co-parenting from 30,000 feet
Can we talk about co-parenting for a minute?
Co-parenting sounds like a great thing. “Co-parent” sounds like “co-pilot,” which sounds VERY useful and also borderline sexy. The only thing I love more than a man in uniform is a man in uniform who’s reading stories to his kids and doing all the voices.
Every pilot needs a co-pilot, someone to say things out loud to in order to make sure they don’t sound like very bad ideas, actually:
“So we’ve got an electric polar vortex up ahead here. I feel like we should just put our nose down and punch through that sucka, balls to the wall. But I don’t know… now that I’m saying that out loud, I feel like… we should go around, right? Yeah, we’ll go around it.”
A co-pilot is there to take the stick in case the pilot gets explosive diarrhea or an attack of the sleepies. A co-pilot is there to return phone calls to the tower while you’re just taking a minute for self-care to clip your fingernails, pop on a sheet mask, and sip your iced tea with cucumber. Honestly, I don’t know what pilots do up there.
I do know that Ryan is my co-pilot. If I go down with the aformentioned explosive diarrhea, my man dons his puffy headphones and takes the stick with a crisp, efficient, “Niner, niner, what’s our vector, Victor?”
He knows every inch of these controls just as well as I do. He can land this mother on a dime and he’s dealt with his fair share of in-flight nonsense. We’ve flown together for years now, and he’s seen me handle all kinds of shenanigans at 30,000 feet. He’s learned by watching the woman who’s logged the damn hours.
I am the pilot. I’m the one who has logged the hours and trained for this mother of emergencies, over the course of years of smaller, less urgent, more band-aid and bathroom-type emergencies. I’m the primary point of contact for anyone who needs to discuss our flight plan or deal with unruly passengers.
In many ways Ryan and I are equally, but differently, qualified to lead this flight, get us safely to our destination, and lay down sky law if our passengers get grumpy. We both keep some part of our brains attuned to the needs of our flight partner at all times. I am always, on some level, trying to model best practices to him. We communicate. We are in this together.
But don’t get it twisted. At crunch time, when the shit hits the fan, if a call needs to be made, a flight path changed, or a passenger sent to the time-out crate in the cargo hold, I’m the one on the puffy headphones demanding clearance from Clarence. My co-parent, my co-pilot, my equal partner? He hangs back. He waits for my call. If he tries to make his own call, I overrule him. Not out of malice, but out of well-earned confidence and bone-deep certainty that the buck stops here. After all, I’m the pilot.
This is the dynamic to which we have both agreed over the last seven years of co-parenting. I love it. I hate it. He loves it. He hates it. Co-parenting is so fucking complicated. I WISH there was a pre-flight checklist for us.
There’s this idea floating around out there that if you call yourselves co-parents, what that means is “we both have equal input in every choice we make relating to how to raise our children.” I’d be fine with that, if it also meant, “we both have equal responsibility to enacting those choices and equal exposure to the face full of blowback from those choices.”
But sweetie, no. That’s not what co-parenting is. Not really.
Too often, co-parenting is either:
a conversation in which both partners give equal input and then one partner deals with significantly more of the work on that choice, which makes the more-work partner feel underappreciated and underrepresented in parenting conversations, and everyone goes to bed grumpy.
OR
a conversation in which one partner pulls rank, makes the other partner feel like they don’t have an equal voice in the choices around raising their kids, makes the more-work partner feel resentful and exhausted and mean, and everyone goes to bed grumpy.
I have had both of those conversations with my co-parent, Ryan, in the last 48 hours. Neither one feels good, and honestly, more often than not, both of those conversations happen IN THE SAME CONVERSATION.
For example! Let’s say the primary caregiver sits down to have a conversation with their co-parent about, say, I don’t know, hypothetically, just whipping something out my ass here, bedtime routines for their 7-year-old. Let’s call these two parents “Katie” and “Ryan,” and their 7-year-old, oh, I don’t know, “Chicken.”
Join me in the land of imagination!
Let’s say for the sake of this totally fabricated story that “Chicken” has a hard time winding down at the end of the night. He loves to read and would happily stay up until midnight or later devouring book after book after book. Obviously, “Katie” and “Ryan” agree that the child cannot stay up until midnight, lest he arise the next morning transformed into a manic pixie nightmare orc. “Katie” and “Ryan” agree that they cannot in good conscience send a manic pixie nightmare orc off to school. Public school teachers have enough on their plates. “Katie” and “Ryan” agree: prevent a tragedy, people. Kid’s gotta go to bed before midnight.
Ryan: I think we should turn off his light at 8.
Katie: Interesting. I hear you and I agree that 8 would be an ideal bedtime.
Ryan: So we’ll turn his light off at 8.
Katie: Hm. So the problem is that his brain doesn’t turn off at 8.
Ryan: I acknowledge your point of view. Also, I’ve turned off his light at 8 before and he’s asleep by 8:15.
Katie: Okay. I validate your lived experience. I have literally never had that experience.
Ryan: Well, respectfully, you never turn his light off at 8.
Katie: Because that’s not the time his brain turns off. I remember being a little kid whose lights were turned off and my brain didn’t go, like, oh okay let’s go to sleep now tra la la la off to dreamland we go. My brain was like, oh good, we’re wide awake in the dark, it’s time to think about my parents dying.
Ryan: Okay, thank you for sharing your—
Katie: The light’s staying on, Ryan.
Ryan: Well, I think the light should go off.
IT’S A STANDOFF. A co-parent standoff. Which is kind of like a Zoolander walk-off except there’s no music, no cameras, and instead of sashaying the cat walk in front of Billy Zane and screaming fans, you’re standing in the kitchen, leaning against opposite sticky counter tops with your arms crossed.
