Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my cell phone light up from where it was nestled in the open front pocket of my bag. I debated checking it. My students were working in small groups and probably wouldn’t notice. And I did have a 6-month-old at home, I rationalized. But I resisted. I had already scolded a number of freshmen for texting, even though it was only the third week of the semester.
Distracted, I finished the lesson, reaching for my phone before my students were even out the door. As I guessed, the call had been from my husband. I played the voice mail message, the sounds of a crying baby the opening refrain. And then Steve’s voice: “Don’t expect dinner.” Click. My finger hovered above the “call back” button, but what was there to say? I looked up to the stream of students entering the room for my final class of the day and stuffed my phone deep into my bag.
The cultural conversation about balancing work and family began before I even had a timeline for when I wanted to have a child. Yet, in my mid-30s and wondering when my desire to start a family would overtake my desire for professional advancement, I still felt the tension acutely.
When I did get pregnant, somewhat unexpectedly, I struggled with reconciling the self that I knew (career driven, hard working) that was being overtaken by the version of me that the public now perceived (over-tired, family-focused). Of course when Rocco was born, little of this mattered, and, due to lucky timing — I had the summer off before we moved to Brooklyn and I started a new position — and my husband’s nontraditional career, we spent a blissful six months adjusting to parenting together. But in September, my role as our family’s breadwinner was reprised.
Perhaps by some people’s accounts I am a feminist success story. I have a full-time professorship and am juggling multiple writing projects while my husband, a musician and songwriter, stays home with our baby boy. My husband supports my academic and creative career, usually drops off the laundry, and often does the grocery shopping. I am on campus three days a week, and on the days that I am home he watches our son while I head to the local coffee shop for a couple hours of uninterrupted work.
In the afternoons, I take Rocco on walks around our Brooklyn neighborhood while my husband works on his own projects. Sometimes there is a late afternoon family outing to the park or a museum, sometimes not. By dinner we reconvene, and I often cook, something I enjoy. Even as I wish I had many more hours in the day that I could fill with research and writing and going to the gym, I also feel as if I have enough time with my family, enough for my work and, well, almost enough for me.
The first weeks of the semester were easy. Steve had lovely late summer weather to navigate our new neighborhood and was able to get recording done during Rocco’s naps. Rocco was asleep by the time I got home at 8 p.m. and Steve had dinner on the table. On the first days I was home with Rocco, I surprised myself by asking Steve whether Rocco liked the pureed peas Steve had offered him for the first time. It was a bit strange not being the one who knew this detail about my infant, but it was a small price to pay to keep ahead in my career. Then on Monday of my third week, I came home exhausted with my first stack of papers and found Steve sipping a beer with a frown, a sauce-stained dish in front of him. For the first time since the semester began, I came home to nothing bubbling on the stove.
I paused, understanding the full cultural implications of the question I was deciding whether to ask. But I was hungry.
“So, um, did you make me anything for dinner?”
It turned out that Rocco had a particularly challenging day. And then Steve made himself pasta and sauce from a can – “bachelor food” as we called it in our house, since it was a meal Steve only made for himself when I was out of town.
“Why didn’t you make some for me?” I asked.
“Because I know you don’t like it.” Which was true. I preferred homemade sauce and reserved my pasta eating for Italian trattorias. But still, I was hungry.
Maybe it was my 13-hour day catching up with me. I was still the one who got up with Rocco and fed him his breakfast before I handed him off to my husband, still sleeping in bed, when I left around 9 a.m. But I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to be mad about this absence of dinner. My options for take-out were limited in our neighborhood, and what we had at home took at least 30 minutes of preparation.
“O.K., well, I, uh, don’t expect you to make me dinner,” I began, feeling the weight of my words for all stay-at-home and second-shifting parents in the world. “But,” and here I tried very hard to put myself in the shoes of both a parent who had been in the company of a crying baby as well as one who had faced 80 college freshmen and survived an hour and a half commute each way, “if you aren’t going to make me food could you please just let me know? So I can grab something on the way home.”
On one hand, I didn’t want to ask for too much, as I couldn’t help but identify with the rhetoric of supporting the intensity of a stay-at-home parent’s job. On the other hand, should the feminist in me insist that dinner-making be part of the deal?
What I did know was that the stance I took on dinner would have larger repercussions for our relationship and family roles, so I let it go. I ate yogurt and asked about his day. Instead of packing leftovers for lunch, I made sure I had cash for the cafeteria.
So when I heard his message from the next day, I was, on one hand, pleased that he had heard my request, no matter the subtext. But I was also a bit annoyed. Maybe I should, like so many male breadwinners before me, expect dinner. Or was accepting our modern gender roles meant that I had no right to expect anything?
When I got off the subway an hour later, I checked my phone preparing to forage the neighborhood for food. Instead I saw a text from Steve: “Dinner’s on the table, see you soon.”
Ten minutes later I walked in the door. Steve was smiling, if a little ragged looking. Rocco had cried for about an hour, but then fell asleep. Quinoa and roasted vegetables filled two plates, the half-empty glass of wine in front of him softening the tension of the previous few hours.
“Just something I threw together,” Steve said with a half smile. “I know you had a long day.”
And as I sat down to Steve filling my wine glass, a warm homemade meal in front of me, I didn’t think about whether I deserved this meal, or whose job it would be to clean the dishes afterward. Steve’s job was to care for our son, not for me, I realized. But being part of a partnership meant caring for each other, not out of guilt and not out of duty, but out of love and in whatever way made sense.