, thirty, who had worked as an administrative assistant before her son arrived. “I was a happy housewife with a job.” She’d been less happy about this arrangement since giving birth. For the time being, she was at home because returning to work didn’t make financial sense. Her husband was critical when the “everything” she’d always taken care of was no longer getting done. “If I don’t do the laundry, he’s like, ‘Well, what did you do all day?’” The others laughed in recognition, but Amber, who said she was just pulling out of a period of postpartum depression, joined them only half-heartedly.
“My husband, he just hates to clean,” said Kimberly, thirty-one, who’d recently returned to her work in educational publishing. “Not that I wake up in the morning going, ‘I can’t wait to dust today,’ but I notice these things, and I want the house a certain way. It’s the way we grew up. I take more pride in having a presentable home.”
Tasha, thirty-two, a librarian, said that this resonated with her. “The ways we grew up influenced how we respond to getting things done. I’m one of four girls, both my parents worked, and in my family, my sisters and I were the housekeepers. My husband’s mom stayed home, and she had help. There were different expectations of us. So now he does things when I ask, but he doesn’t take initiative. We had discussions about that before the baby came. ‘Discussions’ is the polite word.” The women laughed again.
Their husbands’ lack of initiative seemed to be spilling over into child care now that the babies had arrived. These new mothers took care to speak of this gingerly, by which I mean without anger. Meredith—thirty-six, a psychologist—reported “surprise” about how much her spouse deferred to her around the care of their daughter. “He’s a take-charge kind of person, but I’m home with her more, and certain things come more naturally to me. It’s a new dynamic for our relationship.” Meredith was back at work, but nothing had changed in terms of who was responding to her daughter’s cries in the middle of the night. “When I wasn’t working, I felt the responsibility to let him sleep. I still feel that way because he’s working more, but I’m a little bit more resentful now that I’m back in the office. I’m sure if I said something, he’d get up.”
Tasha was also the person in her family most likely to forgo sleep. “My husband is a night person. He’ll stay up until whenever, so in the mornings, I get up with the baby. He says, ‘You don’t mind being up early.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, but I like sleeping in once in a while, too.’ If I said to him, ‘Hey, tomorrow, when she gets up, can you take her?’ he would a hundred percent do it, but I don’t know if it’s something that would ever just occur to him.” At the time of our meeting, her daughter was ten months old, which meant that for ten months running, her husband had left it to her to get up with their daughter while he slept.
“Can you imagine,” I asked her, “a world in which your husband got up early with the baby every morning for ten months running and you never once offered to relieve him?” She acknowledged that she could not. I could not, either. None of us could.
It went on in all of their homes. “I’m happy to do it if you ask,” the modern, involved father’s cri de coeur. His generally positive attitude toward being second in command has made it hard for his wife to feel frustrated without a generous amount of self-rebuke. “It’s my fault for not speaking up,” I heard these women conclude. Why they were left to speak up in the first place remained largely uninterrogated.
“It’s just not part of his thinking,” said Anne, as if in explanation. “I’m the one who’s going to make whatever needs to happen happen.”
Amber’s husband reflexively hands her the baby when it’s time for a new diaper. If Amber resists, “He’s really happy to do it, and he goes with a smile.”
Meredith’s husband meets friends for dinner after work, but she can’t fault him for that: “If I said I wanted to go out with a friend, he would be happy to come and watch Eliza for several hours.”
Kimberly’s husband had been pursuing professional development and also volunteer work more aggressively since the birth of their child. “We discussed that before kids,” she said. “He wanted to make sure he could keep building himself in some way, never losing himself. I guess I thought once she came, he’d back off a little bit. Sometimes I’ll be like, ‘Do you really need to go to that happy hour for this nonprofit you’re volunteering for?’ But I don’t ask him not to go. I mean, it is what it is right now, I guess.”
I had heard these stories before. All of them. What struck me in the room that day was not the novelty of the women’s accounts but, rather, that none of them seemed that much to mind. I realized that was the thing I had not quite recalled—the not minding. I had not minded once, too. Boys will be boys, the women acknowledged, in grand tradition, with their laughter. On that morning in that room, I felt upset about what these otherwise outspoken mothers were allowing, a feeling that they, at least so far, had managed to ward off.
