Despite being steeped in second-wave feminism, I was still stuck with a majority of the domestic grind, like every generation of women before me. I was laboring hard at my career, too. As a working-mother friend of mine recently reminisced over cocktails, “We did everything.” That was our real-world experience of the “having it all” illusion. Doing it all. We did, and we resented it.
I wasn’t a stay-at-home mother, but I dropped off and picked up my kids from school every day, organized their activities, took them to the doctor, bought their clothes, kept them fed, homework, bath, bed, the whole schmear. (When I showed my husband this essay, he wrote in the margins, “Um, you weren’t totally on your own: I dropped off one or the other kid every day and at least in my memory got them breakfast every morning.” The former note is sort of true, the latter is a complete fantasy. PS: He also suggested the Richard Gere comparison above.)
By the late 1990s, my husband made a very (he inserted that word) good living, but we were a family of four in New York City, so we needed both incomes. There were years when I taught 11 classes and wrote books and screenplays, book reviews, the occasional essay, all while running our household and intermittently hospitalizing my parents. I also didn’t have a classic office job like Bruce’s, which meant my days had flexibility. I could do laundry at 2 in the morning while grading papers — the trifecta being simultaneously food shopping on Fresh Direct.
I know our life sounds rarefied, but at the time, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Bruce was always a loving dad. His children adored him. I adored him. He coached their soccer and basketball teams. He is and was a great moviegoing/sports-attending/comic-book-reading/cartoon-watching/Frank Sinatra- and Bob Dylan-listening mentor. He’d take them to the playground on Saturdays, although he arrived back at our apartment one afternoon with only one of my daughter’s shoes. (They cost 30 bucks. We could have gotten a babysitter!) Another time he let her fall off the slide onto her head. (He suggested I might mention the time I created a toxic event in our kitchen when I was sterilizing some formula bottles in a pot of boiling water and left them on the stove so long that they started to melt. OK, but that happened because I was alone with our infant daughter, exhausted, and had fallen asleep well after midnight while he was still at work closing an issue of a newsweekly.)
Bruce was also very adept at coming home from work after the kids had already been tucked into their bunk beds, lights out and all that, and rousing them so that he could read books to them. (Fun times trying to get them to settle back down while he finally ate his dinner, which I’d made and saved for him on a covered plate — why?) He read to them every page of every book of “Harry Potter.” This truly tender, if inconvenient, practice lasted until one evening when I poked my head in and saw he was reading away, enjoying himself, while our daughter was deep in her own book and our son was already fast asleep.