It's a lot of narrative and a LOT of information, which makes it feel like a lot to take in. Maybe some dialogue instead of straight narrative in places might help break it up and make it easier to absorb?

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

Thanks! I'll work on it.

Illness: Where the Caring Gap Meets The Concrete

“Oh, my God,” I said, looking at her finger. My daughter’s finger had a small abscess on its side, along the nail bed, red and angry. I well knew how quickly a skin infection on the finger could become serious, having a grandmother who recently had to be hospitalized for one that was ignored. After a couple of days of triple antibiotic ointment treatments did nothing to improve the infection, I took her to the doctor for some oral antibiotics to get it cleared up. My husband thought I was over-reacting, but the pediatrician took one look at it and prescribed the big-gun drugs with no waffling. This, I thought to myself for the first time, is the sort of thing that could kill a motherless child. Even a loved and well-cared for one, I thought. It would be easy to miss…I almost missed it myself, surely had missed it for days of brewing. My daughter was eight years old, long past the days when I was the High Priestess of Her Body, aware of the consistency of every stool and regularly seeing every part of her as I washed and cared for her. I rarely saw her unclothed anymore and never thought to examine her fingers. I was pregnant and distracted, as well. I might have missed it entirely, but I didn’t. Anyone else would have, though. Had a loving father or grandparent been raising her, I thought, it just probably would not have been seen…not until it was much worse. It took a mother to notice such things.

At the time, I was mostly distressed by how close I had come to missing the infection myself, not by the recognition of my unique perspective on her care. I knew I was her primary parent. My husband and I have always both worked and I had long struggled to push our parenting roles closer to equality, but I didn’t really expect that we would totally get there. My husband was what is generally considered to be a very involved father. He spent loads of time playing with and teaching our daughter. He treasured her and was endlessly patient with her. He had always changed diapers and given baths, washed dishes and done laundry. He was willing and able to do whatever I asked him to do in the maintenance of our home and family.

But I had to ask.

Where other people saw all the tasks he did, I saw the lack of involvement in what I called the managerial sphere of parenting…the taking of personal responsibility for knowing or noticing what needed to be done and doing it. In this sphere, for all of his help, I was alone. I was angry at the inequity and my friends and our families saw my feelings as bizarre, to say the least.

“It’s always like that,” my mother said. “Men don’t do more than that. You can’t make yourself crazy about it. Just be happy that he’s so good with her. He really is.” And he really was. I wasn’t happy, though. I couldn’t stop struggling for better.

Things changed after the birth of our second child. I have read that the second child is often the tipping point in the two-career parenting life…the time when many moms throw in the towel and either stay home with their kids if they can or stop trying to be a very hands-on mother if they can’t. Our second daughter made it easy to see why this might be the case for many families.

My youngest was a very demanding baby, needing to be in my arms all the time and either at my breast or in motion without surcease. Our older daughter had wanted to be held a lot as an infant, too, but she had been okay with being held by her dad or my sister for a bit while I took a shower – not so our second-born. For her, until she was about eighteen months old, it had to be me.

The baby’s adjustment to daycare at three months was bad. She cried all day and refused to take the devotedly expressed bottles of breast milk. She lost so much weight and was so obviously traumatized that I seriously contemplated walking away from work and health insurance, pulling out my retirement to pay for a few months of mortgage payments and applying for WIC and Food Stamps. If it were something we could have managed for more than a few months on my husband’s salary, I would totally have done it. I knew, however, that I would need a job again by the time the retirement ran out and couldn’t be sure that she would be better off for me throwing her family’s financial security to the winds in exchange for a few more short months at home. I hesitated and, after a month at daycare, she pulled through. She was never very happy about the bottles, but she did learn to be happy with her caregivers and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. That was at daycare, though. At home and at large, she would only have me. It was pretty exhausting.

There was, however, a silver lining. Since it was evident from the first day home from the hospital that all of my time would be taken up with the baby, my husband stepped up to the plate with our eight-year-old. He started not just helping me with her care, but also taking responsibility for knowing what she needed and getting it done. Her diet (and clothes!) suffered a bit in this time period, I’ll admit, but I was willing to cut him a lot of slack in that area as he got adjusted to his role as co-primary parent. When I went back to work after my three-month maternity leave and the balancing act with the baby got really hard, he became, if anything, much more of a primary parent to our older daughter than I was for a time.

At first, I felt pretty guilty about leaving so much of my older daughter’s care to my husband. I didn’t feel guilty in terms of piling too much on my husband or anything – I was more liberated than that - but the messages our culture sends about what is supposed to be a mother’s responsibility did manage to wiggle their way into my psyche with regularity. And I missed the time spent with my older daughter, of course. Still, I knew that the baby definitely needed me, and that my older daughter was fine, and doubtless benefiting from her dad’s increased involvement. After awhile, I got used to it.

