From the beginning Jessica had been prepared to balance her law practice with raising a family. The only legal specialties she seriously considered were those she felt were compatible with taking time for a family; that excluded large firms specializing in corporate law. But she did not want to be marooned in solitary motherhood, as her widowed mother had been while raising her. As she made compromises in her career, she wanted Seth to make them in his.
After their first child, Victor, was born, Jessica established two patterns many women would consider highly desirable “solutions”: she cut back her hours at work and she hired a full-time maid. Five years later, when I met her, she would talk cheerfully at dinner parties of having “the best of both worlds”—an adorable three-year-old, a five-year-old, and work she loved. She dropped Victor off at nursery school at nine and went to work. Then she picked him up at noon, gave him lunch, and left him at home with Carmelita, her housekeeper, while she returned to work until five. But there was a certain forced cheer in her account of her day that Seth was the first to explain:
Jessica has been very disappointed about my inability to do more in terms of the child rearing, and about my not sharing things fifty-fifty. She says Fve left the child rearing to her. Her career has suffered. She says she’s cut twice as much time from her career as Fve cut from mine. She complains that Fm not like some imaginary other men, or men she knows, who take time with their children because they want to and know how important it is. On the other hand, she understands the spot Гт in. So she holds it in until she gets good and pissed off, and then she lets me have it.
Jessica didn’t need Seth to help her with housework; Carmelita cleaned the house and even did the weekend dishes on Mondays. Jessica didn’t need Seth for routine care of their children either; Carmelita did that, too. But Jessica badly wanted Seth to get more emotionally involved with the children and with her. Even if he couldn’t be home, she wanted him to want to be. In the meantime, she felt oppressed by his dominating absence.
Jessica did not adjust to Seth’s absence from home in the way nineteenth-century wives adjusted to the absence of husbands who were fishermen and sailors, or the way twentieth-century wives adjust to the absence of husbands who are traveling salesmen. She kept expecting Seth to cut back his hours and she led the children to hope for this too. She kept wanting Seth to feel that he was missing something when he went back to the office in the evening, as he sometimes still did. In a sense, she acted as if she were co-mothering with a ghost.