The Unmade Bed Read online

  These supposedly women-friendly policies are every bit as valuable to men. The hollow patriarchy cannot be escaped until women hold legitimate power. We don’t need a men’s movement that takes sides in some phony gender war. We need a men’s movement that understands the rise of women is a triumph for the species, one of the most unalloyed political goods ever achieved in human history, and who can acknowledge that this achievement does not require us to be ashamed of our masculinity. What good is a woman without pride to a man? What good is a man without pride to a woman? We need an understanding of gender that is in touch with the way men and women actually live—not in a state of war but in an often tormented, often achingly beautiful journey to intimacy.

  * * *

  The number of women in positions of power is steadily, though slowly, increasing, and it’s possible that when women achieve a more substantial number of powerful positions, say a third of the Senate and the House and other bodies of representation, then their status as exceptions will evaporate and their rise to prominence will speed up. It’s also possible that the progress will stall out. But the most likely possibility is more of the same: women underrepresented in political, economic, and cultural high places and increasingly equal or even dominant everywhere else. And the difference will continue to generate more of the turbulence we already live with.

  Fury is the natural reaction to the hollow patriarchy. Young women’s frustration at being kept from power is amplified by their obviously demonstrated competence. For at least three generations now women have shown beyond the doubt of any sane person that they can do whatever men can do. They are now better educated. They are evidently more dedicated. So the fact that they are kept from real power is even more bizarre and egregious. Aside from the limitations that the glass ceiling forces on individual lives, which are quite real, the hollow patriarchy renders femininity itself a marker of weakness, injustice, and humiliation. The struggle between Larry Summers and Janet Yellen for who would head the U.S. Federal Reserve—a struggle in which Yellen’s “gravitas” was repeatedly questioned—happened in 2013, not 1963.

  For men, or for the vast majority of men anyway, the hollow patriarchy is no more pleasant. They are expected to be powerful while having no agency. At the extremes, lost men decline into racism, neo-Nazism, explicit misogyny. These are the angry white men, subject to so much scrutiny. They are the ones who think their jobs have been taken away from them, the ones who long for the good old days that never existed. Everyone wants an excuse, I suppose. Everyone wants to play the victim if they can. In most men, however, the state of hollowness creates much more nuanced reactions: self-pity, confusion, light melancholy, the vagaries of an unplaceable, floating collective guilt, a melodramatic vulnerability, or, in the more fortunate, a sense of humor, an ironic sensibility. Mostly the hollow patriarchy produces silence. There is nothing less manly than talking about manliness.

  * * *

  While my wife was out at various events required by her position in the city, the boy and I had “guys’ nights,” the two of us watching hockey, eating Portuguese takeout with our rude fingers, often in our pajamas. Meanwhile, Sarah ate rubber chicken and listened to endless exercises in self-congratulation, introducing herself and being introduced to the billionaires, police chiefs, CEOs, local celebrities, and the rest of the powers that be.VI Who was the “winner” and who was the “loser” in this arrangement is entirely a matter of perspective. Like a pagan, I worship what is newborn. I love a baby heart against my heart, breasts swollen with milk, tears, clipped nails, and the smell of boys who have come inside from out of the snow. I would not trade the nights with my son for any other nights on earth, certainly not for Toronto hotel ballroom galas.

  Simple cohort change is bringing a fundamental realignment of family dynamics with it. A 2011 study of millennials revealed that they are markedly more open to new models of the family, but that does not mean family is less important to them: 52 percent believe that being a good parent is more important than having a successful marriage. They have a greater sense of duty to their parents than Boomers or Generation X had to theirs.

  Progressive tendencies dovetail neatly with their sense of family obligation. Women are going to have babies sucking their breasts at work.VII Get used to it. They are mammals who work. Men are going to leave the office in time to bathe their kids. Get used to it. They are mammals who work. Men even in the highest positions increasingly see time with their children as a nonnegotiable aspect of their compensation. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel of Germany, who is responsible for dismantling his country’s nuclear power industry—a big job—decided to take Wednesday afternoons off to spend with his two-year-old daughter. He explained that the time away from his job served the professional function of keeping him aware of reality: “Otherwise we don’t know what normal life is like.”