I saw my husband’s shift from helper-parent to co-primary parent as huge. As far as I was concerned, it changed everything. It was revolutionary. I knew not one other dad who was as equal a partner as my husband and I was thrilled with the change. It made me feel better about every aspect of our relationship and, frankly, made me love my husband more than I had ever loved him before. For his part, he seemed puzzled by my enthusiasm for the New Him.

“I’m not any different than I was,” he said.

He didn’t know what it had been like for me, though. To me, the change meant everything.

A couple of years passed and we had some financial hardships and career changes. The rough patches made my husband’s equal involvement even more important to our family’s functioning. At about a year and a half, the baby decided that she adored her daddy, but she remained a demanding child and we needed to be able to spell each other often to stay even-keeled. Then, when my older daughter was ten, she started having a lot of gastrointestinal complaints and became anemic and tired. I started an uphill climb to find out what was wrong with her that took two years.

Since my older daughter was growing like a weed and doing great in school, I had a hard time convincing the pediatrician that there was anything wrong with her. “She’s fine,” the doctor said. My daughter grew more tearful and tired as I upped her iron intake, fiddled with her diet and pushed for tests. The doctors rolled their eyes and smirked, implying politely, and then not so politely, that I was a nutcase.

My husband stayed out of it.

Eventually, the pediatrician gave my daughter a blood test for allergies that showed her to be allergic to pretty much everything they test for, and, surprised that something really was wrong, referred us to an allergist. The allergist’s skin test confirmed what the blood test had said.

“Give her Claritin and keep her away from allergens,” he said. We did, as best as we could considering the breadth of her allergies.

My daughter was having coughing episodes that made her throw up on a regular basis by the winter that she was twelve and I stayed up all night listening to the scary, liquid sounds she made. The Claritin didn’t seem to help at all and the pediatrician and allergist continued to dismiss my concerns. She also started to have reactions to foods that frightened me…respiratory, tight throat reactions. I was scared.

I knew we needed some emergency medication, but was still getting the run-around. I was starting to notice something else as well...our co-primary parenting set-up at home was breaking down. My husband did not seem to notice the diarrhea and coughing spells and shortness of breath and reflux, or at least he did not see them as something that required action from him. If I had not been agitating, he would have been relieved when the doctors said that nothing was wrong and stopped worrying about it. I couldn’t count on him for back up.

My husband was still doing all of the co-parenting he had taken on after the baby came, but these health concerns for my older daughter added a new dimension. Asking him to take responsibility to advocate for her well being in this sphere seemed to be asking too much. I found that I was still the managerial parent when it came to health care…the noticer of problems and the keeper of the mental lists. It felt a little like the bad old days even though the good changes were still true.

Needless to say, I ended up needing to get a new allergist for my daughter. He did a pulmonary function test. “This is quite abnormal,” he said, explaining all the places that were not getting air. When I asked if that meant asthma, he laughed. “Oh, definitely.” I started crying, partly out of worry for my daughter and partly out of relief that someone had finally acknowledged that something was wrong. “Don’t worry,” he said, handing me tissues. “We’ll get her well.”

He gave us emergency medication and put her on a special diet and immunotherapy. We also saw an ENT who gave her regular medicine to take and who says she may need surgery, but that we can wait awhile and see if the allergy treatment clears her airways enough to avoid it. I am glad that my daughter is finally getting the help she needs to stay strong and energetic and healthy.

Although my husband is still more of a co-primary parent than any other father who I personally know, this brush with health concerns showed me that we still have not really met our goal of equally shared parenting – or perhaps I should say my goal of equally shared parenting. I am sad that our co-parenting did not rise to the occasion when my daughter’s health concerns entered into the mix. I know that most people would say, like they used to, that I am lucky that my husband participates so equally. I, however, now know again that cold truth that I first felt when I looked at that little infection on my daughter’s finger: it’s really all on me. I alone am responsible, in so many ways, for keeping her healthy and safe. It’s a heavy thing to carry alone again. I don’t like it.

Is it ready to send?

This is an interesting topic--I just read an article from New York Times Magazine about equally-shared parenting (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/magazine/15parenting-t.html?ref=magazine AND http://www.thirdpath.org/)
that made me wish my husband and I had actually considered some of these things before we had kids...

Suggestions: This essay seems to go back and forth between being about co-parenting and being about your daughter's illness...maybe tightening up some of the details/specifics on the illness will help keep it focused on the co-parenting.

I would also like to know more of your feelings as you go through this...you mention guilt, and I sense a little resentment, but what else? are you exhausted, angry, sad, resigned? How do the emotions shift when the parenting roles shift? What's going on with the baby while the big girl is going through the illness? She must be about four by then? Is daddy playing more of a role with her? What do you envision as your ideal of shared parenting? Why do you think you didn't end up getting there? Did you think/talk about who would take on what roles before you had kids? Did you just fall into the roles your parents had? How do the discussions between you and your husband over who does what go?

