To Betsy:
Yes, couples should try to arrange their lives in ways that make them happy without worrying about what the world thinks.

However, it can be something of a slippery slope. I don’t just mean the “happy housewife” who loses her marketable skills over time and regrets it only after something terrible happens, such as a car accident. I mean that if adults don’t regularly exchange little unpaid jobs that we hate and always will (dishes, changing the oil in the car), the kids are likely to get the idea that work should always be “fun” and that that tradition is enough reason to shirk anything you don’t feel like doing. Or, at least, that they’re entitled to land a career that’s “fun” more than half the time.

The fact is, fun is often all in the head, which is why teachers can’t possibly make chemistry or history fun every day to 30 different pupils. Even if they could, they shouldn’t, because it would teach the wrong lesson. Again.

Hi Betsy,

I read your comments about why most “women” resist equality in parenting with their spouses and was quite amused.

I learned about Pro-Equality Parenting from my own parents. He of the WWII generation and she of the 60’s civil rights protest movement. Even as middle-class African-Americans, they were well aware of the risk that one or both of them could lose their jobs on whim without the legal recourse my generation now enjoys. So both felt it was a matter of course that they both had to work.

In fact, when I was weighing the option of starting a home business after my second child, my mother was horrified that I was considering not working at “a real job!”

Both my parents shared in the housework. If fact my dad was better at scrubbing and cooking than my mom since he had worked after school as child in a restaurant during the Great Depression. My mom, a bookkeeper, was the queen of organization and decoration. If mom wasn’t available to take us to girl scouts on a Saturday due to a second job (they had to do this to afford Catholic school for us), then dad did it. They taught me that marriage was a partnership and each worked according to his or her best gifts or abilities. It wasn’t about the type of competition your article describes.

As a consequence, my husband and I have a similar relationship. Like my dad, my husband is the better cook and I’m better at organization as well as maintaining the extremely busy schedules of our four children.

I’m sure in your circle of acquaintances, your opinion is probably quite valid. But you should also widen your horizons by polling such working mothers as police officers, junior executives (who may travel), technology workers (like me) and even cafeteria or cleaning staff of corporate buildings. You’ll find that the choices they have had to make aren’t nearly so cut and dried. And in more than a few cases, their husbands were raised to partner with them not against them.

But that’s the cool thing about living in these times - we all, both men and women, have choices!

Respectfully,

Mrs. Pier de Lourdes Frost
Evanston, IL