DadWagon + The Atlantic, Volume 2: Outearned but still a man

Originally published over there at The Atlantic

Hey, guys,

My professional life has been, by most measures, an exercise in small-bore self-indulgence: modest in scope and ambition, of arguable intellectual merit, meagerly compensated. The carcasses of two novels and a collection of awful short stories rot, as they should, in a closet in my mother’s house. As the inspiration for my first book, she is understandably loathe to cast aside any potential hints of my early genius, so I can hope only that the ink will fade or the paper crumble before any of my children stumbles onto them. Sex Tourist, a satirical novel-in-stories set among the whoremongers loitering in Southeast Asia’s backpacker districts, is a literary experiment about which I prefer they remain unaware.

There were the obligatory Los Angeles years and the doomed foray into screenwriting, which mercifully concluded with my application, at age 30, to law school. (I was rejected.) My resumé would not be complete without a quixotic career divertissement, mine being a journey to the fringes of reality television. The fiscal highlight of this venture was $500, for the sale of a bank-heist game show called Mastermind, which was no such thing. It was optioned and then forgotten by the same company that had elevated this nation’s cultural conversation with American Gladiator.

When that fizzled, I vowed to give up creative pursuits and accepted a $25,000-a-year job as a secretary for an international non-profit. But who was I to keep a vow when an unpaid internship for a monthly magazine of fading literary glory was on offer? The magazine hired me as an editor not long after the internship, whence I embarked on a meteoric march to the middle of the masthead which halted when I was laid off while earning $45,000, the highest salary—by far—of my life to that point.

My book, of which I am proud, seems likely to prove an aberration. I found a reputable agent, who sold it to a good publishing house for far more than it was worth. Shortly after publication, I topped Amazon’s “Hot New Releases: Jewish biographies” for a day or so, and even now I occasionally zoom past the 400,000 barrier on the website’s rankings with a certain insouciant flair.

Did I mention that I have a master’s degree in something called “professional writing”?

Never fear that I have confronted this catalog of unrivaled success alone. Women do in fact exist willing (even eager, at times) to immerse themselves wholly in the financial quagmire known as Theodore Ross, potbelly, balding pate, and paucity of retirement assets be damned! Yes—pick up your jaw, please—I have been married on two occasions, to well-educated, high-functioning, practical, hardworking, successful women who have never—not for a month or a moment—failed to make more money than me. Some might reckon divorce as evidence of interpersonal shortcomings, but not in this context. Consider that two, living, breathing, actual women consented to a relationship with me; perhaps I should end the current one just to prove I could again do so successfully.

Last year, I happened by chance into an editorial job at a national magazine that pays well by the standards to which I’ve educated my women to become accustomed. That, combined with a tidy little book payment or two, has swollen the balance of my semi-hidden-checking-account-for-which-my-wife-lacks-the-password to levels she had never dared dream, even when we were dating and I wanted her to think I earned a living. And yet she still outdid me, without breaking a sweat, if one’s cold, hard cash could be said to sweat.

Which, leads, finally, to the subject I would like to address with my DadWagon colleagues. I understand, and am grateful for, my great connubial good fortune. To be blessed, as I am, with the affection of a woman who surfs and cooks, finds Jewish men attractive, and who will always make more money than I do and has yet to show signs of resenting that fact, would seem to preclude the possibility of complaining.

And yet.

The gentle kiss of undeserved providence has not relieved me of a fair amount of, say, irritation, at my wife’s enhanced procurative powers. I find it a little annoying that her bottom line is bigger than my bottom line (or whatever).

Before anyone overreacts, my spouse among them, let me be clear: I love my wife and I don’t begrudge her the success she has achieved, particularly in those moments when I am without regret spending her loot. She’s worked for everything she has, and she can hardly be faulted for having chosen a career—advertising executive—more pleasingly remunerative than mine. Likewise, she has never indicated any unease about my paltry earnings—although when my current job became available she didn’t talk me out of giving up my plan to write full-time.

