The Husbands

women can do anything, but they can’t do everything

We can elbow and push all we want for every packed lunch, picked-up towel, put-away pan, and scheduled doctor’s appointment, but until paternity leave is normalized, until schools call fathers about sick kids as often as they call mothers, until sons are given not just the same number of chores but the same types as daughters, until the helpless sitcom dad with a tool belt isn’t quite so loveable, I’m skeptical of how much ground we’re really gaining.

It’s like he thinks their house, their toddler, their lives, are kept on track by magic. As though she is the family Rumpelstiltskin. He goes to bed and—voilà—see, Nora? All taken care of! And, my god, woman, why are you so sweaty?

The things she loves and those that drive her to madness are the exact same.

I think I have an idea,” says the second woman. “I believe you’ve come to value yourself based on your ability to perform. Maybe you even place value on the martyrdom of performance.

Because she, in fact, does not want to die in a fire. But sometimes (meaning at all times, obviously) she feels as if there are no spare folds of her brain in which to cram the minutiae of their lives that she’s been charged with tracking.

You don’t need rescuing, darling. You’ll be perfectly capable of saving yourself.

she feels as if there are no spare folds of her brain in which to cram the minutiae of their lives that she’s been charged with tracking.

To the millions of women who are struggling to be caregivers, mothers, coworkers, and spouses all at once—and who left the workforce this past year in record numbers (at four times the rate of men)—because women can do anything, but they can’t do everything

The lazy traveler. It's a theory about couples. Two people are traveling together, and no matter what their two individual personality types might be, one person will start doing, right? That person figures out which way to the metro, what the day's itinerary is, how to exchange currency, all that stuff, and the other one, they sit back." He laces his fingers behind his head and leans back to demonstrate, chest puffed out. "Because it's being done for them. They don't pay attention to which way they're going. In fact, they probably wouldn't even be able to find the nearest metro station if they were plopped alone right back on the same spot they started from. They're along for the ride. Because they can be. They become the lazy traveler.

And this is the problem with being stretched so thin. She’s constantly on the verge of disaster. She feels it now, coming for her. A landslide over her lungs. Call in the National Guard. She’s heard the saying: I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. Nora knows exactly which she wants to do.

But criticism on an individual scale diverts focus from the critique of entrenched gender norms that still haunt our culture today.

She hates that it’s up to her to make things normal again because she’s the one with the list of grievances. And so she has to start by making conversation, has to drop that scrolling record of all the things she wants to say, all the reasons she knows she’s right.

She is the safety net. She is the government bailout. She’s the default setting. And so how can she pursue happiness when there are full Diaper Genies to empty, school loans to help pay down, and seven preschool teacher planning days a year?

She feels her blood pressure rising and wills it not to. She walks upstairs still in her high heels, wondering how she can be so eager to see her family, her favorite faces in the entire world, and yet also feel a horror movie–level of dread: Don’t go in there! She can’t even say that these warring emotions are in equal measure. It’s more like they overlap.

Nothing” is what you say when to say “everything” would be ridiculous.

But sometimes (meaning at all times, obviously) she feels as if there are no spare folds of her brain in which to cram the minutiae of their lives that she’s been charged with tracking.

sleepy toddlers back to their own beds, they write thank-you notes and dispose of the torn envelopes of read mail, they put their shoes away, they nail down plans and don’t parent from the couch, they read school emails and listen to voice mails and make dinners and rinse out Keurig machines and remember to use sunflower seed butter and that gymnastics is on Tuesdays and that next week the nanny has off and that this week is a nephew’s graduation. Do you have it? Very good. Now take a deep breath in, exhale. That’s right. Deeper now. Just relax and imagine.

And this is how the Spangler family will go broke, one $3.99 delivery fee plus $5 driver tip at a time.

Men want women to stay the same while women want men to change.

Garys droning on about how many hours they billed back in their day. And Nora wants to scream at them in the break room, “Things were different!” They billed for spending the night at the print shop, waiting for closing documents to be spat out and manually compiled. They billed the hours they slept on a plane traveling to in-person meetings. They counted the time spent driving to any number of legal libraries for archaic case law research that has now gone completely online, all while chitchatting on the road. Chitchat is now obsolete. In contrast, for every six-minute increment of their time billed, Nora and her peers sit hunched over computers. Meetings happen on-screen. She takes calls on the evening commute. Her email chimes just before bedtime. The volume of work she can handle in a day has more than doubled since Gary was a young attorney, and yet somehow Nora’s work ethic is the butt of every senior partner’s joke. Millennials, as a punchline, stands on its own.