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onsuela, the baby-sitter, finally opens the door a crack, looks me over, and lets me in. She leads me up to the second floor of the Livingstons’ friendly, weather-worn Victorian home to a family room with overstaffed chairs, family photos, and an excitable parrot in a large cage, all of which seem to face the cluster of toys on a blanket in the middle of the room on which Cary, two and a half, sits drawing trolls.
Mary Poppins is on the video machine, and has been all day. Just now, Mary Poppins, the nanny, is announcing dinner to the upper-middle-class British Mr. and Mrs. Banks and their children, all primly seated at the dinner table. As I settle in, start drawing trolls with Cary, and talk with Consuela, Barbara Livingston returns from work. She asks Cary for a kiss, then changes into jeans. Half an hour later, John Livingston returns from work, gets a big running hug from Cary, and sits down to chat. In a while, he rises to drive Consuela home, saying to his wife, “On my way back should I pick up some carry-out for dinner?”
Unlike Mary Poppins, so free and—at least symbolically—“on the rise,” Consuela, at twenty-two, has a seven-year-old child of her own, living in El Salvador with Consuelas mother. As Barbara explained to me later, the baby-sitter shared a small two-bedroom apartment with two workers and her husband, a salad waiter at the Toreador Restaurant. As an undocumented worker, Consuela fears the immigration authorities. “She never goes to the park with Cary because shes afraid they’ll find her.” Unlike Mrs. Banks on the video screen, Barbara has just returned from a ten-hour day at the office, and unlike Mr. Banks, John is picking up carryout from the deli down the street. Consuela’s life and the Livingstons’ in the United States today seem at least as far apart as those of Mary Poppins and the Banks family a hundred years ago in England. If anything, the fact that Consuela comes from the Third World but works in the United States makes her life more different from the Livingstons’. Social class differences seem to have lived on, while relations between men and women are changing for both Consuela and for Barbara, but here I tell Barbara’s story.
When I entered the Livingstons’ home, I noticed a half-empty trellis standing ready to support a frail, outreaching bougainvillea with leaves of brilliant crimson. A window was cracked. The paint was peeling. As Barbara said, “We haven’t had time for the house.” It occurred to me later that the house was a little like their marriage, the last entry on a long list of things to fix up. At the moment, they were negotiating with a workman to refloor the kitchen. The dining-room table was heaped with lamps separated from their shades, stacks of books, piles of linen. Only Cary’s room looked finished. John and Barbara had painted it themselves, green walls carefully edged with red, yellow, blue, and orange hearts at the top, which matched the hearts decorating Cary’s pillow cover. A hat collection hung behind her bed, next to a clown puppet. Their bedroom, the living room—these awaited attention. With ten-hour workdays and Saturday fractured into a dozen errands, many things had to wait, but not Cary, and not Cary’s room.
At thirty-four, Barbara is a youthful, lively woman with soft brown eyes, short, dark hair, and—considering the eight times the phone rang that evening—a consistently friendly telephone voice. She runs a beauty shop in Daly City. John is thirty-seven, tall, thin, with sandy hair; his crinkly eyes betray the quiet sense of humor that has recently gotten him through tough times at work
and home. He works in the billing department of a plastics wholesale company. .
Both began their interviews by describing hard times in their childhoods. Barbara described growing up in a gaggle of girls in a working-class Catholic family in Wisconsin, an alcoholic father, and a strong mother who died when Barbara was fifteen. John told me about a taciturn father who moved away to an empty room of the house when company came. For as long as John can recall, his mother worked as a waitress, even taking an extra job selling ice cream on weekends. “All I can remember is their criticizing me,” he said. “It made me a quiet person myself.” For most couples, marriage is a chance to heal and restore each other emotionally, but for the Livingstons this healing was vital to the marriage. They had been married for nine years.
In strategy, Barbara was a supermom, like Nina Tanagawa. And to a lesser degree, John was a superdad. Barbara left the house at 7:45, returned at 5:30. (The last four months had been unusually busy in her office: “IVe eaten dinner and gone back to the office for two or three more hours, and worked ten hours a day on Saturdays.”) What made Barbara a supermom was not her long hours at work but the four hours of concentrated time she devoted to Cary after work. She encouraged Cary to take two-and- a-half-hour naps during the afternoon so that she could stay up until 9:30 or 10:00 (according to Barbara), 10:00 or 11:00 (according to John), to play with her parents in the evenings. Also, as John explained, “Cary doesn’t sleep on weekends. She makes up the sleep on weekday afternoons.” These days, Cary often woke up two or three times a night. Usually Barbara got up to “march her back to bed.” This meant Barbara subsisted on an interrupted seven hours of sleep a night, although, as she explained with a laugh, “I’m not one of those people who feel just fine with five hours a night.”
Unlike other supermoms, Barbara split the housework and child care fifty-fifty with John. And Barbara had not struggled for this. John had always shared in the rough sense that Greg Alston had always shared the second shift—in time but not in responsibility. Consuela helped with some of the cleaning, but Barbara was the organizer and the primary parent to Cary. As John noted, “On weekends, Barbara mainly takes care of Cary. I would if she’d ask me, but she doesn’t.” One evening at dinner, as John moved his chair closer to Cary’s feeding table, and as Cary simultaneously slithered down from it, Cary’s toe accidentally got caught under John’s chair and she cried hard. John took her in his lap, soothed her with soft, explanatory talk, and cradled her warmly. But Barbara stood up to lift Cary out of her daddy’s lap and to comfort her in the same way, herself. John handed her over.
Like many couples, Barbara and John also cut back on household work. On the cooking, John declared, “About 40 percent of the time we buy take-out, eat out, or don’t eat.” They cut back on clothes shopping: “Except for Cary’s things, we don’t shop. We don’t need anything,” Barbara said. They no longer walked their nine-month-old German Shepherd, Daisy, but left her to pace their small back yard. Guilty over neglecting Daisy, they were wondering whether to give her away. They also cut back on letter-writing. (“Five years ago we found our Christmas cards in the glove compartment of our car in June. They’d never been mailed, and we haven’t sent any since.”) But as a strategy, cutting back was supplemental to being a supermom and superdad.
John told me that Barbara’s job “matters as much as mine,” and Barbara agreed. As with the Alstons, neither spouse had any leisure, but the responsibility for the home was mainly Barbara’s. She decided what needed doing and asked John to do errands, which in a considerate spirit he always did. Although John was often “on board” as much as Barbara, as fully interested in Cary and as fully skilled in primary parenting, Barbara seemed to want to be more primary to Cary. She, not John, had stayed home on “parental leave,” and that had seemed to set a pattern they both allowed to remain.
They felt the problem was not their division of labor. It was the huge amount of time that housework, Cary, and careers were taking from their marriage. Barbara commented with a sigh, “I cant remember the last time we went out alone.” And she found it hard to talk about their marriage.
In fact, Barbara had talked for nearly two hours in a relaxed way about how her father had remarried, to a wonderful woman, but was living in a trailer now, watching TV all day and drinking heavily. She had chatted about the day-to-day events of working and raising Cary, when she came upon the fact, and said that she and John were ‘seeing a counselor. …” Suddenly she burst into tears, paused, then continued softly, “Because we felt like our marriage wasn’t working out.”