It’s a Girl

When I was 14, my parents remodeled part of their house. My father hung his various scholastic degrees on the walls of his new office. My mother took her own collection of degrees and hung them on the walls of the new laundry room. When asked why, she’d say, offhandedly, “I thought they should go there, since that’s where I spend most of my time.”

My mother, of course, spends more time at her job teaching preschool than doing laundry. And my father, for all the time sucked down by his basement den of an office, spends a few days each week grandparenting my niece, giving her his tireless, undivided attention for hours at a time.

That said, it remains true that my father has had an office of his own for more than two decades, while my mother had to make do with a desk in their bedroom. This spring, however, they finally finished redoing the rest of the house, and now my mom has an office of her own. Except, of course, for when the grandbabies visit; then her office becomes a joint study/nursery. Win some, lose some.

Around the time of that first remodel, I read the Virginia Woolf classic A Room of One’s Own. At the time, I found it both inspiring and frustrating. Claim your own space! the book seemed to declare. But how? I asked. For it’s only easy to claim your own space if you have everything Woolf had but (at least in my memory) failed to mention: enough rooms to spare one for an office, and enough servants to take care of things like laundry. (And cooking, and cleaning, and parenting . . . ) In other words, money.

At our house, Caleb and I share office space. (My parents did, too, until I was 14.) We carved it out of the guest-room space. Should we ever have another child and find ourselves still living here, we’ll have to move into the guest space. Goodbye, guests. And maybe goodbye office.

We don’t live especially differently from our peers, who also scrabble for space and time around their day jobs, be those day jobs of the career-focused, remunerative kind or the stay-at-home-with-the-kids, paid-only-in-hugs kind. Most of our friends live the way we do, sharing the domestic chores as well as the career chores. Caleb does nearly all the laundry and dishes, as well as all the pet care. I do the shopping and the cleaning and most of the baby care. We share gardening and cooking duties.

But there never seems to be enough time to do more than the same routine over and over — changing the baby, feeding the baby, cleaning up after the baby, playing with the baby, encouraging the cranky baby to fall asleep. Taking a shower? If you’re lucky.

As a cousin of Caleb’s said who graduated from MIT, “When you arrive as a freshman, you’re told you can pick two out of three things to do: study, sleep, and have a social life. You can’t do all three, so you have to choose.”

On days when you’re starving and can’t find the time to cook or even shop, life with baby feels like being an MIT freshman all over again. In the photo here, Caleb was washing dishes while trying to encourage a grumpy baby to zonk out. But usually we’re too tired, and our brains are too fried, to multitask.

Back when I had the time and the tolerance for alternative healing, the naturopath I was seeing suggested that I could do some of her treatments at home while I was taking care of the baby. I could apply a castor-oil pack to my torso, for example, while I was vacuuming.

This from a naturopath who is young, pretty, and well-educated. Also — obviously — childless. Yes, it’s true that I’m generally the one doing the vacuuming. But sometimes Caleb does the hoovering. And maybe I can’t, or don’t want to, combine a supposedly relaxing treatment with the sweaty work of housecleaning. And maybe, just maybe, my naturopath is wrapped in a 1950s haze.

The television show “Mad Men” has been accused of glamorizing alcohol abuse and blatant sexism. Hardly. What it glamorizes is the look of the early 1960s — the furniture, the clothes, the enormous cars. It’s harshly critical of the midcentury attitude toward gender roles and expectations: the wife who is expected to feel fulfilled by parenting and housework, the husband who is expected to dress conservatively and bring home the greasy bacon. The Betty and Don Drapers, as it were.

Watching it now, nearly half a century after the era it depicts, it’s easy to feel smug about how much more enlightened we are these days. Now women can do whatever they want! And men are so much more sensitive!

Except that the show’s situations still come up today. Dads are still trapped at the office. (We have a friend who just became a dad, and took no paternity leave because his law firm simply didn’t offer it.) Moms are still trapped at home — or if they do pursue careers, they find themselves either forking over their entire paycheck to daycare and babysitters, or struggling to work part-time while the baby’s asleep.

My grandparents, who were raising kids of their own in the Mad Men era, didn’t live the lives of the so-called 1950s ideal. Yes, they had two kids and pets and little small-town houses with lawns. But they all worked outside the home. My father’s parents ran a radio station together. My mother’s father was a sporting-goods salesman, and my mother’s mother was a social worker. (And she still cooked them all a hot breakfast every morning.)

My own mom went back to teaching part-time when I was six months old. I went back to work part-time, working from home, when Delphine was just a few weeks old. Most of the moms in our playgroup also work part-time, either from home or in situations (such as a dad with a flexible schedule or a generous workplace) with free babycare.

As the authors of the popular baby book And Baby Makes Three point out, the idea of “the second shift” — of moms working a full day at work and then another full day at home, cooking and cleaning and all that — was bogus from the get-go. Dads have always done more work than they got credit for.

For Mother’s Day this year, Caleb’s present to me was to take care of Delphine for four hours straight. I went outside and did heavy labor in the garden. When I came in, I noted Caleb’s slightly dazed look, focused on the middle distance while Delphine quietly played at his feet.

“You have the babysitter glazed-over expression,” I commented.

“Well, you know what it’s like,” he answered. “You can’t do anything else, so you feel trapped.”

Last summer, I decided to paint half of our kitchen cabinets, to pep up the room a bit. I picked blue, because I thought it would contrast well with the cabinets’ dull-but-warm brown. (And because warm colors, like reds, oranges, and yellows, are used by food companies for a reason: They make you feel hungrier than you actually are.) It took me several weeks to paint just eight cabinet doors; caring for a baby, working, and dealing with post-partum health woes can really slow you down. But after we finally put the doors back up, we decided they looked very chic.

Then we kicked back with a round of “Mad Men.” And I realized that the blue I had picked out at the paint shop was the same tint slapped on the doors of the television show’s fictional advertising agency, Sterling Cooper.

Don Draper Blue, we dubbed it.

So welcome to my office. It has better lighting (barely) than my mom’s laundry room. It doesn’t have my degrees on the wall. But it’s where I spend most of my time. A room of my own? Sort of.