  Wanting a reasonable amount of time with the family is no longer a sign of weakness or lack of dedication; it’s a sign that you’re human and that you’re aware of your humanity.VIII It’s not a sign of selfishness; it’s a sign that you’re a grown-up. To be a mammal and to be a human being is an impossible position, it should be pointed out. No gender politics, no politics of any kind, is going to solve the problem of being a body that wants to be more. No mere philosophy will ever solve the confusion of biology and aspiration and desire that is the massive human mess. Maybe at some point, though I don’t see how, we’ll reconcile being animals with the desire to be something more.

  We pretend that family life is achievement and negotiation, a logic puzzle from an aptitude test. We fantasize that life is something built by the person living it, so that we may pretend that our fate is in our hands and that others are to blame for their failures. Control is, at best, a minor aspect of the human condition. Love is something into which we fall. The problem of work-life balance divides life into negotiable responsibilities, but there is no real balance, or rather the balance is a pose that is hard to hold. There is only falling down and getting up. There is loss and gift.IX

  * * *

  In the meantime, children keep coming. In the hospital, after a rest that seemed much too long and much too short, the moment of crisisX rose on its own rhythm out of Sarah’s womb. All the iPads were put away.

  Our brief idyll of privacy suddenly filled up with a crowd: a midwife, a midwife in training, a senior surgeon, a junior surgeon, nurses galore. I’ve heard the saying that you’re born alone and you die alone, but nothing could be further from the truth. Birth and death are public spectacles. The suffering joy of my wife as she pushed my daughter out of her was an event, a fascination. I could see, inside my wife, the head of another person.

  But the pushing was not working. The head would roll up and roll back. It became clear after two and a half hours that my daughter’s shoulder was catching on the inner crook of my wife’s hip. So the doctors decided to suck my daughter into the world with a vacuum. Cheerful to the point of ebullience, the technicians of the flesh tinkered over my wife’s vagina with what looked like a cheap bicycle pump. They attached. They pulled. They kept pulling while my wife pushed (from inside herself!), and the pulling and the pushing kept pushing and pulling until a lump of bloody life flopped up. A whole new body, a whole new soul, with all that it needs to live, thrust itself out of the womb like a god on a foaming sea of blood. The professionals who had seen it all a thousand times gasped as if it were the first time. A new little girl. In the hygienic roomful of hypermodern machinery, a bunch of apes moaned over new progeny. Life had begun again.

  * * *

  I. In fact, I was telling the magazine’s deputy editor that I might be offline for a while.

  II. Canada, I believed, would allow me to be an involved mom and have a rich career at the same time, while America, I believed, would have forced me to choose. When we lived in New York I saw what it meant to be a New York mother with a job in journalism. In New York office jobs no one leaves till 6 or 7 p.m. You take the subway to y
our tiny apartment, switching lines a few times, if the subways are working properly, which means that when you get home your kids are already in their PJs and they’ve had dinner. (A few years later the New York Times published an article about the importance of having dinner with your kids every night. I am pretty sure that the editors of that paper rarely eat dinner with their kids.) Getting your kids into decent schools involves lying, begging, borrowing, stealing. The challenges of New York parenthood often defeat even the toughest Brooklynites, who ultimately end up in Westchester or Montclair or Philadelphia if they are rich enough to afford the move. Why would you do that if you had an alternative? A lesson we learned firsthand: public policy can have a huge impact on quality of life. This is what Steve means by a “no-brainer.”

