‘I’d trade my husband for a housekeeper’

Modern parenthood is anything but simple. But that doesn't mean it has to be incompatible with conjugal bliss. In “I’d Trade My Husband for a Housekeeper: Loving Your Marriage After the Baby Carriage,” authors Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile take an honest, humorous approach to the obstacles and benefits of marriage — targeting everything from balancing housework to trying to keeping the romance alive. An excerpt:

Chapter 2: Why Don’t We Have One of Those Hollywood Marriages (Expectations vs. Reality)

We realize that you might not be in dire crisis mode in your marriage right now, but if you’re like most women, you probably could be happier. In fact, of the over 300 married women with kids we interviewed, 240 said they could be happier. And nearly all thought they were the minority in their feelings. What’s more, they thought their unhappiness was their fault.

But after talking — and talking, and talking — to so many women, we noticed a trend: Of the 80 percent of women who wished they were happier in marriage, most started out with an unrealistic vision of what married life would look like. Particularly married life with kids. As we wrote in our first book, when our expectations aren’t met, unhappiness ensues. Never mind that our expectations were unrealistic in the first place and are never going to happen in a million years. We had a vision. We didn’t attain it. We feel like we failed.

Which leads us to the big question: Why are so many of us in this situation? While we can blame our parents, Hollywood movies, celebrity culture, the insidious development of the BlackBerry, the truth is we’re all complicit. We tend to blow a lot of sunshine up other people’s skirts. We tell our friends and co-workers how much we love being mothers, and put a pretty good varnish on our marriages as well. “I had heard a lot of girlfriends talk about how you fall in love all over again with your husband after you have a baby,” one mom named Christy told us. “How you’re on cloud nine 24 hours a day. And I kept waiting for that moment to come — more of that ‘over the moon’ feeling, when you just stare at your husband and say, ‘Wow!’ [But] I just didn’t have that.”

Sister, between the sleeplessness, spit-up, sore boobs, and constant screaming, who could possibly have that?

We’re not sharing this so we can all shed a big tear of pity for ourselves. We’re sharing this to open each other’s eyes. How’s anybody supposed to feel satisfied with their marriage, or even know what a good marriage looks like, if we don’t talk about marriage and motherhood openly and honestly? As one mom told us, “I didn’t talk to anyone about how we were having a hard time — not even my work friends. It’s an image thing. I wanted the world to think of me as a working married mom with a great family. It was painful — I knew that wasn’t how my life was.”

“People are actually less happy today than in the prior generation,” Joshua Coleman, Ph.D., author of The Lazy Husband, explains. “The first problem is expectations. Today we expect our partner to be everything to us. Our workout partner, our coach, our lover, our friend.” The next problem, Dr. Coleman says, is that we tend to enter into marriage with ludicrously overblown notions of what it will be like. We think we’ll have perfect communication; star-aligned value systems; great sex after kids; the perfect house; a long-lasting, healthy, best-friendship marriage... the list goes on and on. And while that’s all really nice, we need to get those visions out of our heads and start talking realistically about marriage if we want to be happy in it. Marriage and motherhood are difficult — but they can also be magical and worthwhile. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we’ve got to start acknowledging real marriage — flawed marriage — if we want to learn to enjoy the marriages we’ve got.

I THOUGHT WE’D COOK DINNER TOGETHER WHILE GIGGLING ABOUT OUR DAY
When we asked women about their expectations going into marriage, particularly expectations relative to marriage with kids, here is what we heard:

• Once we have kids, our roles will be interchangeable.
• We will have a 50-50 division of labor.
• We’ll make all of our decisions together.
• We’ll be even closer after we have kids.
• We’ll cook dinner together while giggling about our day.
• We might go through a rough patch sex-wise with the new baby, but we’ll get back to “normal” in no time.
• We will always take care of each other — mind, body, and soul.
• My husband stayed the same guy when we got married; he’ll stay the same after we have kids.
• We’ll adjust our lives to support each other’s goals.
• My husband knows me really well; he’ll pitch in when he sees I’m tired.
• We’ll talk openly and honestly about everything.
• We’ll have a lot of family time together.
• Even if life at home gets stressful, our family vacations will be relaxing and fun.

