Certain vestiges of Jessica’s earlier strategy remained. Although she often articulated her words hesitantly, as if trying to see clearly through a dense fog, the fog vanished suddenly when she spoke of her children’s feelings about Seth: both children felt cheated of time with their father. In this the Stein children differed from neighboring children […]

This took some arranging. Jessica had had a history of bad expe­rience with help. First she’d hired a nanny who was a wonderful baby-sitter but refused to do anything else, like pick up toys or oc­casionally wash breakfast dishes. (Often nannies who were citi­zens and English-speaking had more exacting standards than illegal aliens.) So Jessica […]

Eventually Jessica accepted Seths long hours and more whole­heartedly colluded in the idea that he was the helpless captive of his profession and his neurotic personality. This was her cover story. But as she did this, she made another emotional move— away from the marriage and family. She did not bolt from moth­erhood into a […]

The Steins’ misunderstanding over gifts led to a scarcity of grati­tude, and the scarcity of gratitude led to a dearth of small gestures of caring, especially from Jessica to Seth. Increasingly, they were feeling out of touch. When I asked Seth what he was not getting from Jessica that he had expected, he replied in […]

The Steins’ different views about their responsibilities at home led them to want to be appreciated, and to appreciate each other in ways that did not correspond. Seth wanted Jessica to identify with his ambition, enjoy the benefits of it—his large salary, their posi­tion in the community—and to accept gracefully his unavoidable absence from home. […]

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 […]

A T thirty-six, Seth Stein has been a husband for eleven years, a father for five, a practicing lawyer for eight, and a litigation attorney for the last six. He is tall, with broad, slightly stooped shoulders, and a firm handshake. We sit down for our interview at eight in the evening; normally at this […]

Why did Ann feel like Carmen Delacorte, that her husband’s job—and really his life—came first, when Frank and Robert, though very loving, did not talk in the same way about their wives? Carmen’s belief in male superiority is more easily understood as cultural programming: Given her working-class, Catholic back­ground, her lack of training and career […]

On this question of sharing the work at home, Ann listened to two contradictory inner voices. In her “better moments,” as she saw them, she wanted to relieve Robert of the work at home, to do it herself. When this voice spoke loudest, Ann spoke apprecia­tively about the heavy demands of Robert’s career and his […]

At our first meeting at the moms’ group, Ann told the other women: “Robert easily does half the work at home, with one ex­ception—I plan. I like the control. But he keeps doing errands as long as I hand him errands to do. He’s very unusual.” Yet when I met Robert he described their arrangement […]