Think your man doesn't pull his weight at home? Maybe it's YOUR fault



When Rebecca Asher had a baby, her relationship with her husband suffered. She became resentful of her new role as a housewife, but critical if her husband tried to help. Here, in an extract from her book, Shattered, the former editor of Woman’s Hour describes how women can be their own worst enemies . . .

Today, women outperform men at school and university. They make a success of their early careers and enter into relationships on their own terms.

So why then, once children come along, do so many women end up ‘holding the baby’, to the detriment of everything else in their lives, while their partners’ lives seem to carry on as before — relatively free of childcare responsibilities?

Could women be their own worst enemies when it comes to the balance of modern family life?

Mother knows best: Many women make life harder for themselves by not letting their husbands help out with the baby, or criticising them when they do (posed by models)

There is a photograph of me holding my son when he is two months old. He is in rude health. His complexion is peachy, his eyes shine with liveliness and curiosity. In contrast, I appear to be in the grip of a life-sapping disease. My skin is sallow and drawn, the grey offset only by aubergine accents below the eyes. My cheeks are hollow.

A few months later, I appraise myself in the landing mirror on the return leg from a night feed. There has been no improvement: I still look deathly. My dressing gown is covered in an applique of baby snot and nappy cream. My T-shirt is stiff with stale breast milk. What has happened to me?

I worried about being a parent long before I became one. I had a decent job behind the scenes in television that, though it didn’t make me rich or powerful, allowed me to think of myself as an independent, capable woman and gave me just enough cash and free time to live a varied and spontaneous existence.

I fretted about the inevitable compromises to my life and relationship with my husband that having a child would bring. We wrestled with the issue off and on for a few years. Then, as I hurtled towards the wrong end of my 30s, like many couples we took the plunge and I hoped for the best.

The result has been both much better and worse than I’d imagined. I have discovered the intense joys of parenthood. But I have also learnt that the inequality mothers experience in raising their children is not simply the cause of occasional bouts of angst, but the foundation on which our existence is built and future prospects determined.



'Could I relinquish control and allow my husband to help? Probably not, because I wouldn't be confident that it would be done to my standards'

My husband and I may have bought all the baby equipment and read all the right books before our child was born, but I was still entirely unprepared for the fundamental undoing of the life and identity I’d carefully constructed for myself over the previous 15 years and, in particular, the demolition of the equality that I’d thought to be at the heart of my relationship with my husband.

We walked home from hospital a new family of three. My husband took his two weeks’ statutory paternity leave. We spent that fortnight in a jet-lagged haze, barely getting any sleep, but surviving on exhilaration and adoration for our child.

But then my husband went back to work, our baby ceased sleeping all day and the music stopped.

My devotion to my son was unshakeable, but I was now faced with day after day in which for 12 or more hours I was solely responsible for an infant who was entirely dependent on me, utterly resistant to being put down and never seemed to want to nap.

Abruptly, the severe challenges of motherhood were brought home to me. Having been used to environments where I mixed with women and men of all ages, circumstances and life stages, I now lived in a world where I only ever seemed to be in the company of other new mothers and their young charges.

Home work: Rebecca resented the fact her husband went off to work while she was stuck at home with the kids (posed by models)

Collectively shell-shocked, our topics of conversation appeared limited to the merits of various pram models and how to tackle colic. I vacillated between a desperate hunger for tips on encouraging my child to sleep and a head-pounding boredom with this narrow baby-centric world.

Every day, I was pulled up sharp by the dismantling of my former life. En route to my mother-and-baby activities, I would pass young women heading off to work dressed immaculately and with the luxury of a solitary bus ride ahead of them. I was filled with envy.

I’d known that life with a newborn would be tough, but what made it hard to bear was the disparity that was emerging between my existence and that of my husband.

Up and out of the house by eight in the morning, scrubbed and suited, I suspected that he was only too glad to flee the domestic disorder he left behind.