Compounding the problem, many of us assumed our husbands had these same rosy expectations of marriage. In reality, many did not. As Bill, a father of two daughters, told us, “I have two little girls, and their favorite stories are about princesses getting married! Guys have a much less romantic view of marriage. When guys talk about marriage, we buy into this idea of ‘giving things up.’ We’re doing our duty. We go into [marriage] automatically thinking the romance is out of it. And I didn’t know it at first. It was a running joke: “Welcome to the team,” and all that. Your pals make fun of you and tell you what it’s really like. And later on you go, ‘Oh, you meant it?’ It’s tough — it’s a lot of work! Guys expect to work. This is just another form of work.”

Women, however, tend to think that finding the right person is the hard part of getting married, not the beginning of a life’s work. As Dr. Pat Covalt, author of What Smart Couples Know, explained to us, “I think what happens is we women are totally unrealistic about love and romance in marriage. We get caught up more in the gown that we’re going to wear than what our conflict management style is.” The in love feeling women focus on can also lead to trouble down the road. “I don’t even use the words ‘fall in love’ anymore,” Covalt says. “Love dissipates. The romantic, jittery stuff — that ‘in love’ feeling — always goes away, [followed by] a mature level of love that is much less exciting but much more real. People say, ‘I love you, but I’m not in love with you, so I’ll end the marriage.’ We need to grow up and be more mature in [our] expectations of marriage. You should be this sweet little thing you always were... Well, I’m too tired to be sweet — I’m going to bed!”

I DON’T FEEL LIKE I’M IN LOVE, WITH DOVES FLYING OVER MY HEAD
Of course, in hindsight it’s easy to see how idealistic this all was. Falling in love is temporary insanity. And then you come back to your senses and you’re left with toothpaste all over the sink, a husband glued to the couch watching hoops for the entirety of March, and old buddies of his who come over and eat all your food. To put it another way, women wake up from falling in love to the realization that life is not one big romance. For men, that waking up often means accepting that the mother of your children doesn’t have sex on the forefront of her mind after a long day of getting pelted with Cheerios.

As we discussed in our first book, parenting seldom turns out exactly as we had imagined. The same is true for marriage. “I don’t feel like I’m in love, with the doves flying over my head and my heart skipping beats and all that,” one mom explained. “Sometimes when I’m angry at him I think, ‘Well, is it really supposed to be that way? Am I not feeling “in love” with him?’ When I’m not angry I think, ‘Maybe I really am in love with him,’ but I never know if my feelings are true.”

We’ve learned from our research that one of the main ingredients of a happy marriage is a shared, realistic vision of what that marriage is. As well as explicitly discussing what you each expect and the best way to get there. The men we’re married to are husbands and fathers in their own idiosyncratic ways. We can’t change them — not the bad singing to the car radio, not the way he likes to eat chicken breasts without using a fork — but we can change the pictures we carry around in our heads of what our unions are supposed to look like. Just connecting with each other, on a daily or even weekly basis, about the joys and difficulties in our days, about how we’re feeling as parents, can be a huge relief and pave the road for success. Do you think he expects you to stay home with the kids? Have you asked him? Does he know that the reason you’re so mad is that you’ve been waiting for him to get up with the baby in the middle of the night? Does he know that you’re always wearing shorts and running shoes at 5:45 p.m. because you want to go for a jog when he gets home from work? Have you talked about working out a schedule? Have you told him how fantastically turned-on you’ll be if he even offers to help you change the sheets?

I ALMOST KILLED MYSELF BAKING MY CHILD’S BIRTHDAY CAKE
In order to understand the pressures we feel in our marriage, we need to first look at the pressures we feel as mothers today.

While researching our first book, we interviewed over a hundred moms nationwide and found a startlingly common thread: their expectations of themselves were over the top. Most moms are carrying this idea of the “good mom” that’s completely unrealistic. And as a result, we had a lot of conversations that went like this:

Us: Tell us a little something about yourself.

Them: Well, I’m thirty-six, I have two kids, and I used to be a manager of a pharmaceutical company. I finally got a big promotion right before I had my first child.

Us: How are you handling motherhood right now?

Them: It’s amazing. I love it! I am so balanced. My husband is my best friend. I feel really blessed and extremely lucky that I have healthy kids and we’re able to provide a great foundation and a positive environment for our children.

Twenty-two minutes later:

Us: Sounds like you have real balance in your life. A lot of women we’ve talked to seem to have a hard time finding that. How do you do it?