  III. There are six years between our first kid, born when I was thirty-one, and our daughter because I needed that much time to figure out, practically, how I was going to be a woman with a “big job” while having a second child. During that time I talked to two other female editors in chief who had babies. I took each one out for lunch and, after swearing them to secrecy, asked for detailed accounts of how they managed their brief maternity leaves and how they returned to work and when. I took notes. They both advised me not to take much time off because I would end up working from home anyway, with a baby on my boob, not getting paid—they had learned that the hard way. So I created a business plan: After the baby was born I’d take six weeks off entirely, then go back to the office four days a week (with the proportional 20 percent pay reduction) for the duration of the summer. After Labour Day I’d go back full-time. I wrote it up and rehearsed delivering it to my employers. Then, and only then, did we stop using birth control.

  IV. Some context here. The truth is, Steve was always ambivalent about academic work. He loved teaching and was deeply attracted to the job security that a tenured position provides. But being a professor was never his dream. In fact he told me that writing his PhD thesis was an alibi—something respectable he could say he was doing—when he was actually writing novels. He encouraged me to accept the job at Toronto Life in part because it would free him from academic committee work, marking papers, publishing journal articles no one would read. Most significant, it would give him more time to write. Which is, in fact, exactly what happened.

  V. Toronto isn’t as expensive as New York, but it isn’t cheap. After paying the rent and the bills and groceries, there wasn’t much left over. My salary, which was pretty good, was still just one salary. I regret everything about this chapter of our lives and would do it all differently if given the chance.

  VI. This intense period when I was out three or four nights a week was pretty brief. After a year or two in my job I realized that going out one or two nights a week was just fine. Now I’m home for dinner way, way more often than not. I like it like that.

  VII. Breastfeeding was, to my surprise, a great pleasure for me. My mother, a staunch feminist who spent much of her career as a radio producer, raised me to believe that the La Leche League was a group of deluded hippie evangelists dedicated to making working mothers feel inadequate. Then I experienced for myself the physiological oxytocin-infused high of a milk let-down coupled with the quiet intimacy of providing food through my body to my baby, and I was a convert. With our first kid I took a long maternity leave, which allowed me the time to breast-feed. With our second, born when I had more responsibility at work, I took a shorter leave, hired a nanny, and worked out a system that allowed me to breast-feed: I worked in the office in the morning (with a short break for a midmorning pump while I checked email on my phone), then I’d leave after lunch, drive like a lunatic across town, breast-feed my baby at about 2 p.m., then work the rest of the afternoon on my laptop at a neighborhood coffee shop and be home for a late afternoon, predinner feed. I now view the success of this crazy system as one of the great accomplishments of my life. I managed to have a baby and breast-feed her until she was seven months old while maintaining a job that I love, all roughly on my own terms. I am aware that even the chance to attempt this feat is a privilege not available to most moms.

  VIII. An old college friend of mine who is a doctor told me recently that she is the “flex parent” in her marriage, a term I had never heard before. She works part-time in a medical clinic and has arranged her schedule so that she can be at home for her school-age daughters. Her husband is also a doctor, but his career is hospital-based and he works more hours per week than she does and has less control over his schedule. One of the best things about our lives in Toronto is that Steve is the flex parent. His work is no less important and no less demanding than mine (in fact he’s on his laptop working constantly), but he can work anywhere at any time, which means that when one of our kids starts puking at school at 11 a.m., he can pick him up without causing havoc in an office. Christopher Noxon, the husband of the superstar TV writer Jenji Kohan, calls that role “the domestic first responder.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, in her book Unfinished Business, says she was the “lead parent” when she worked in Washington and her husband was in charge of her kid’s day-to-day activities—playdates and dentist appointments and afterschool lessons. But what is the term for my parenting status, where I am the queen of the calendar and stay on top of the day-to-day needs of the kids—booking sleepovers, buying the shoes, scheduling camps, sewing up holes in Halloween costumes, hiring the babysitters for our evenings out—while Steve is the available one, who executes the plans and does more than his share of pick-ups and drop-offs?

