Peter believes that Nina should tend the home not because her anatomy is her destiny, not because God intended men to dominate women, nor because Peter earns more money. Peter believes she should tend the home because she is more interested and competent in it and has freely chosen to put her time and energy into it. Nina agrees with that. Accordingly, she does 70 percent of the child care and about 80 percent of the housework. (They agree on this estimate.) Nina stays home if the children are sick; she retrieves a child’s forgotten jacket from a friends house; she waits for the new sofa to be delivered. Although Peter describes his daughters as “daddy’s girls” and he seems to me to do quite a bit around the house, they both agree that he has little responsibility for the daily work of caring for them.
One evening when I was visiting their home, Nina took the children upstairs to bed to say their prayers; Peter whispered to me, pleased and proud, “Now they’re getting quality time.” Then, since I had asked both parents to go through the evening as they normally would, he settled down with the newspaper. I wasn’t sure whether he really meant to imply that he couldn’t give his children “quality time.” But it was clear that he saw his parental role as supporting Nina’s: he mothered Nina; Nina mothered the children.
This did not mean Peter was not an able, interested father. Both agree that Peter is more intuitive about the children’s feelings. For example, he is quick to sense just what favor to Diane had made Alexandra feel slighted. He knows when Alexandra is really hurt and when she is faking it. Often he tells Nina, and Nina does something about it. Nina tends the children’s physical needs, organizes their social lives, and in a kindly way “administers” them. An absence of warm communication with her own mother had left Nina slightly anxious about being a good mother herself, so she welcomes every little bit of Peters appreciation. And Peter appreciates Ninas mothering.
Peter is at one remove from the children, but he is enormously interested in them. When he talks to me about himself, he weaves in extraneous reminders of his wife and children. Unlike many men, he describes his typical workday morning with a consensual “we”—as in “We get up at six.” When he describes a typical day, his work seems like an interlude between more emotionally charged periods of time with his family. As he recounted:
Nina will get up first and take a shower. When the door closes, thats my cue to get up. I go downstairs and make coffee for both of us, and while the water is heating, the paper arrives. I glance at the front page, the sports page, then read the business section, make the coffee, bring the paper and two cups of coffee upstairs, as she’s coming out of the bathroom. She and I both drink coffee. Then Nina brings out Diane, our youngest child. I start to change her clothes, and put her on her little potty seat. Then I towel her off so she’s fresh and put on her day clothes. Alexandra is getting up and I dress her in her school uniform—she needs the attention when she sees me doing it for Diane, it’s not that she needs the assistance. So I do it with that understanding.
In contrast, Peter’s description of his workday is brief and perfunctory: “I arrive at work at eight-thirty or nine. Then once I get there, it’s just another daily routine. I leave around five or five- thirty.” Once home, Peter disappears upstairs to change into his jeans (after work, Nina remains in her white business suit). He describes mealtime, bath time, and “quality time” all in spontaneous, appreciative, and loving detail, recalling just what Nina had packed in Alexandra’s lunchbox, exactly which clothes she had laid out for Diane.
In Nina’s account of her typical day, the morning is short, a matter of warmly, efficiently dispatched routine. The detail begins when she gets to the first morning meeting, the morning calls and appointments over an impending crisis at the company. She slows down to talk at length about the challenging issues that would come before an important committee next week, and about a bristling rivalry between two members of her staff. Just as Peter lives less intensely at his office than he had intended, Nina lives more intensely than she had intended at hers. But far more than most men who did not share, Peter could visualize clearly just what sharing would be like. Recalling the preparations for Alexandras fifth birthday, he describes a vast array of tasks he has not done:
IVe done nothing for Alexandras birthday party this weekend except wrap a few gifts. Ninas the one who has had to write out the invitations, order the cake, buy Alexandra all her presents, figure out where were going, figure out the lunch menu for the kids. That has all been her responsibility, and I think she would like me to participate more in this. I did the decorations, blew up the balloons, threw the confetti all over the place. And I made all twenty-two sandwiches and set up the Betamax. But Nina still does 70 percent to my 30 percent.
Like Frank Delacorte, Peter probably did more to make the children have a good time than his self-image allowed him to accept real credit for. One evening when I was having dinner with them, Diane began to whimper and suddenly threw up some purple chewing gum. The two parents spontaneously leapt to their feet; Peter rushed to Diane, and Nina rushed for the mop. Peter comforted Diane: “Its okay, Diane. You tummys okaaaay.” After cleaning up the floor, Nina took Diane s clothes off to be washed. Nina, it seemed, was the “maid” of the house—putting in a load of laundry, changing a light bulb, packing the lunches, calling the sitter. Peter was the “nanny,” the understander and comforter. To reconcile the conflict between their gender ideology and the inner reality of their personalities, they developed a family myth: Nina was ‘naturally better with children,” and “naturally more interested” than Peter.