OK, I know that's a lot to ask, but I guess the overall point is to make the essay a bit more reflective of your own situation and maybe a bit more global about the concept of gender roles in parenting... what will I learn about my own life from reading your essay?

Good luck!

GEMINI Mama

Thanks! Here's revision 3 - better? The theme of the MMO issue I am submitting it to is special needs, by the way.

Illness: Where the Caring Gap Meets The Concrete

“Oh, my God,” I said, looking at her finger. My daughter’s finger had a small abscess on its side, along the nail bed, red and angry. I well knew how quickly a skin infection on the finger could become serious, having a grandmother who recently had to be hospitalized for one that was ignored. After a couple of days of triple antibiotic ointment treatments did nothing to improve the infection, I took her to the doctor for some oral antibiotics to get it cleared up. My husband thought I was over-reacting, but the pediatrician took one look at it and prescribed the big-gun drugs with no waffling. This, I thought to myself for the first time, is the sort of thing that could kill a motherless child. Even a loved and well-cared for one, I thought. It would be easy to miss…I almost missed it myself, surely had missed it for days of brewing. My daughter was eight years old, long past the days when I was the High Priestess of Her Body, aware of the consistency of every stool and regularly seeing every part of her as I washed and cared for her. I rarely saw her unclothed anymore and never thought to examine her fingers. I was pregnant and distracted, as well. I might have missed it entirely, but I didn’t. Anyone else would have, though. Had a loving father or grandparent been raising her, I thought, it just probably would not have been seen…not until it was much worse. It took a mother to notice such things.

At the time, I was mostly distressed by how close I had come to missing the infection myself, not by the recognition of my unique perspective on her care. I knew I was her primary parent. My husband and I have always both worked and I had long struggled to push our parenting roles closer to equality, but I didn’t really expect that we would totally get there. My husband was what is generally considered to be a very involved father. He spent loads of time playing with and teaching our daughter. He treasured her and was endlessly patient with her. He had always changed diapers and given baths, washed dishes and done laundry. He was willing and able to do whatever I asked him to do in the maintenance of our home and family.

But I had to ask.

Where other people saw all the tasks he did, I saw the lack of involvement in what I called the managerial sphere of parenting…the taking of personal responsibility for knowing or noticing what needed to be done and doing it. In this sphere, for all of his help, I was alone. I was angry at the inequity and my friends and our families saw my feelings as bizarre, which made me madder.

“It’s always like that,” my mother said. “Men don’t do more than that. You can’t make yourself crazy about it. Just be happy that he’s so good with her. He really is.” And he really was. I wasn’t happy, though. I couldn’t stop struggling for better.

Things changed after the birth of our second child. I have read that the second child is often the tipping point in the two-career parenting life…the time when many moms throw in the towel and either stay home with their kids if they can or stop trying to be a very hands-on mother if they can’t. Our second daughter made it easy to see why this might be the case for many families.

My youngest was a very demanding baby, needing to be in my arms all the time and either at my breast or in motion without surcease. Our older daughter had wanted to be held a lot as an infant, too, but she had been okay with being held by her dad or my sister for a bit while I took a shower – not so our second-born. For her, it had to be me.

The baby’s adjustment to daycare at three months was bad. She cried all day and refused to take the devotedly expressed bottles of breast milk. She lost so much weight and was so obviously traumatized that I seriously contemplated walking away from work and health insurance, pulling out my retirement to pay for a few months of mortgage payments and applying for WIC and Food Stamps. If it were something we could have managed for more than a few months on my husband’s salary, I would totally have done it. I knew, however, that I would need a job again by the time the retirement ran out and couldn’t be sure that she would be better off for me throwing her family’s financial security to the winds in exchange for a few more short months at home. I hesitated and, after a month at daycare, she pulled through. She was never very happy about the bottles, but she did learn to be happy with her caregivers and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. That was at daycare, though. At home and at large, she would only have me. It was exhausting.

There was, however, a silver lining. Since it was evident from the first day home from the hospital that all of my time would be taken up with the baby, my husband stepped up to the plate with our eight-year-old. He started not just helping me with her care, but also taking responsibility for knowing what she needed and getting it done. Her diet (and clothes!) suffered a bit in this time period, I’ll admit, but I was willing to cut him a lot of slack in that area as he got adjusted to his role as co-primary parent. When I went back to work after my three-month maternity leave and the balancing act with the baby got really hard, he became, if anything, much more of a primary parent to our older daughter than I was for a time.

