In response to my entry yesterday, teranika has asked a couple of questions that I thought I�d field here instead of in her notes. I was hoping for something pithy and insightful, but the weather (18 inches of snow) and other miscellaneous factors (hyperactive three-year-old, feverish and vomiting husband) conspired against me. I think the best I can hope for is that I didn't contradict myself.
First, if you need a road map for this discussion, it originated with this entry by sea-change and continued with this entry I wrote yesterday. Here is what teranika had to say in my notes:

Hi H - I'm glad to hear that your husband is invested in the project. I hope that you don't take this the wrong way, because I really don't know you so well..but I have just reread the last ten entries and there is no mention of your husband's participation with A.J., and I found it interesting that you rarely mention your husband or your interactions with your husband, and AJ is at the center of every entry. It makes me want to go back and revisit my own entries to see how frequently I mention my own partner..and more so it makes me wonder about the perspectives that one sees from the outside versus what the people feel is happening in their daily relationships.

and

OK - I had to reread mine. No, I don't really mention my partner all that much (he is, of course, living in Germany so it's kind of easy not to). But I asked the question because of the outside perspective one gets. As someone who doesn't have children observing my female friends with children: the husband really does seem to vanish, either from action or from thought, when a baby is born...

There are a couple of unrelated issues at work here, at least in the context of my own diary. I�ll get the one that is least relevant to the discussion (begun in sea-change~�s entry from two days ago, and followed up in my entry from yesterday) out of the way first. The fact that I rarely mention my husband in entries is entirely deliberate. My husband is of a much less confessional bent than I and I try to respect his privacy by leaving him out of my diary as much as possible. I will freely admit this is a totally illogical decision from the perspective of AJ, to whom I grant very little privacy. I can�t justify the double standard at all. I can say, however, that the struggle with coming to terms with my identity as both a parent and a scholar was a large part of the purpose of beginning this diary in the first place, so to omit AJ would leave me with little to write about. I wrote about this issue a couple of months after starting this diary. If you�re interested, you can read the original entry on privacy issues here.

The second issue is more complex. Why is it that it always looks like husbands disappear from the relationship when women have children? What is going on here? I think teranika�s observation is astute and the explanation is complicated with two distinct components � the relationship between mother and child and between husband and wife (or child-rearing partners), with a woman�s work-life as a complicating factor for both parts of the discussion. I am no expert in this area. I can offer only my own experience as support or example. But I have observed the same tendency from both the outside and the inside.

First, I think there is a sense in which husbands/fathers do recede a bit for a while when a woman has a child (I cannot speak at all for adoptive mothers, only for myself and some I know who�ve actually given birth to children). Regardless of how equitable the partnership, there is a unique physical bond between mother and child, especially if the mother is breastfeeding her infant, that simply doesn�t exist with the father. It is completely impossible for me to explain the connection yielded by nine months or sharing the same body and of being the sole nourishment for months after the birth. It�s at times horrifying � I seem to remember feeling on at least one occasion like Ripley in Alien � and exhilarating. The experience of birth is emotional for both parents, but there are hormonally induced emotions that the mother experiences that frankly are beyond my power to describe. Regardless of how involved the father is in the process, it�s just not physically possible for him to be quite as involved as the mother. I remember AJ�s birth as the single most intense moment of my life. For weeks afterwards I told and retold the sequence of events to myself in my head, in an effort to gain a toehold on the momentousness of the occasion, to have some grasp of the experience. I made several attempts at writing it down on paper, but it came out as a string of meaningless details and didn�t begin to describe what I had felt. While I was so wrapped up in the new baby, though, my husband was feeling a little left out. Most of my male friends who are parents have confessed similar feelings.

After the actual birth, the differences in maternal and paternal ties start to wane, but it takes a while. From a purely practical standpoint, breastfeeding mothers will probably spend more time with their kids than the fathers. It�s simply hard to be away for too long. And once you do that for a while (and for many it is a year or more), it becomes a habit that has to be consciously broken by all three of the people involved. And even with a conscious attempt to change the pattern, the kid might have other ideas. It can take a while. As AJ has gotten bigger, his demands on me have still been greater than on his father, but the difference is growing smaller every day. Mostly we just feel grateful that there are two of us to keep up with the demands and needs of a busy child.

Then there�s the issue of the partnership (which in our case is a marriage but I imagine similar issues would be at stake in any committed partnership involved in the raising of a child). The thing that pulled at me about teranika�s questions was actually in her entry on a colleague who has a baby and is not pulling her weight in departmental business. I�m sure there are all kinds of reasons this happens and one of them is probably that a husband is not pulling his weight. But there are other issues to be aware of too. Most of the women I know who have some kind of career they feel strongly about and plan to continue go through a lot of angst when they have their first child. Do I work? Do I stay home? If you work, you feel guilty for not working. If you stay home, you resent the time away from your child or feel guilty for wanting to take that time away or both at once. Moreover, if the child is very young, this woman, regardless of how much her husband is willing to help, is probably getting no time alone and very little sleep.

But the issue also made me think about the gender roles in a relationship. Frankly, no matter how hard we fight, traditional gender roles affect us in our marriage. At the moment, my husband is paying the mortgage while I try to finish school. As a result, I am the primary childcare giver and dinner-maker. We do, however, share cleaning chores pretty equally and he probably does a lot more with the childcare and other domestic chores than most husbands of stay-at-home moms. As we were figuring out the arrangement, I was extremely sensitive and squeamish about anything that rang of �traditional housewife,� even though by many outward appearances, that may be what I appear. In our case, we assume this is a temporary situation and that once I graduate and find a job, my husband will be taking over more of the childcare and will get a chance to work on some of his pet projects.

But there�s another side to this too, which is the extreme social difficulty of a father stepping in where mothers have traditionally done the work. I usually drop AJ off at school partly because I don�t need to be home for business calls but also because if my husband does it he is inevitably the only male over the age of 5 in the building and is treated with some distrust as a result. AJ can�t go to playgroup if I don�t take him. The group dynamics of the mothers that gather with the children would not permit a male interloper. Perhaps in a city these things aren�t quite as much of an issue � I assume with a greater density of people one might be able to find others in the same situation. But here in the suburbs, dads who do anything with their kids during traditional business hours are still an incredible rarity. Even if my husband were met with welcoming arms in these situations, he still has to confront social pressures against men doing what has traditionally been done by women. Until more men start doing it, it�s still going to be hard and a test of his sense of self.

Whether or not the husbands disappear from the child-rearing picture depends on a particular couple�s ability to negotiate these issues and, if possible, to plan ahead for how to deal with them before that child arrives and knocks your world upside-down and inside-out. How are you going to negotiate time? When the kid wakes up in the middle of the night, who answers? Do you alternate? If the mother is nursing her infant, it will usually need to be her in the beginning. How do you prevent that fact from setting a pattern of it always being the mother forever after? How do you negotiate other domestic activities? What happens when one or the other partner�s job suddenly becomes more (or less) demanding? When the child is sick, who stays home?

I like to think we�ve handled most of these issues pretty well so far. It helps that we both work at home all day. And things got easier once I stopped getting hung up on the philosophical problem with being saddled with a fairly traditional role in the short term and started focusing on the practical: what needed to get done in the household. Still, I think I'd go nuts doing this for a long time. The real test for us will be when I get a job. How we handle the next phase will be telling.

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