Michael Lewis & Tabitha Soren
An interview with the author and his wife turns into couple's counseling.
by Ada Calhoun
May 29, 2009
I wonder how much of it is the pressure of being the breadwinner. We just ran a story about a woman who really resented her stay-at-home husband because she was making the money and here she was having to toil away at this job she was increasingly dissatisfied with. And at the same time, she found herself cleaning up the house and scheduling the doctor's appointments and she found herself really resenting him.
Tabitha: Most of the women I know who are the main breadwinners are also the people who are doing all the 1950s defined domestic chores as well, like the stuff you just listed. So that's sort of just piling on. I don't know dads who work all day and then complain that they're also the ones who have to clean up the whole house, and make the doctor's appointments. I don't see men multi-tasking in that way. They have one job description and that's fine and then they get to play and be fun with the kids.
Michael: So, what you're saying is that when men become stay-at-home dads they completely screw it up?
No, certainly not. The writer was saying that her husband was doing a really good job with the kids. It was just that everything that she had to do that was extra to being a breadwinner, she resented.
Michael: That is not the way, probably, most men feel right now, but it would have been the way men felt thirty years ago. They would have expected this other part to be taken care of. So, if you're a man now having children, your model is a father who thought that anything extra that he did was slightly a nuisance. Which gets to a larger point of how much of raising children is shit work. Some part of it is wonderful, right? There's a really fun part of it. But I am dragged kicking and screaming into the shitty parts. Every time, basically. I think maybe in some ways I'm a horrible person, but I don't think I'm that unusual. That's my point.
"One thing I find very funny about parenthood is how deceitful it is." I think it's funny that there's an assumption that women love the hard parts.
Michael: Well, that's a really good point.
Tabitha: That's baloney. Nobody loves it.
Michael: Nobody loves it. And also, it is really unseemly to complain about it, because you were the one who screwed up and had the children in the first place. So what right do you have to complain about those roles?
I'll tell you one thing I find very funny about parenthood is how deceitful it is. I found that if I didn't write down exactly how I felt and exactly what had happened within twenty-four hours of what I felt and how it had happened, I was already lying about it. It has actually become one of the litmus tests in friendship for me: will they be honest about all this? When you lie about it, you go around saying, "Oh, everything about kids is just wonderful!"
Tabitha: "Such a blessing."
Michael: And that makes it so much easier to dump all the shit work on Tabitha, because I'm saying it's not shit work. You have to basically just face up to the fact that some large part of this is not pleasant and that's not exactly something that gets told before you have them. Because everybody's lying to you.
Since the book, have you had an epiphany about how you divide things up? Are you doing charts or something?
Tabitha: Oh God, no. We can't even do star charts with the kids, let alone each other.
Michael: I would say there's a lot less conflict. But I'm not sure why. I think basically we've just sort of grown used to doing it together. There's still conflict but . . .
Tabitha: That's a lie! The reason that we have less conflict is that we happen to have Mary Poppins.
Michael: Well, there you go. That's true. We have a nanny.
©2009 Babble Media
About the Author
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Ada Calhoun was Babble's founding editor-in-chief. She has been a theater critic at New York magazine, an AOL News blogger and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. She has written for Time, Salon.com and The New York Times Arts & Leisure. Her first book, Instinctive Parenting, will be published by Simon Spotlight in 2010. Visit adacalhoun.com. |
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