For the first few years of our marriage, Michelle and I went through the usual adjustments all couples go through: learning to read each other’s moods, accepting the quirks and habits of a stranger underfoot. Michelle liked to wake up early and could barely keep her eyes open after ten o’clock. I was a night owl and could be a bit grumpy (mean, Michelle would say) within the first half hour or so of getting out of bed. Partly because I was still working on my first book, and perhaps because I had lived much of my life as an only child, I would often spend the evening holed up in my office in the back of our railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle feeling lonely. I invariably left the butter out after breakfast and forgot to twist the little tie around the bread bag; Michelle could rack up parking tickets like nobody’s business.
Mostly, though, those early years were full of ordinary pleasures — going to movies, having dinner with friends, catching the occasional concert. We were both working hard: I was practicing law at a small civil rights firm and had started teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, while Michelle had decided to leave her law practice, first to work in Chicago’s Department of Planning and then to run the Chicago arm of a national service program called Public Allies. Our time together got squeezed even more when I ran for the state legislature, but despite my lengthy absences and her general dislike of politics, Michelle supported the decision; “I know it’s something that you want to do,” she would tell me. On the nights that I was in Springfield, we’d talk and laugh over the phone, sharing the humor and frustrations of our days apart, and I would fall asleep content in the knowledge of our love.
Then Malia was born, a Fourth of July baby, so calm and so beautiful, with big, hypnotic eyes that seemed to read the world the moment they opened. Malia’s arrival came at an ideal time for both of us: Because I was out of session and didn’t have to teach during the summer, I was able to spend every evening at home; meanwhile, Michelle had decided to accept a part-time job at the University of Chicago so she could spend more time with the baby, and the new job didn’t start until October. For three magical months the two of us fussed and fretted over our new baby, checking the crib to make sure she was breathing, coaxing smiles from her, singing her songs, and taking so many pictures that we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes. Suddenly our different biorhythms came in handy: While Michelle got some well-earned sleep, I would stay up until one or two in the morning, changing diapers, heating breast milk, feeling my daughter’s soft breath against my chest as I rocked her to sleep, guessing at her infant dreams.
But when fall came — when my classes started back up, the legislature went back into session, and Michelle went back to work — the strains in our relationship began to show. I was often gone for three days at a stretch, and even when I was back in Chicago, I might have evening meetings to attend, or papers to grade, or briefs to write. Michelle found that a part-time job had a funny way of expanding. We found a wonderful in-home babysitter to look after Malia while we were at work, but with a full-time employee suddenly on our payroll, money got tight.
Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance. When I launched my ill-fated congressional run, Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with the decision. My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing. Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born — just as beautiful, and almost as calm as her sister — my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained.
“You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”
I was stung by such accusations; I thought she was being unfair. After all, it wasn’t as if I went carousing with the boys every night. I made few demands of Michelle — I didn’t expect her to darn my socks or have dinner waiting for me when I got home. Whenever I could, I pitched in with the kids. All I asked for in return was a little tenderness. Instead, I found myself subjected to endless negotiations about every detail of managing the house, long lists of things that I needed to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally sour attitude. I reminded Michelle that compared to most families, we were incredibly lucky. I reminded her as well that for all my flaws, I loved her and the girls more than anything else. My love should be enough, I thought. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to complain about.
It was only upon reflection, after the trials of those years had passed and the kids had started school, that I began to appreciate what Michelle had been going through at the time, the struggles so typical of today’s working mother. For no matter how liberated I liked to see myself as — no matter how much I told myself that Michelle and I were equal partners, and that her dreams and ambitions were as important as my own — the fact was that when children showed up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected to make the necessary adjustments. Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on hold. She was the one who had to make sure that the kids were fed and bathed every night. If Malia or Sasha got sick or the babysitter failed to show up, it was she who, more often than not, had to get on the phone to cancel a meeting at work.
It wasn’t just the constant scrambling between her work and the children that made Michelle’s situation so tough. It was also the fact that from her perspective she wasn’t doing either job well. This was not true, of course; her employers loved her, and everyone remarked on what a good mother she was. But I came to see that in her own mind, two visions of herself were at war with each other — the desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids; and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all those plans she’d had on the very first day that we met.
In the end, I credit Michelle’s strength — her willingness to manage these tensions and make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls — with carrying us through the difficult times. But we also had resources at our disposal that many American families don’t have. For starters, Michelle’s and my status as professionals meant that we could rework our schedules to handle an emergency (or just take a day off) without risk of losing our jobs. Fifty-seven percent of American workers don’t have that luxury; indeed, most of them can’t take a day off to look after a child without losing pay or using vacation days. For parents who do try to make their own schedules, flexibility often means accepting part-time or temporary work with no career ladder and few or no benefits.
Michelle and I also had enough income to cover all the services that help ease the pressures of two-earner parenthood: reliable child care, extra babysitting whenever we needed it, take-out dinners when we had neither the time nor the energy to cook, someone to come in and clean the house once a week, and private preschool and summer day camp once the kids were old enough. For most American families, such help is financially out of reach. The cost of day care is especially prohibitive; the United States is practically alone among Western nations in not providing government-subsidized, high-quality day-care services to all its workers.
Finally, Michelle and I had my mother-in-law, who lives only fifteen minutes away from us, in the same house in which Michelle was raised. Marian is in her late sixties but looks ten years younger, and last year, when Michelle went back to full-time work, Marian decided to cut her hours at the bank so she could pick up the girls from school and look after them every afternoon. For many American families, such help is simply unavailable; in fact, for many families, the situation is reversed — someone in the family has to provide care for an aging parent on top of other family responsibilities.