Here’s the problem: I don’t WANT to be the only one who makes plans about how to get the child to sleep. I want input. I want to tag in my co-parent to do the mental work of making a bedtime plan. I want him to spend an hour on research and tap into his personal network of trusted parent friends to see if they have any advice. I want him to plan the conversation with the 7-year-old so it happens way before bedtime, brainstorm the tools we’ll use to make sure the kid’s expectations are clear. I WANT RYAN TO DO THAT WORK, even as I never give him a chance to do that work.
Because I also know that regardless of who makes the plan, I will be the one who bears a disproportionate responsibility for enacting that plan and I’ll be weathering the blowback on that plan. I am the primary caregiver and my husband travels a fair amount for work. Over the last three weeks, Ryan’s done bedtime 5 or 6 times. When you’re doing 23% of the bedtimes, you get 23% of the input into how those bedtimes go, which roughly translates to “you get to choose the white noise as long as it’s one of the whooshy ones and it’s on volume 7 or 8, but really it should be 8” or “you get to choose how far open the bathroom door is so they boys can see their nightlight. No, wait, that’s too open. You get to choose the angle, like anywhere you want, reach for the stars, get funky with it, as long as it’s between 20 and 45 degrees.”
Honestly, that seems fair to me.
It also seems… I don’t know. Petty? Myopic, perhaps? Am I really crunching the numbers on Ryan’s contribution to our household? Would HE crunch the numbers on MY contribution to our household? And more importantly, how long would he survive such a calculation with his kneecaps unshattered?
Bottom line, and I’ve been waiting since 7th grade algebra to say this: MATH WILL NOT SAVE US, MR. KAPLAN.
Ryan has been there for 23% of bedtimes this month, but I’m not comfortable with taking on the role of scorekeeper. I’m already the pilot. I’m already the keymaster (and by key, I mean fruit snacks). I’m already the head researcher and chief nutritionist and floor fire marshall and team efficiency operative.
It can be draining to be all of those things but it’s also my job, which I do because of love. If I kept score, I’d be doing that because of justice. Or more specifically, perceived injustice.
There’s a time and a place to talk about justice, and it’s valid as hell to discuss inequity in domestic labor, but that’s not what I’m talking about in this post. This post is about a co-parenting conundrum in which both parents WANT to have equal input, but the roles that each parent takes in caregiving are not equal. How do we navigate that mismatch between our intentions and hard reality? Not from a framework of “fairness.” Fair is still so far away from even the most evolved domestic partnerships which continue to exist in a world that asks more of women at home. And more importantly “fair” is something that can really only be judged from 30,000 feet (#THEPILOTMETAPHORCONTINUES). Single days are rarely fair but good marriages can be.
Besides, if I wanted the kind of marriage where I had to approach our shared labor like a state’s attorney or a forensic accountant, I’d have married MR. KAPLAN, okay?
Perhaps I’ve been having the wrong conversation here.
I need to be talking less about who gets the majority share of decision-making power in proportion to their costs, and more about how co-parents don’t just work by splitting bedtimes straight down the middle.
We work by wrestling every day with questions whose answers change by the minute, both because our children are in constant evolution, and because the world around us asks different things of us every day.
I often say that parenting doesn’t get respect as work because it doesn’t LOOK like work. Not like the work we’re used to seeing, anyway: it’s unpaid, uncelebrated, relentless, ill-defined, infinite effort. Yet work it is - I have deadlines. I have accountability. I’ve spent this career organizing my time to complete necessary tasks on the road to the successful launch of such groundbreaking projects as “learning to read” or “potty-training,” or “actually eating green vegetables” or “Not screaming observations about a stranger’s facial hair at Safeway.” I led the team that INVENTED that shit in our family. I strategized the innovation of literacy, continence, nutrition, and kindness. That shit is woooooork. It doesn’t happen by accident and every time you see a child demonstrate one of those qualities you gotta recognize the hard, unpaid, unrelenting work that went into it. A high five for Mom would not be out of line, is what I’m saying.
I defend my work as work because nobody thinks of it that way, and this bitch could use a little respect.
But in thinking about this co-parenting conundrum, maybe I also need to defend my work as more than a job. Sorry, this is cheesy, but true: it’s love. Or art. Or flight. Co-parenting is an expedition far more than it is a product launch or a clumsy merger of two once-independent corporations.
The problem is not my husband’s unwillingness to contribute. He WANTS to contribute. The problem is that I’m treating our shared labor as if it’s a destination, as if we could read a map and find our way together to a place where we could live the rest of our lives at full, uncomplicated 50-50.
Shared labor is not a destination. It is a vector, Victor. It’s the hours you spend in the air. You learn each other’s instincts and cover each other when someone gets the tummy gurgles. You nudge your route this way or that, you overcorrect and bring it back. You keep your eyes on the prize.
I’m going to bring this one in for a landing now (God, so many pilot things to left to say and I’m running out of time) and admit that yes, this post was a takeoff to touch down, and was, in that way, a fucking non-journey. We started and ended with wheels on the ground, two pilots in the cockpit, and a sense of uncertainty and discomfort around sharing power, proportional parenting, the cost of scorekeeping, and the difference between justice and love in a marriage.
Did anyone ever tell you that flight would become effortless? Did anyone ever tell you that if you logged enough hours, you’d be able to keep your plane suspended in the air indefinitely?
Did anyone ever promise you that your co-parenting would become effortless? That you’d arrive? You never arrive. You track your vector. You check the horizon. You overcorrect, and bring it back. You have the same conversation again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the flight remains labor, and a labor of love.
Surely, that’s the work we need to be celebrating over and over and over again.
Damn right it is. But stop calling me Shirley.
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