At first, I felt guilty about leaving so much of my older daughter’s care to my husband. Not in terms of piling too much on my husband or anything – I was more liberated than that - but the messages our culture sends about what is supposed to be a mother’s responsibility did manage to wiggle their way into my psyche with regularity. And I missed the time spent with my older daughter, of course. Still, I knew that the baby definitely needed me, and that my older daughter was fine, and doubtless benefiting from her dad’s increased involvement. After awhile, I got used to it.

I saw my husband’s shift from helper-parent to co-primary parent as huge. As far as I was concerned, it changed everything. It was revolutionary. I knew not one other dad who was as equal a partner as my husband and I was thrilled with the change. Equally shared parenting! This is what I had always wanted. It made me feel better about every aspect of our relationship and, frankly, made me love, and want, my husband more than I ever had before. For his part, he seemed puzzled by my enthusiasm for the New Him.

“I’m not any different than I was,” he said.

He didn’t know what it had been like for me, though. He didn’t know the stress I’d been under or how deeply I’d resented him. To me, the change meant everything.

A couple of years passed and we had some financial hardships and career changes. The rough patches made my husband’s equal involvement even more important to our family’s functioning. At about a year and a half, the baby decided that she adored her daddy, but she remained a demanding child and we needed to be able to spell each other often to stay even-keeled. Then, when my older daughter was ten, she started having a lot of gastrointestinal complaints and became anemic and tired. I started an uphill climb to find out what was wrong with her that took two years.

Since my older daughter was growing like a weed and doing great in school, I had a hard time convincing the pediatrician that there was anything wrong with her. “She’s fine,” the doctor said. My daughter grew more tearful and tired as I upped her iron intake, fiddled with her diet and pushed for tests. Celiac, allergies...it had to be something. The doctors rolled their eyes and smirked, implying politely, and then not so politely, that I was a nutcase.

My husband stayed out of it.

Eventually, the pediatrician gave my daughter a blood test for allergies that showed her to be allergic to pretty much everything they test for, and, surprised that something really was wrong, referred us to an allergist. The allergist’s skin test confirmed what the blood test had said.

“Give her Claritin and keep her away from allergens,” he said. I did. My husband brought home things our daughter was allergic to and got angry when I melted down over his lack of support. And the Claritin and avoidance wasn’t enough.

My daughter was having coughing episodes that made her throw up on a regular basis by the winter that she was twelve and I stayed up all night listening to the scary, liquid sounds she made. The Claritin didn’t seem to help at all and the pediatrician and allergist continued to dismiss my concerns. She also started to have reactions to foods that frightened me…respiratory, tight throat reactions. I was scared.

I was starting to notice something else as well...the co-primary parenting set-up between my husband and I was breaking down in the face of my daughter’s new needs. My husband did not seem to notice the diarrhea and coughing spells and shortness of breath and reflux, or at least he did not see them as something that required action from him. If I had not been agitating, he would have been relieved when the doctors said that nothing was wrong and stopped worrying about it. I couldn’t count on him for back up.

My husband was still doing all of the co-parenting that he had taken on after the baby came, but these health concerns for my older daughter added a new dimension. Asking him to take responsibility to advocate for her well being in this sphere seemed to be asking too much. I found that I was still the managerial parent when it came to health care…the noticer of problems and the keeper of the mental lists. It felt like the bad old days all over again, even though the good changes were still true.

Needless to say, I ended up needing to get a new allergist for my daughter. He did a pulmonary function test. “This is quite abnormal,” he said, explaining all the places that were not getting air. When I asked if that meant asthma, he laughed. “Oh, definitely.” I started crying, partly out of worry for my daughter and partly out of relief that someone had finally acknowledged that something was wrong. “Don’t worry,” he said, handing me tissues. “We’ll get her well.” He gave us emergency medication and put her on a special diet and immunotherapy. We also saw an ENT who gave her regular medicine to take and who says she may need surgery, but that we can wait awhile and see if the allergy treatment clears her airways enough to avoid it. I handled all of the appointments, all of the insurance phone calls and pharmacy runs. My husband half-listened when I explained them to him later.

Although my husband is still more of a co-primary parent than any other father who I personally know, this brush with health concerns showed me that we still have not really met our goal of equally shared parenting – or perhaps I should say my goal of equally shared parenting. I am sad that our co-parenting did not rise to the occasion when my daughter’s health concerns entered into the mix. I am not struggling as hard against this inequity as I did against the inequities of our younger days of parenting together…my daughter’s health is too important and I am too tired. I know that most people would say, like they used to, that I am lucky that my husband participates so equally. I, however, know that the caring gap is alive and well again in our family. I know again that cold truth that I first felt when I looked at that little infection on my daughter’s finger: it’s really all on me. I alone am responsible, in so many ways, for keeping her healthy and safe. It’s a heavy thing to carry alone again. I don’t like it.