  IX. The two loveliest presents Stephen has given me (in a lifetime of lovely presents): When I was in my early twenties I was struggling to write a magazine article about my beloved high school music teacher who was arrested and imprisoned for being a pedophile. I was working in a corner of our condo that was badly lit, and Steve bought me a simple silver desk lamp. He was saying You can do it, I believe in you, this is important, your career is important. A few years after I returned from studying Judaism at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, Steve bought me a tallit, my own prayer shawl. Steve’s not Jewish, so to figure out how to buy the thing he had to consult my mother and travel with her to a super Jewish part of town and have lord knows what type of uncomfortable conversation with the store clerk. He was saying Judaism is essential to you, I get it, and not only will I help build a Jewish home with you, but I will encourage this thing that matters to you.

  X. Not a word I would use. In fact I was thrilled when my labor contractions started. Our first kid, six years earlier, was medically induced before my body was ready to go into labor—which resulted in thirty-six hours of fruitless contractions, many interventions, and ultimately a c-section. When my contractions started this time, I was past my due date, hoping to avoid a second c-section, and extremely eager to go into labor naturally. The rhymthic tightening around my abdomen was a source of joyful anticipation. I had a hard but happy vaginal birth. The baby was born at 2 p.m. and by 5 p.m. I was home, with all four grandparents drinking bubbly wine. Come to think of it, the whole thing was about as far from a crisis as I’ve ever experienced.

  TWO

  * * *

  The New Fatherhood

  TWENTY days after my daughter entered the world, my father left it. He died at sixty-four, unexpectedly, nowhere near ready. From my selfish little position in between death and life, I was glad he had a chance to hold his granddaughter a few times.

  Death generates an amazing amount of paperwork. As I was dropping my son off at school a deliberately blank policeman’s voice on the phone offered me no information other than an ominous instruction to bring my whole family to Toronto Western Hospital, which I did, where the same deliberately blank policeman told us that Dad was a corpse in the next room. He gave us an hour to pull our hair and weep—mammalian grief—then the paperwork. The family needed to approve an autopsy, since Dad had died on the street, without witnesses, right there in the open. His body had to be moved. Where? Under whose authority? Somebody needed to sign
for his recovered belongings. Somebody needed to write the obituaries, which cost about eight hundred bucks per paper (that’s how they get ya), enough to give me pause even when directly confronted by the clearest evidence I would ever receive that you can’t take the money with you. It’s almost as if the world decides to support mourners by the arrival of a tidal wave of busywork.

  The first break I had all day was in the afternoon, on the walk to pick up my son from kindergarten to tell him that his grandfather no longer was. My father and my son had been close. The night before Dad died, they had been out for ice cream. The walk, the quiet decent houses, shaded by awkward trees, was freshly drugged by sadness and dread. How was I supposed to explain to my son what made no sense to me?

  * * *

  As the hollow patriarchy is slowly cracking, as the traditional male iconography frays and tatters, fatherhood has never mattered more. Having children has always been a major life marker, but the demise of other markers of masculine inclusion has left fatherhood with outsize importance. The old religious rituals gave way long ago. The postdynamic capitalism of the moment has taken away other methods of proving yourself. Making a living is principally a sign of good luck. Owning property is a sign of inheritance more than individual strengths. Combat itself is now gender-neutral. Only fatherhood remains indisputably masculine. Which is why, when you ask men when they became men, they will usually say it was when they became a father or lost a father.

  The economic reordering of family life is a reordering of the iconography of the family. The two coincide; they are identical. The defeat of patriarchy will mean, before anything else, the building of a new fatherhood and a new motherhood. It’s already happening. Since 1965 the amount of time fathers spend with their children has tripled. The rise of the stay-at-home dad—from 10 percent of caregivers in 1989 to 16 percent in 2012—is an extension of this aspiration. When working fathers see a man with a baby on the street in the afternoon, their first thought is “lucky bastard.” And it’s not only that dads love being dads more. Men who don’t have children aspire to fatherhood more than they did before, more than women aspire to motherhood. In 2011 the largest study of singles ever undertaken found that young unmarried men want children slightly more than young unmarried women. Another study showed that men become more depressed and jealous than women when they don’t have children.