An ever-growing body of research in family and clinical studies demonstrates that spousal equality promotes marital success and that inequality undermines it.73 Women who report that they do more child care than their husbands are 45 percent less likely to describe their marriages as “very happy” than women who say responsibilities are shared.74 Recent data published in the Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that couples in which men do more than a third of the household work have more sex than those who do less, and that these relatively egalitarian couples are the only ones to have experienced an increase in sexual frequency during three decades over which sex within marriage has declined worldwide.75
Division of family labor is the primary source of conflict after couples have children. Mothers of kids under four report the greatest sense of injustice.76 Female infidelity has risen 40 percent over the last three decades, and Belgian psychotherapist and author Esther Perel has said that in her extensive work treating couples in the wake of affairs, she has found that the most common reason women give for cheating on their husbands is the desire to break free from their caregiving role. Perel has said, “In truth we are not looking for another person. We are looking for another self.”77
A male partner’s contribution to child care is the most important factor predicting relationship conflict and mothers’ satisfaction.78 Not surprisingly, studies in the last decade in the UK, Sweden, and the United States have all found that couples with low levels of male partner participation in domestic chores are more likely to separate than couples in which men do more. As satisfaction with a male partner’s help increases, so, too, do positive marital interactions, closeness, affirmation, and positive affect. As it decreases, thoughts of divorce, negative affect, and depression go up—for mothers. Although perceived unfairness predicts both unhappiness and distress for women, it predicts neither for men,79 who often do not seem to fully register the problem. It’s worth noting that women initiate about 70 percent of all divorce. While domestic equality offers no guarantee of marital bliss, as social psychologist Francine Deutsch found in her family study: “In homes where both parents worked full time and women did most of the work at home, free and easy happiness never emerged.”80
If a mother believes that child care specifically is unfairly portioned, this is more likely to affect her relationship happiness than a perceived imbalance in housework by one full standard deviation.81 The optimistic tale of the modern, involved father means that women today believe they are signing up for something resembling 50/50. When it fails to manifest, there is trouble.
Ultimately, if couples have parsed who will do what in advance, it doesn’t matter if the labor is equally shared or not. This becomes especially clear in same-sex pairs. Gay couples also report labor imbalances. Still, they are less likely than their straight counterparts to feel angry about it, not because they are more even-tempered but, rather, because they have explicitly agreed to their respective roles.82 Without the double-edged sword of gendered assumptions, they are more likely to work to communicate their needs and preferences around parenting work. As obvious as it may seem, heterosexual couples often fail to do this.
In our marriage, it never occurred to us. In their book When Partners Become Parents, the Cowans expressed dismay that the couples they interviewed felt that inequality had just somehow happened upon them. They write, “It’s not just that [they] are startled by how the division of labor falls along gender lines, but they describe the change as if it were a mysterious virus they picked up when they were in the hospital having their baby. They don’t seem to view their arrangements as choices they have made.”83
Here is one additional consistent finding: Greater father involvement predicts smaller declines in both partners’ marital satisfaction. Recent research has shown that a new father’s active participation minimizes overall relationship dissatisfaction in the transition to parenthood. When fathers behave like equal partners, both members of a couple say they are more satisfied with their relationship. One longitudinal study found that dads who reported the largest contributions to child care six months postpartum manifested the new-parent equivalent of a unicorn, an increase in marital satisfaction at their child’s eighteen-month mark. Their wives reported even greater increases in satisfaction during the same period. On the flip side, the less involved a father became with his baby’s care over the first eighteen months, the more likely both members of a couple were to experience growing disenchantment with the relationship.84 A husband having more leisure time than his wife did not a happy marriage make.
It can even mean the end of a relationship. After writing an op-ed about couples and child care for The Washington Post in 2017, I received emails from women who’d ultimately left when their husbands refused to step up their game. “My husband’s failure to be a partner around child care ended the marriage. He wouldn’t watch our child to let me shower. He wouldn’t get up to give me a few uninterrupted hours of sleep at night. He dumped all the responsibility for managing the kid and the house on me. I resented him so, so much,” wrote one woman in New York.
“I’m a full-time, now single, career professional with two primary-school-age kids,” wrote an American living abroad and working in international diplomacy. “While there were many factors that resulted in the end of my marriage two years ago, it was the gnawing grind of responsibility for every little thing, and the knowledge that my children were being shaped by seeing me put up with it, that eventually tipped me over the edge and saw my marriage conclude. Life is tough now. Certainly. But it’s much clearer and calmer without the festering resentment that just added to my exhaustion at work, parenting, and everything else.”
