"Daaaddyyy, higher!" My 4-year-old daughter, Maya, always knows when I'm not devoting my full attention to pushing her swing. Across the playground, in the bow of a play ship, my 6-year-old son, Max, and his friend are negotiating the rules of some complicated superhero game: "And then you . . . ," "Yeah, and then I'll. . . . " It's a perfect lazy Sunday afternoon in the park, the kind I always expected to share with my children. But in these overscheduled times, I'm having fewer of these days than I'd imagined.
My wife thought she would return to work full time after Max was born. But when he was still an infant, she was so anguished about not being with him that she reconsidered her priorities. After a lot of discussions with me and her colleagues and much self-questioning, Julie decided to scale back her hours as a journalist and work part time.
We're fortunate that we can afford this arrangement. I have a good, stable job that pays well enough. But our decision has had costs--and not just financial. As the primary wage-earner in the family, I can't diverge much from my current path. I won't be able to work part time to go to school; I won't be able to make any career shifts unless I can be assured of making close to the amount of money I do now. In short, it closes a lot of doors and pinches further my already constrained freedom. As a result of the renewed attention that I must pay to my career, I often feel like I'm missing out on precious time with my family. And all too soon Maya will be able to swing herself, no longer needing me.
As my wife addresses an increasingly large part of our children's needs, they come to rely on her more and me less. This is partly because they tend to associate me with "doing stuff"--homework, violin, soccer, T-ball, baths, swimming. Julie, though, has time to spend just hanging out with them, being there when they need her. Maybe that's the crux of my concerns: Aside from weekends and evenings, many of which are taken up with managing their busy schedules, I'm not just "there." Sometimes this makes me feel like an outsider or oddball in my own family.
When we got married, I saw myself as an enlightened man of the '80s, sharing equally in all the domestic responsibilities, including caring for and raising my children. I didn't want a "traditional" single-earner family, with me gone all day and my wife at home making dinner and dealing with the kids. And neither did Julie want that. I certainly don't resent my wife for rearranging her priorities; before we had kids, I didn't have a clue as to what it would really be like or how it would test my own values. But I sometimes wonder if we've "betrayed" the feminist mores we so strongly advocated by too easily falling into traditional roles. I hope not. I suspect that our concepts of feminism have been redefined to include the realities of raising a family in the '90s.
I don't want to sound like a self-centered whiner: The arrangement that we've created has yielded a positive response for my wife and children (and for me). Surely it is worth the sacrifices I am making. It's not as if I'm carrying the weight of the entire world on my shoulders. Just a small piece of it--or, perhaps some might say, just a chip on my shoulder. In fact, Julie's changed schedule has brought me benefits as well, among them reduced guilt when traveling on business, additional flexibility in scheduling work, and children who are more relaxed when I am home.
This change in our childcare responsibilities has shifted our roles subtly but, on the whole, beneficially. It would have been petty and selfish of me to have demanded that Julie not choose to reduce her work hours. We went into this with our eyes open, and though I did not expect to see my kids relying so much on their mother or to feel the sadness and vague jealously that accompanied this, I do not regret our decisions for a minute.
Ben Lloyd, '81, is a technical manager at Hewlett-Packard