In my thoughts, I jealously shadowed his day: a day in which he had time to himself, exercised his brain and kept his career on track. No wonder, then, that when he came through the front door in the evening as I was clearing up the baby’s wreckage, he was sometimes met with tears or sulking. Bound up in my enforced domesticity, I gave no thought to my husband’s own entrapment in the world of work.



'For many men, if it’s a choice between spending an extra hour at the office or getting back home in time to wrestle irritable offspring into a bath, they will take the former'

When a couple choose to have children, all the gains women have supposedly made over the past few decades seem to vanish, as the time machine of motherhood transports us back to the Fifties.

After my son was born, my husband wanted to share the care as much as possible. But when he was around, I wanted him to experience how hard it could be to look after a young baby.

Perversely, I willed our son to puke and scream when he was with him. When this wish was granted, I would look on coldly, offering no assistance, glad that he was finding it difficult. On other occasions, when he was changing the baby’s nappy, putting him in the pram or dressing him, I would bossily interject, scolding my husband for his ineptitude and taking over the task. I wanted him to understand how gruelling it was to live my new life. Yet I risked discouraging him from getting involved.

Looking after children can be tedious and gruelling. For many men, if it’s a choice between spending an extra hour at the office or getting back home in time to wrestle irritable offspring into a bath, they will take the former.

Time your return right, however, and the children will come running to the door, calmed down, scrubbed up and ready for sleep, greeting you like the Railway Children reunited with Father. Then all you have to do is help them potter off to bed and give them a kiss as they tell you they love you, Daddy.

Fathers’ reluctance to get involved in the day-to-day graft of childcare is rarely challenged. Men have too little resolve to resist the cultural norms, government policy and employer practice that herds them into a secondary parenting role.

And as mothers, we don’t always help ourselves. We begin to use the role of expert foisted upon us as a weapon against fathers.

It starts from the first weeks of motherhood. We begin chiding our partner for the way he fastens a nappy or holds a bottle, and the criticism continues down the years as we throw up our hands at the school shoes he buys or his inadequate attention to detail over holiday club arrangements.

AT A GLANCE 29% of mothers work full-time

12% of mothers want to work full-time

31% of mothers do not want to work at all

I can recall grabbing the pram from my husband’s hands in order to strap in our baby to my satisfaction and making critical comments about how he chooses to spend the days he looks after our son.

As another mother told me: ‘Could I relinquish control and allow my husband to help? Probably not, because I wouldn’t be confident that it would be done to my standards.’

Women are inconsistent, claiming they are frustrated with having to deal with the majority of the domestic burden, yet are at the same time unwilling to cede any control over home life. Fathers can feel excluded and back off — even get depressed. Many men talk of the pressure not to put a foot wrong.

Beyond their own homes, women can also be guilty of maternal gatekeeping. Although mothers collectively rage at fathers for not taking responsibility for their children, the valiant few who do try to ‘cross the border’ are often treated warily, ignored or intimidated.

I know of one father who was asked to leave when he tried to take his daughter along to her mother-and-baby swim class.

Rather than realising that encouraging men to play a fair part in raising their families will pay dividends for both fathers and mothers, and, most importantly, children, mothers hoard the domestic power they are left with.

Rather than try to fight the forces they are up against, from inflexible work to costly childcare, women decide instead to sulk. Women sulk at work and sulk at home, wallowing in martyrdom and indulging in territorialism.

When not sulking we submit, unquestioningly buying the male line and even — sometimes — taking the view that it’s a ticket out of the stresses of modern life.

In each of these ways mothers prop up their inequality, reinforcing stereotypes and preconceptions rather than working to break them down. In so doing, we become only more securely imprisoned within the domestic realm.

Only by challenging our own attitudes, as well as those of others, do we have the power to reverse our descent into unhappiness and create a life with which we are truly content.

This is an edited extract from Shattered by Rebecca Asher published by Harvill Secker at £12.99 © Rebecca Asher 2011.