These character traits are superb, hard to find, and not easily replaced. Yet, still, I continue to wish I made more money than she did, even if only once, and merely so that I could brag of it, in public, perhaps at a cocktail party, child’s birthday party, or some other peer-group social gathering.

I have only my uncorroborated word that I am not an inordinately competitive man, not blindingly macho, or sexist, or a misogynist. Yet these feelings persist. I suspect it has less to do with my relationship to my wife than with my chosen profession. For me, the writing life has been one of failure alternating with frustration mixed with dashed hopes combined, at long last, with a measure of success that I’ve never truly accepted as here to stay.

People who know me generally don’t rate me a monster. I am as good to my wife as I know how to be. Like her, I have worked hard, provided for our children and our household as best I am able, and struggled for whatever success I’ve been able to enjoy. But it’s never felt nearly enough. The question is why?

I am reminded of the concluding sentences of Ann Beattie’s famous 1979 short story, “The Burning House,” in which the husband, Frank, explains to his wife, Amy, why he will leave her:

“All men…I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.” He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

I have no super-heroic delusions of grandeur, and unlike Frank, I intend to stay with my wife for as long as she will have me. But I feel a form of grim and guilt-ridden satisfaction when she worries, as all modern-day Americans must, about losing her job. I reassure her, tell her that we will be fine whatever comes. We can, I say, betraying no irony, get by on what I make.

–Theodore

In the early evening of November 1, I rode my bicycle south from Times Square, dodging first the remaining tourists wandering in a post-Sandy haze, then slaloming through the lightless intersections, and finally powering past the legions of dilettante cyclists on the Manhattan Bridge. By the time I got home, the autumn sun was starting to set, and I climbed the stairs to my fourth-floor two-bedroom co-op with the glow of physical exertion in my chest.

At the top of the stairs, I opened the door, and my nearly 4-year-old daughter, Sasha, looked up, yelled “Daddy!” and sprinted into my arms. This was, of course, a heartwarming moment, but mixed in with my fatherly pride was a new and unusual feeling, one I didn’t quite recognize at first: not just happiness but satisfaction. And the source of that satisfaction? Readers, I had gotten a job.

In fact, I had been in Times Square nearly every day for the past two weeks, serving as the new editor for the website of a fairly large food magazine—the first full-time job I’ve had since 2004. And not just a full-time job but a job I liked, a job I was good at, a job that was earning me twice as much as I’d ever made before in my working life. This, I thought to myself as I hugged little Sasha, was what it feels like to be a man.

Now, it’s not as if I hadn’t worked in the intervening eight years between full-time gigs. For most of that time I was a travel writer, jetting around the world in the service of large, dying publications. It was glamorous, certainly. Also, extremely poorly paying. If it wasn’t for my wife, Jean, and her substantial salary, I never would have been able to indulge in that high-status, low-wage endeavor I loved. What’s more, I never resented Jean’s earning ability. I’d never needed to be a breadwinner, and I knew that my other talents—for cooking, for organization, for childcare—would make up for what I lacked in my bank account. I wouldn’t have minded being rich(er), but unlike my colleague Theodore (who I can aver is highly competitive and occasionally a monster), our internal income disparity didn’t bother me, and I wasn’t about to do anything that might begin to elevate my earning potential.

But then, a few months ago, my world shifted. At just about the same time Jean was preparing to give birth to our second daughter, I was growing frustrated with my inability to earn a living. After hundreds of articles and loads of appreciation from my peers, I was making less than I ever had. I was tired of it—tired of working as hard as ever, and writing as well as ever. With the new kid on the way, I would be neither able nor willing to travel like I had been, and full-time daycare would stretch our budget precariously thin. And so I made that momentous decision. I would get a job, any job. Who knew that I would not only find one in this economy but would actually like it, too?

