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Silencing the Maternal Nag

Christine Gardner

Women want their spouses to be more involved in raising their children, but they need to allow fathers to father, not force them to mother. The New York Times reported last week on new research that suggests that women are unintentionally blocking men from greater participation in child-raising because they insist that men do it their way. Women need to find a way to encourage their partners for the good of the children. The research shows that children thrive when both mom and dad are involved, not one or the other.

The article hit close to home. As a new mother, I confess to needing to fight the temptation to turn my husband into my employee in the Raising Our Son business. We both work outside the home, but because I’ve chosen to exclusively breast-feed, I’ve arranged my schedule so that I’m with our baby more than my husband is. Naturally, I feel like the expert on what each of our son’s cries and coos mean. Sharing information on our son’s development is helpful, but when I swoop in to rescue our fussy baby from my husband’s arms, I know I’ve gone too far. More often than not, the baby keeps fussing in my arms, anyway.

But shouldn’t my husband be quietly humming Brahms Lullaby instead of singing the raucous Rocky Raccoon song (our own creation) while he is getting our son ready for bed? Isn’t PBS better than the Golf Channel for their television viewing? Should they even be watching television? Again, I have to silence the inner nag. The point is that my husband is involved in the raising of our son. Our child needs a mother and a father, not two mothers.

That children do better when both parents are involved is not news. What caught my attention in the New York Times article is that research affirms that happy marriages make for happy children. As Philip Cowan, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, is quoted as saying, “Parents work all day, and feel as if they need to give every other minute to the kids. But if they don’t take care of the relationship between them, they’re not taking care of the whole story.” Nagging my husband to take care of our son serves only to gnaw away at our marriage.

As a child, I remember going into the kitchen looking for a snack, only to find my parents kissing by the refrigerator. I would usually giggle, or in later years, offer my pre-adolescent commentary: “That’s so gross.” I also felt a sense of warmth and security that I couldn’t name at the time. I would find the Oreos, go back to watching Happy Days or The Muppet Show, feeling that all was right in my world.

Placing love for spouse ahead of love for children is not without controversy. Ayelet Waldman, author most recently of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (Doubleday, 2009), created quite a stir when she confessed in a 2005 New York Times column that she loved her husband more than her children. She writes,

I wish some learned sociologist would publish a definitive study of marriages where the parents are desperately, ardently in love, where the parents love each other even more than they love the children. It would be wonderful if it could be established, once and for all, that the children of these marriages are more successful, happier, live longer, and have healthier lives than children whose mothers focus their desires and passions on them.

Of course, it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that one must love one’s spouse or children more than the other. But in our child-centric society where photos of kids-as-accessories fill the pages of celebrity tabloids, it’s good to be reminded that marriage is supposed to come before children. Even within Christian culture, our desire to “focus on the family” can take on an idolatrous zeal.

We have developed a ritual in the Gardner household called the “family sandwich”: When my husband comes through the door to the kitchen from the garage at the end of the day, we embrace, and then we kiss the baby. Since I’m usually holding our son at the time, he becomes the “meat” in our family sandwich. Now that I think of it, it usually happens by the refrigerator.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty on November 18, 2009 9:41 AM

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