But even when relationship dissolution is not the end result, the cost of unequal partnership to women’s well-being is high. Most working parents today report too little time for family life. Mothers, however, experience this time deficit differently than fathers. For a woman, having insufficient time to attend to her family is associated with a greater likelihood of depression, which epidemiologists say may explain why employed women are more likely than employed men to become depressed. A father’s sense of well-being, in contrast, is more negatively impacted by not having enough time to himself.85
A 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that female physicians were significantly more likely than their male colleagues to experience an increase in depressive symptoms during their demanding internship year, and that work-family conflict accounted for 36 percent of this disparity between the sexes. The New York Times noted, “Despite large increases in the number of women in medicine, female physicians continue to shoulder the bulk of household and child care duties.”86 This sampling of one specific group of working women seems likely to be reflective of many.
Theorists propose that our culture’s particular emphasis on feminine family devotion leaves women more vulnerable to guilt and then despair when they find themselves with outsize nonfamilial obligations. Employed women with young children also take a health hit. While advances in women’s access to education and employment have brought about vast improvements in their health87—once incorrectly presumed just innately more fragile than men’s—those improvements are not borne out during the years when they’re raising young kids.
Education and employment are among the most important preventative factors in social epidemiology, for men of all family statuses, and for women with no children or with older ones. Being a family’s primary caretaker in the early years leaves women more vulnerable to health problems, if only for a limited time.88 Carissa, a thirty-five-year-old public defender and mother to a seven-year-old and a three-year-old in Seattle, spoke to me while laid up in bed after foot surgery. “I developed a bone spur on the top of my foot. For months I was wearing shoes that hurt, but I didn’t stop to buy other shoes because I have no time to go shopping. I kept wearing them and ignoring the problem. Finally, one of my friends said, ‘What is wrong with your foot?’ So here I am now, I had this surgery, and it’s horrible, and recovery is painful, all largely because I did not stop last fall and do what I needed to do for myself. My foot is a casualty of this life where I go and go and go and go and go.”
There’s also a financial cost. Lack of parity in the home stalls movement toward greater gender equality in the labor market. Mothers’ income trajectories fall when they move in and out of the workforce, cut back their hours, take less demanding jobs, and pass up or don’t win promotions because of biases against mothers. In 2016, economists at the Center for American Progress calculated that a twenty-six-year-old woman earning the median U.S. income of $44,148 would lose not only her wages for taking one year off to be with her baby but also, and over time, $64,393 in wage growth and $52,945 in retirement and benefits.89 The overall economy then loses, too: A 2015 report from think tank McKinsey Global Institute estimated that the world economy would be $28.4 trillion (or 26 percent) richer by 2025 if the gender gaps in labor force participation and productivity were bridged.90
Recent research indicates that the gender wage gap is really a motherhood gap.91 Women without children earn just barely less than men. It’s not called “the motherhood wage penalty”92 for nothing. One reason for this is that commitment to one’s job, in the last few decades, has become associated with the willingness or ability to work more than full-time. Since the 1970s, “overwork” (defined as fifty hours or more per week) is an ever more standard expectation, especially in managerial professions. By the mid-1990s, the years surrounding the apex of working moms, salaried workers who’d once faced a wage penalty for overwork began to see a wage bump for the same. The proportion of people who overworked increased, financial rewards for working long hours went up, and the attitude toward employees unable to make themselves perpetually available soared.93
Attorney Joan Williams, the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law and author of the 2014 book What Works for Women at Work, told me, “Not to be a conspiracy-theorist, but the wage penalty for overwork turned into a wage premium in exactly the same period that women started to enter professional life in a serious way. It’s striking that when that happened, the ideal worker was redefined on the single vector in which women couldn’t effectively compete, and that was time.”
University of Indiana sociologist Youngjoo Cha studies the impact of overwork on labor outcomes. She’s found that the increase in financial compensation for overwork plays a large role in maintaining the gender wage gap. She explains that if relative hourly wages for overwork had remained constant between 1979 and 2007, that gender wage gap would be about 10 percent smaller than it is today.94
Legal scholars have argued that bias toward women as caretakers and men as breadwinners also manifests in workplace discrimination, further hurting women’s career advancement and wages. Additionally, the so-called logic of gendered choices almost always trumps cold hard cash when it comes to decisions about who in the family will take leave or cut back. Even when mothers earn more, an increasingly common phenomenon, couples tend to decide that it should be she, rather than he, who becomes the secondary breadwinner. It is disproportionately women who forgo economic security and well-being when they become parents, costs that would be more easily borne were they only equitably distributed.