Of course, I’m still nowhere close to making what Jean does (not that either of us particularly cares), but I am enjoying the satisfaction and freedom this new gig brings. Soon I’ll be able to cover my (modest) credit card bills without having to ask Jean for a loan against a coming freelance payment, and I’ll still get home in time to whip up dinner. (Tomorrow: seared Moulard duck breast.) One of these months, I might even pay the mortgage—just for kicks, you know. I wouldn’t want Jean to think she’d married a rich man.

–Matt

What does it mean to be outearned by your wife? I had better figure that out, because after some back-and-forth over the last 18 years—times when we were both broke, or living off of her student loans, or off my lousy salary—we have now reached what is likely a permanent income imbalance. As my colleagues here have pointed out, wordsmithing doesn’t pay what it used to. And my wife now has an advanced degree and an actual profession.

We are part of the vanguard, I suppose: as Liz Mundy recently pointed out in The Atlantic , nearly 40 percent of wives outearn their husbands, and that number is growing.

So, does income disparity flip some kind of gender switch? Do I take over that section of home life that my wife used to inhabit (among her duties: sewing, light cooking, choosing Pandora channels, putting the kids to bed, giving a shit about the PTA)?

With us, so far, the answer is no.

Yes, I take the kids to school in the morning because she goes to work at first light. And sometimes I’ll have to cover things solo if she’s running late at the end of the day because her work schedule can be non-negotiable in ways that mine isn’t.

But when Mundy wrote in her same post that wives outearning husbands “can powerfully affect relationship dynamics,”,I don’t see it. My wife and I still maintain the same mix of unpredictable gender assignments. I still do the majority of the cooking, but that’s because I enjoy it and the men in my family have always been the cooks. My wife still puts the kids to bed, no matter her outside workload, both because she wants to, and because I usually have some sports that need watching.

A useful parallel for me is driving. My wife is a better driver than I. She’s from LA; she’s got smog and road rage in her DNA. I’m from Key West, a small island where traffic still stops for conversations between drivers and on the weekends many of us are too drunk to even ride bicycles. But when my wife and I are together, in big cities and small, I like to drive, and she likes to have me drive. Men have been driving their wives around since long before Apollonia Corleone got blown up, and that’s exactly what my wife and I do.

Gender is not a house of cards that collapses when you take away one element. I am still hotheaded, broad-shouldered, sports-addicted, and foolishly optimistic about home improvement projects. Those things and the other dozen typically male characteristics I have won’t change just because my wife makes more than I.

You know how some people like to talk about a post-racial society but it’s complete bullshit because no matter who is president, race still matters in this country? Well, it’s equally fallacious to think that changing income structure alone will change the power balance of the sexes, in the home or outside the home. We are not post-gender, no matter what the economic trends are. Women who earn more than their husbands still earn less than their colleagues. They still have their basic reproductive rights threatened constantly. They still are underrepresented in every level of leadership.

And on a more personal level, they still have to solve one of the oldest and most intractable problems of all: how to share their daily lives with men. That’s because, no matter what my wife says, I am still the man of the house, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.

–Nathan

Subway Follies: Dads vs. Pregnant Women

A couple of weeks ago, Jean, Sasha, and I were riding the F train. We do this a lot. It goes where we want to go, generally, and takes us back to where we live. I don’t know where we were going at the time, but what I do remember is that the train was moderately, but not insanely, crowded. All the seats were taken, but there was still room to stand.

And stand was what we did, in front of a row of seats. Eh, so what? Well, Jean is eight months’ pregnant, and seems to have been so all summer long. And there was this guy sitting right in front of us, maybe in his mid-20s, with headphones and eyeglasses on and a backpack in his lap; his face was maybe 18 inches from the watermelon-like protuberance of Jean’s belly. And he didn’t get up and give Jean his seat. He sat there, not looking at anything in particular, for station stop after station stop. Eventually, he debarked, and Jean was granted a one-stop reprieve before we too had to leave. What a dick.

