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TEDx Talks
Title: How to avoid becoming The Bitch in the House (and The Bastard on the Couch) | Cathi Hanauer | TEDxKC
Published: 2017-09-07
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8h9dtwZik
here's a piece of wisdom that might be obvious to you but for some reason it wasn't to me you can't be both your mother and your father at least not at the same time what do I mean by this well I'm talking about the traditional old fashioned male and female roles in marriage and parenting so my mother I mean the nurture the one who does the
domestic tasks cooking cleaning shopping child care the one who stays home or close to home during the day and by father I mean the breadwinner the one with the power and the power tools the one who leaves in the morning and comes back at night paycheck in hand ready to eat the meal is wife prepared this is how my parents marriage worked that's how my in
laws marriage worked but this isn't how the marriages of my generation were supposed to work most of them anyway women of my generation and a lot of men to thought we were beyond those traditional roles and that we'd all husbands and wives be both nurtures and breadwinners and that this would make us all happy but both of us trying to be both turned out to be
a lot harder than we thought I didn't realize this until I was thirty two when I had my first baby and it was a shock not just to me but to a lot of people I knew so much so that I published a book about it full of stories of women shocked by this the women felt angry and betrayed so the book had on the cover
snarling red lips and are rated title the bitch in the house that led to another book this one by my husband his was all men baffled band tired from always being made to feel inadequate his book was called the bastard on the couch the problem was we had all believed that the earnings of the domestic duties could and would be roughly equal and evenly divided and
that would be able to combine them pretty easily so we women set out to have jobs or careers we got educated we got places to live and supported ourselves we could date and have fun even love but we worked often for a decade or more before we signed on to marriage and kids and when we did marry her become parents we knew most of us would
still need to work because by now most middle class families need two incomes sometimes to live as well as our parents had on one and that was fine with a lot of us we were doctors and lawyers teachers and artists our work to find us supported us helped us navigate the world even if we didn't love our jobs we like being independent we no longer had
to go straight from our parents homes to our husbands homes we waited for the right partner are solely and someone who would be involved in their kids lives in a way their own father had been our guys if we chose dies wanted to feed in diaper babies some of them could they like that their wives have careers that we too were engaged with the world and
they wouldn't have to support the family alone waking up in mid life to realize that Mr kids entire childhood with our partners at first things felt equal we were all building our careers and mostly splitting home stuff soon the men like the women would wear baby since slings throw birthday parties feed the fish that's what we thought and then the baby's arrived for me that worked
out like this I had very Dan raider admit when I was twenty eight but then I've been thinking about what I wanted in a husband and when I met Dan I knew he was a he was calm and respectful smart and talented rye he could fix cars and build things and he did it all very cheaply because for years he's lived on so little for example
he so just close and even his shoes with dental floss I love that so creative and resourceful but then I was well into into my career as a journalist and editor Dan also twenty eight had so far been a ski instructor and a part time janitor and was now part time reading teacher I loved all this too especially the janitor part when our dog a kid
throughout he could clean it plus we read each other's work and made each other laugh I was looking for someone to support me only to be my partner in work and in parenting love in life that was Dan and I married him soon he got a full time editing job and I sold a novel and got an advance for another do in a year thrilled we
got pregnant we were thirty two I was also reading a monthly magazine column living in New York we were just getting by on both of our incomes with the baby though nothing went quite as expected first came the emergency C. section so much for the expense of birthing classes Dan took one of his two precious vacation weeks but I was in the hospital for six of
those days when I got home the baby was nursing and projectile vomiting round the clock and I had along with my stitches the painful breast infection Dan returned to work the next day he had to he had no paternity leave so there we were me my work and the baby I love baby Phoebe she looked so pretty in her hat but what was I supposed to
do with her I had fully believed I would work while she napped exhausted and throbbing I type with one hand while holding the baby dirty laundry and empty pampers boxes surrounding me Dan was a loving attentive father but his later work life seemed unchanged well my now revolved around baby and household duties doctor visits reading childcare books and restocking onesies I had no community of mother
ship my friends were ambitious professional women most don't even married so far none had kids my mother out in Jersey had gone back to full time teaching my mother in law lived far away this was a moment of truth for me my generation had known what we wanted but known it figured out how we're supposed to work taking care of an infant appear to be a
full time job with over time but we already had full time jobs often work the defined us with incomes are families dependent on here's how it was for a friend of mine a successful executive and the bigger earner in her marriage this was not long after they had their second child just got home from work around seven her husband wasn't home yet the sitter had been
on for ten hours and needed to get home to her own kids the baby was hungry at four months he was still nursing often including at night the toddler was whiny and clinging my friend needed to eat dinner for both kids to bed and prepare for a big presentation the next day she sat down to nurse the baby the toddler grabbed a crayon and began scribbling
on the wall no my friend yelled the toddler burst into tears mommy's grumpy he well go back to work and stay there for the rest of your life my friend's husband who just walked in smirked and shrugged and she felt horrible she told me I'm the bitch in the house I heard stories like this every day and I thought something isn't working we were educated women