Though it’s been illegal in the U.S. to fire a woman for becoming pregnant since 1978, in 2018 The New York Times reported, “Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies.”95 The story detailed pregnant women’s experiences being sidelined from work, refused accommodations, passed over for promotion, or fired for questioning all of the above. Hiring discrimination against mothers is also ubiquitous. “This commute would be too long for a woman with a young child,” an older male psychologist at a Bronx hospital informed me toward the end of a job interview in 2010 (as I cursed my own judgment for mentioning I had a kid).
In 2007, sociologists spent eighteen months sending confederate résumés to entry- and mid-level business positions available in a large northeastern city. The gender and parental status of the made-up applicants varied, but their work history and education did not. Childless women were 2.1 times more likely to be offered interviews than mothers. In contrast, fathers were slightly more likely to be called than men without children.96
A world in which both men and women are presumed to shoulder outside obligations equally would necessarily render family commitments acceptable and expectable rather than inconvenient and deal-breaking. It might also shift public policy. For now, the male legislators who continue to make up the majority of Congress in the U.S. remain uninterested in proposing or passing policy changes that would support more livable family arrangements—paid parental leave and government-subsidized early child care come to mind. These men don’t know parenthood’s most grueling tribulations firsthand. Might their minds change if they did? (Never mind the problems inherent in having relatively few women in public office. As University of Wisconsin–La Crosse historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves put it when we spoke, “One of the really unfortunate continuities in this country is that women have had so little say over the public allocation of resources.”) The longer we all tolerate 65/35, the longer factors that support it will remain in place. If men had periods, tampons would be free in every public restroom. The same principle applies here. Until men bear the labor of family life as women do, other status quos seem unlikely to shift.
The women I spoke with described the personal toll of this status quo: intense disappointment in their partnerships, persistent underlying anger at their children’s fathers, dampened sexual desire, and fantasies of escape. Tracy, forty-seven, a domestic violence advocate with two preteens in Washington State, ended our phone call in tears. “There’s a huge amount of resentment. And the thought that, you know, If you’re not going to help me more, I’ll just check out,” she said. “You hope that when the kids get older, things will get better. But I tell my friends, I’m one gas tank away from a small town and a new identity.”
At a time when heady feminist battles are being fought boldly and publicly, parity in first-world homes might take its place among them. It is an essential piece of a bigger puzzle, one that undergirds the general struggle for the broad acceptance of women’s basic humanity. We do not exist for the convenience and pleasure of men. We will not be equal anywhere until we are equal everywhere, until we stop colluding in the most widely accepted form of cultural misogyny. For now, we love our families as our partners do, but we remain more encumbered by the arrangements we accept in our private lives.
The following is an old finding, published in 1994, but as behavior hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years, I think it bears mentioning. It’s a breakdown calculated from the time diaries of couples, and their separate reports on their feelings about the distribution of labor in their homes. Time-diary studies require participants to record how they are spending their time at set intervals during the day for a limited number of days or weeks. Researchers can then take the time diary of each member of a couple and compute what percentage of the work he or she is doing in their home.
Once the researchers determined the relative percentages of the couples in the study (percentages that the couples were blind to), they compared the numbers to the participants’ feelings about their arrangements. They found that men who performed 36 percent of their household’s labor reported the strongest feelings of fairness. What might give us—and especially those of us who are female—a moment of pause is that women basically agreed with them. Women’s “equity point” was actually even more generous to men. The women whose time diaries attested to the fact that they were doing 66 percent of their household’s labor were the most likely to say that arrangements were fair.
The study’s authors write, “These results show that fairness in housework does not mean sharing chores equally. Rather, both women and men appear to believe that women should do about two-thirds of household chores.”97 The labor force participation of mothers with infants peaked in 1995, so this finding is not an artifact of the era of separate spheres. It makes some sense, then, that the division of child care labor has stalled here, 65/35, women/men. Our culture of sexism has reaped what it has sown.