Them: Ummm, well, maybe “balance” isn’t the right word. [Long pause.] Umm, actually, I haven’t taken a shower in three days. And, OK, my husband and I haven’t had sex in three weeks. And, well, my laundry is piled to the ceiling and my house is a mess. My five-year-old daughter could also use a serious attitude adjustment. I really wish I had time to get a haircut. And I hate to admit it, but my son’s first word was “Shrek.”

Us: OK, things aren’t perfect. But overall, are you happy?

Them:  Umm, wow, happy? Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, I’m happy. Well, I wouldn’t say totally happy. You know, I have an MBA. Why can’t I do this? [Long pause.] I feel like such a bad mom sometimes. This isn’t really what I expected.

Wondering why so many mothers are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, guilty, and stretched? Wonder no more. We judge ourselves, we compare ourselves to others we think have it all together, we feel out of control. We have more “bad mom” days than “good mom” days. We’re struggling to find balance, and we’ve lost sight of our identity. One mom told us an all-too-familiar story. “I remember when Ellie was turning one, I wanted to make her cake. I had gotten the Martha Stewart Baby magazine, and it was all about making the first birthday cake special, being made by you. So I almost killed myself making this cake and decorating it, and screwed up the monogram on top! I was so stressed out that I started screaming at my husband and we got in a huge fight.”

We also tend to feel alone in this particular brand of insanity because so few people are talking honestly about how they feel in motherhood today. We expect the world of ourselves, and we think everyone else is just bearing up under the burden better than we are. As another mom, Marissa, told us, “I’m dumbfounded on a daily basis as to how you’re supposed to maintain your house and all that entails, maintain and raise your children, have a great marriage and relationship, keep yourself healthy and balanced, and be interesting and have great friendships. I’m totally flabbergasted. Women are doing this all around the world? I totally don’t get it.”

HE LOOKS AT ME CROSS-EYED AND THINKS I’M CRAZY
Of course, our motherhood pressures affect our husbands, and ultimately our marriages. This usually takes the form of our husbands assuming we’re crazy. After all, when he married you, you probably didn’t obsess over having the perfect skirt to wear to your son’s third birthday party in your immensely important role as Mother of the Birthday Boy. You probably didn’t have all of these insane “shoulds” swirling around in your head, making you completely exhausted and overextended, and liable to snap if anybody so much as suggests, last minute, that you invite the neighbors over for dinner. As Lisa so nicely put it, “[My husband’s] aware that most women are nuts. He’s seen firsthand some other mothers and other women, and scratches his head. When he comes home at night and I’m ranting like a loony person about the mom politics I’ve encountered during my day, he just looks at me cross-eyed and tells me I’m completely crazy.”

I WISH I HAD  ‘THAT GUY’
Some of this is timeless, and some is unique to our generation. We were raised to believe that we could and should do it all. That if we picked the right combinations of coulds and shoulds, our lives would work out perfectly. We’d have great husbands, great relationships, great kids, great careers. 

The idea that we can (and should) succeed at anything if we just put our minds to it has contributed to the difficulty we have admitting hardship in our lives. We made our own choices, right? So we should be able to shape our outcomes. And if we don’t succeed in creating perfect happiness in our lives, it’s not that life is hard and perfect happiness is a fantasy — it’s our fault!

The result is that a lot of women don’t want to talk about reality, because reality looks like failure to them. Our marriages, our family lives, our careers are not turning out as we planned, because what we planned for was perfection, and what we got is merely good. We know this is sort of nuts, but we’re having a hard time letting go of it anyway. As one mom named Julia put it, “I know no one has this perfect fairytale husband who talks to you about your feelings and pitches in all the time, but I wish I had ‘THAT GUY.’

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So, what we’re left with is feeling embarrassed and self-protective about our lives as we actually live them — and this only exacerbates the expectations problem! In a crazy feedback loop, we compare ourselves to the outward façades of other people’s marriages, not their real marriages. Then we assume our own marriage is not stacking up. (Maybe our husbands are onto something when they look at us cross-eyed.) “I do feel pressure,” says another mom named Jill. “I’m always comparing us to couples who don’t have problems, especially friends who have these great Hollywood marriages.”

Excuse us — great Hollywood marriages? This is a recipe for misery. Most of our marriages are, or at least can be, pretty good, if not better than that. But we don’t all live on a soundstage in Hollywood, and we need to be smart about what and who we compare ourselves to.

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