This isn’t totally typical, Jean tells me. Often, people give her a seat. But not that often—and certainly not as often as people offer me their seats when I’m riding alone with Sasha. Then, my god! Look, I’m a healthy 38-year-old guy who has no trouble standing in a subway car, and Sasha, though only 3 and two-thirds years old, is certainly capable of doing the same, no matter how ear-splittingly she may whine. But still, we walk onto the F train and everyone offers us their seat: middle-aged women, gorgeous young creatures, gym-built behemoths, old Chinese dudes in sweat-stained undershirts, businessmen in somber suits and Happy Socks. It’s incredible how polite everyone is, and although I’m thankful for their collective kindness, I’m also a little put off. Do I look that harried and wiped out? Am I cloaked in an aura that declares, “Danger! This father incapable of guarding his kid for three stops!”? Or is it just some bending-over-backward to be nice to an incredibly rare father-who’s-actually-there?

Whatever the reasoning, I wish it was as automatically there for Jean (and other pregnant ladies) as it is for me. But only because that would make me feel less guilty and lazy about so speedily and wholeheartedly accepting the offers.

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Hello, Dan Zanes

'His hair looks like Grandpa's!'

So, Sasha and I were walking home from school yesterday, and as we neared our apartment, who should we see a couple of doors down but Dan Zanes, king of the Brooklyn kiddie-music scene. Gray curls blazing, surrounded by fellow musicians. Yep, that’s him.

This happens occasionally. Zanes is like Jim Jarmusch in the East Village, or Terry Richardson around Bowery. Eventually, you’re going to spot him.

I didn’t have anything in particular to say to him, so we walked on by. But after we’d passed him I turned to Sasha.

“You see that guy with the gray hair?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know the CD we always listen to? That song ‘Polly-Wolly Doodle’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That guy with the gray hair is the one who sings the song!”

“I sing the songs, too!”

She’s right, of course. “That’s right,” I said. “You sing the songs, too.”

As I hunted around in my pocket for the keys to our gate, Zanes and his crew walked past with their instruments. Sasha glanced over at them.

“His hair looks like Grandpa’s,” she said.

She was right.

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To Pre-K or Not to Pre-K, That Is the Question

So, we got the letter: Sasha has a spot in a free pre-K program starting this fall! This puts us in a bit of a quandary—since we never thought she’d get in, we didn’t really figure out how we’d respond to an acceptance.

Let me back up a bit. Universal pre-K, for those of you blissfully unaware of the concept, is, in NYC, a bit of a misnomer. It’s a public program available to everyone (hence “universal”), although so limited in practice that most kids have little chance of being accepted, unless they’re willing to go to a school deemed “not so great” by the hordes of over-ambitious, over-protective, over-sensitive parents who populate the blogs of this great metropolis.

We applied, I think, to six schools, expecting to get rejected from our top choices: the bilingual Shuang Wen in the Lower East Side, for instance. And that’s just what happened, except that we put, as our last choice, the school that is only four blocks from our home in Brooklyn, P.S. 38. And that’s where we got in. Yay.

And so now what do we do? As much as I like the idea of FREE PRESCHOOL, it’s complicated to just say yes. For one, Sasha really likes her current preschool, the bilingual English-Chinese Preschool of America. We like it, too, particularly the fact that it runs from 8:30 in the morning till 6 p.m., allowing both me and Jean to work a full day. Will pre-K at P.S. 38 do the same? Not quite—the school day ends around 3, and we’re not too sure of the status of after-school programs for the pre-K kids. So we’d either need to cut our own workday short, or hire a daily babysitter/nanny, whose cost would totally negate the whole FREE PRESCHOOL benefit.

But then, of course, there’s the possibility that my or Jean’s work situation could change drastically at any moment, either freeing us up to spend afternoons with our precious snowflake or burying us deeper in office dilemmas or sending us packing for Taipei post-haste.

Gah!

Why isn’t there some Web version of those mortgage calculators that could just let me enter in all the details and give me one single answer: Yay or Nay? In the end, I think we’ll register her for P.S. 38 and make our actual decision sometime in August, when my book is done, the second baby is imminent, and we have a better sense of our financial future. Blech. Hey, what do you think?

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