More recently, Yale anthropologist Riché J. Daniel Barnes conducted a study of twenty-three professional African American women raising children with men. In 2016’s Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood and Community, Barnes reports that 75 percent of them felt that their proportion of family work increased more dramatically than their husbands’ after their first child was born. Still, Barnes writes, “Despite the mismatch, almost half of the women said they were pleased with the allocation of responsibilities. They all had complaints, but, for the most part, each of the women excused the imbalance as a function of the role as wife and mother.”98
We delude ourselves with ideology and the lip service we pay to female empowerment. Although sharing child care is associated with valuing gender equality, this value is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for equally shared parenting.99 Actually, there is limited support in the literature for gender attitudes determining family practices.100
A 2001 study in Toronto looked at forty couples making the transition to parenthood. The subjects expressed “a stronger commitment to sharing the work . . . than is usual.” Ultimately, the study found, most of them developed the gendered patterns typical in Canadian families, where women either cut back on paid work and take charge of the bulk of tasks at home, or don’t cut back on paid work and take charge of the bulk of tasks at home.101
Here’s something more recent: While 65 percent of millennial men without children endorse combined breadwinner/caretaker roles for husbands and wives, only 47 percent of their peers with children continue to do so.102 Idealism is well and good before one has to accommodate its burdens. As British author Rebecca Asher writes in Shattered, her book about the state of her feminist ideals after children, “on becoming fathers, [men] find that patriarchy suits them rather well after all.”103
Less skeptical explanations for this difference between belief and practice have also been proposed. Arlie Hochschild wrote about “on top” versus “underneath” ideologies.104 Couples hold one set of beliefs about women’s employment and men’s domestic responsibilities on top but have a much different reality in lived experience underneath. Paula England attributes the gap to two competing cultural logics, that of individualism and the right to equal opportunity versus that of gender essentialism, the tacit belief that men and women have fundamentally different interests and skills.105
Finally, exposure-based explanations argue that contact with other fathers who adopt primary caretaking roles will push more men toward doing the same, but also that immersion in a culture of female parenting just discourages men’s shift. Social context can supersede gender ideology. Context influences whether attitudes will result in behavior, and when attitudes and behaviors conflict, we tend to reduce inconsistency by changing the former.106 Parents may ultimately become less egalitarian in order to minimize cognitive dissonance in relationships where egalitarianism is expected but inequality has forever been the norm.
Still, to say that gender ideology is totally and completely irrelevant to behavior is misleading. Rather, it is relevant only when the man’s ideology is in consideration.107 Most studies have found that men with less traditional gender ideologies do a greater share of the household chores. These findings are confirmed in samples from Taiwan, Israel, China, Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, and the U.S. To quote the conclusion of the paper that examines this data, “Husbands’ gender ideology may be a stronger determinant of housework divisions than the wives’ gender ideology.”108
Along the same lines, a number of studies have found that fathers’ (but not mothers’) belief in equality is positively associated with paternal involvement with child care.109 Is it then any surprise that women who believe in sharing housework tend to have lower marital satisfaction than those who don’t, and men who believe in sharing tend to have higher marital satisfaction than those who don’t?110 Similarly, when men are more egalitarian than their wives, marital disagreements are fewer. When wives are more egalitarian than their husbands, marital disagreements abound.
What does this tell us about who wears the pants? Did you know we were still asking that question? Wait, there’s more. In terms of beliefs about marital roles, fathers’ attitudes—but not mothers’—are significantly related to their children’s attitudes regardless of the gender of those children.111 This seems to speak to kids’ ability to identify power, to determine whose beliefs are more valuable and worthy of internalization. And while family of origin’s effects on attitude formation recede during adolescence, we all know of the tenacious “underneath” quality of the ideas we acquire in our earliest years. Cultural messages about men and women maintain the rules of the gender system, and these rules have self-fulfilling effects on behavior. The rules give the system the ability to persist in the face of social shifts that might otherwise upend them.
Deanna, a teacher and mother of two in San Diego who was born in the Midwest in 1976, explained, “When my husband and I got together, we were totally equal partners in everything. Then we got married, and I wanted to do all the housework and take care of everything. It was part of my dream of meeting someone I adored. I thought I should assume the responsibility that being married, that being a woman, comes with. I know it sounds crazy now. At the time it really made sense.” Her husband predicted she’d come to resent him (he was right). He went along with her anyway.