with nice partners and homes healthy babies good jobs we knew we were privileged that there were places in the world and the U. S. where women struggle just have a safe home and feed their children still almost every working mother I knew was exhausted and overwhelmed nothing was as we'd expected we nursed round the clock even at work pumping in bathroom stalls one woman who worked
on wallstreet described how her male colleagues would move when she carried her breast pump past their desks our baby seeded shots shoes toys BPA free T. there's soon they did activities playdates possibly therapy because kids today were micro managed not just let loose to dig up worms in the park and feed inserted to their little brothers with rare exceptions women were the ones piecing all this
together the ones holding the puzzle of family life in our heads it didn't matter for jobs are as demanding as our husbands jobs we were the ones rushing home the ones up at night our husbands try to step two but that was hard when we had let's face it the boobs so while they slept winners the babies and made mental lists of all the things we've
done wrong and the things to be figured out the sitter needed a vacation the baby needed a new stroller we had to sign up now for preschool if we wanted to spot it was the women who make sure all this happened maybe this was because we'd watched our mothers do it or maybe we were wired this way we didn't know but it seems we've been wrong
to believe that parenting would be equal society male roles even biology hadn't caught up to where we were as working mothers our husbands didn't understand our anger after all they said the pumped milk they were the kids hop on pop they did the laundry a fast and they retired to they're doing twice as much as their fathers had and those fathers had come home to calm
wives offering warm slippers cold martinis homemade meatloaf or so the myth when what was our problem marriage was hard it was even harder with jobs and young children Woody Allen called marriage the death of hope almost half the married couples in this country divorce and sometimes heartbreaking or not that really is the best option but wait there is hope even for working couples with children and
since today seventy one percent of mothers work and in four of ten families the woman is the primary or sole earner four of ten well they better be hoped plus is Woody Allen really we want to listen to that marriage I believe hope star to this realization you don't have to be your mother and your father at once you do though have to be a portion
of each if you're working mother or married to one so here's what you need to ask ourselves as a couple ideally before the kids come along which portion of each will you each being and which will you give us what rules from our parents generation are we willing to break and how can we make it so that everyone feels valued and everyone feels it's fair how
can we avoid becoming the bitch in the house and the bastard on the couch I'm speaking to you today from a different perspective that of someone who's years beyond those frantic days and his anger has been replaced by deep gratitude for the things in my life that felt so hard to balance then marriage motherhood work and what I can tell you with the perspective of distance
is this first with few exceptions working mothers really are still doing a second shift at home mothers who work full time still do twice as much housework and childcare is men the millennium and do score better than their predecessors though millennials working mothers also have less of what one study called leisure time partly because men even fathers are better than women and allowing themselves to relax
as for the office Ono the work place hasn't changed much if anything hours are longer now with workers expects to be dialed in round the clock in the US we still don't have paid parental leave paid family medical leave or subsidized childcare we're behind virtually every other country and the world on the stuff from Burundi to Brazil to Serbia mothers are twice as likely as fathers
to say that being a parent has made it harder for them to advance at work no surprise that the number of women dropped dramatically at the top of most professions so working mothers dissatisfaction Israel and justified both at home and at work and no matter how egalitarian a couple your going in having children silently rewrites you marriage contract when the baby is sick and someone has
to stay home from work you actually have to decide whose work is more important when you've birth work both worked all week and someone needs to get up but the kids on Sunday at five A. M. and play twister that's when you see what your marriage is made out till death do you part takes on a whole new meaning talk about it with each other before
during and after tell each other how you feel and what you need seems obvious but sometimes it isn't and break the rules from your parents generation your father kept an immaculate derives your mother made a home cooked meal every night but in your family with two full time jobs and kids let it go your mother might have ordered into if she had an iPhone and while
studies look to tell us our kids will be delinquency if we don't call it family dinner together every single night what matters is that you find a way to connect as a family maybe for you that's breakfast or dog walks or movie night embrace it and lose the guilt don't let the idea of perfection ruin the reality of good agree if I don't have a job
and a family and household to run I might've been able to memorize this talk women didn't go hi years with jobs and young kids are hard and part of why the hardest because things do you still need to change for working parents at home at work and in our country but they're also hard of course because the full of some of the best things in life
and they do go by fast and if you've got the right partner and can get through them the rewards are myriad a shared history and home someone to drive you to your colon awski and if you're lucky because luck plays a part here to a day when your kids come home from college for the summer and your son who learned to cook when you finally sat
back with a book and a bag of chocolate chips that boy now a man makes a nice dinner for everyone and your daughter that pretty baby in the hot comes home from her summer job full of excitement and your husband comes in from the back Reese finally gotten a few minutes off work to fix a car and build some things and you find yourselves all around
the table together and you look at you now grown up babies and say how mature and responsible they are and how you never could have predicted this all those years ago when you found it so hard to combine work and parenting and they say well we left our childhood and our friends think your work is cool and you're speechless tears might even come to your eyes