Deanna was rare among the women I spoke with in that she made a conscious and explicit decision to be her family’s sole homemaker, if one with a full-time job. She and her husband agreed to live like a traditional couple. More common these days for dual earners is an arrangement that social scientists call the gender legacy couple. In these pairs, responsibility for children simply defaults to the woman, and if you are reading this book because of a personal connection to this problem, it is likely that you fall into this group. Mothers in the gender legacy pairs describe the most pronounced feelings of stress and burden associated with child care.112 Family researchers describe a “marriage between equals discourse”113 that bears little relationship to what actually goes on day-to-day. While couples report that their decisions are mutual, outcomes tend to favor the needs and goals of husbands much more than wives.114
The language of equality—a belief in the modern, involved father—creates a myth central to the idea of these contemporary marriages. It conceals a sort of female subordination that would otherwise be intolerable in many twenty-first-century homes, the taken-for-granted notion that a mother is in charge of the tracking and the knowing and the thinking and the planning and the feeding and the caring and the checking and the doing unless she has worked to make other arrangements (which then entail more knowing and more thinking and more tracking and more doing). He’s-happy-to-do-it-if-I-ask is yet another task; it’s not a partnership.
Sometimes couples succinctly articulate the gap between their values and their behaviors. In other cases, they work hard to imagine that their arrangements live up to their ideals. In researching her 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, sociologist Annette Lareau noted how little organizing and managing fathers seemed to do,115 and she emphasized to me how blatantly this fact was denied. (This observation, not germane to her book’s subject, grew into a separate paper she eventually titled “My Wife Can Tell Me Who I Know.”)
Lareau told me that the dads “knew nothing about the kids’ schedules and needs. But mothers and fathers swore otherwise. For example, one couple insisted that the dad did all the soccer. I was there one day when there was a rainout, and there were seventeen phone calls, all fielded by the mom. They didn’t even notice that she did all the snacks, the uniforms, the registration. They said, ‘Oh, no, he does all the soccer.’ It was hard to interview these people. They were so blinded by ideology. They didn’t see all the invisible labor that went into moms structuring dads’ time with the kids.”
I heard similarly conflicting accounts from mothers I interviewed. Claudia, a forty-four-year-old bookkeeper in Atlanta with two children, said, “My husband is a hands-on dad,” before adding that she has to harangue him to ask the kids how their days were, and “If he had to hire a babysitter, he wouldn’t know where to start. I’m the one who knows what is due when, who reads emails from schools, goes through their folders. He takes my son to Boy Scouts, though sometimes he tries to get me to do it, and I’m like, ‘Dude, you have to do one thing! I can’t do every single thing. There are a bunch of guys there! Why don’t you go encounter other male adults?’ But then he will. He’s not useless.”
Couples that hang on to old gendered norms better suited to different social and economic times may be heading into choppy waters. The younger set of research subjects, not yet coupled or parenting, suggest as much. A large majority of undergraduates participating in New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson’s “Plan A/Plan B” research say they hope for egalitarian marriages. But when asked to predict how they’d decide to live if that didn’t work out (their plan B), young men anticipate becoming breadwinners with primary caretaker wives, and young women anticipate divorce.116 Gerson wonders whether the differing fallback positions of self-reliant women and neotraditional men may point to a new gender divide. Of course, real life is stickier than theoretical situations posed to nineteen-year-olds in labs, and Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade questions whether this finding speaks to anything that might ever come to pass. “You love the stupid guy, and he’s the father of your children. Are you really going to table-flip your life because he won’t pack a bag for your kids?”
But simply staying together is hardly a high bar for a marriage. Perceived unfairness in division of child care predicts marital unhappiness for women, but also, unhappy marital relationships predict decreasing involvement on the part of fathers.117 The two feed each other. Couples accept the myth of equality, fail to address their actual circumstances, and then enter into a despondent cycle. As long as they fail to recognize power dynamics in their relationship, it’s hard for them to change. Studies of couples show that even when power issues are raised, they’re generally not framed in terms of how husbands need to change but, rather, how wives do—you know, she needs to be more assertive.118 The women I spoke with demonstrated this, offering me earfuls about what they might have done differently (and to be clear, if someone had been interviewing me, I’d have sounded exactly the same). Tracy, the domestic violence advocate, said, “Why didn’t he take on more? Because I did not force him to.” She did, however, ask him to. He wasn’t having it. “He’d say, ‘You’re doing just fine. You’ve got this under control. I’m going to play video games.’”