Annie Redman (37) and Matt Mitchell (38) are the parents of two children: Simon (4) and Gus (6 months). Since becoming parents, they've experienced various caregiving arrangements. Annie stayed home full-time when Simon was an infant while Matt worked full-time outside the home, and later Matt worked full-time while Annie worked part-time. Around Simon's third birthday, Matt left his job and became a stay-at-home parent, and Annie took a full-time, 8-5 job. She's currently working as a nurse on the postpartum ward of a local hospital while also doing on-call work as a midwife for another hospital and a nearby birthing center while Matt continues to work as a stay-at-home father and freelance writer.

In June 2005, I spent some time emailing and talking to Annie and Matt about their lives as parents. Here's a bit of what we talked about.
-Amy Anderson

mamazine.com: Before you had Simon, how did you think you'd split the responsibilities involved in caring for a baby and what role does gender play in your decisions about caregiving?

Annie: I think I did have that idea of the 50/50 split, and I think that came from the feminist movement for me. When I was pregnant with Simon, we thought the ideal would be for us both to work part-time. We knew one other couple that did that, and they didn't make it look easy, but they were our one model to learn from.

Matt: I'm not sure what role gender plays in my decisions about caregiving, to be honest. I think the main thing with Simon is that he's very, very mommy-focused. So much so that it was really tough for me to be alone with him as an infant/toddler. He cried and longed for mommy a great deal. With Gus, it's a bit harder [for me to care for him than it is for Annie] in the sense that I can't breastfeed him to sleep, but other than that he doesn't seem less attached to me than to Annie.

Some of the typical things about men being a bit more rough and tumble in their style probably apply too, though only to a small degree. For a long time Annie was much better at handling unstructured time with the kids at home, though that's less true than it used to be.

mamazine.com: Did you feel like people's perceptions of you—say, other moms at the park—changed when Matt became the full-time caregiver and Annie went to work outside the home full-time when Simon was three?

Annie: Other moms at the park, well, once I went to work full-time, there was just this slight, "Oh you work full-time, so you won't be around." But I felt like people were warm and interested in talking to me, mostly. So I did feel a little on the outs, but I also felt like, yeah, I'm not around to have a playdate, even though my kids are having them with their kids. But I didn't feel like there was any kind of judgment or wierdness about it, just kind of, "Oh, so you're not really available." And then when I did see moms I knew from before I went to work full-time, they were just happy to see me, and I still felt that mom support.

Matt: I remember being about 13 years old, and I read an article about stay-at-home dads in The Seattle Times. And I distinctly remember thinking, "What chumps!" and then, "I guess that's okay, but you'd never catch me in that role!" So it's funny that here I am now, at least temporarily a stay-at-home dad. I need to reach out to other men who are stay-at-home dads, but I just don't very often. But inevitably, if you're at home, if you're going to be part of any network, it's going to be a network mostly of women. And there are—I mean, a lot of women are amazingly helpful, but there are some sort of subtle exclusionary things. There's this other level, where you have the mom stores, and this is mamazine, and there's the neighborhood mom's club. What's interesting is that women are often able to identify with their role as mothers as sort of very central to their identity, more so than their careers, but men, by and large, don't or aren't encouraged to—there's a certain way in which their identity is their job. Being a stay-at-home mom is sort of a powerful thing in a certain way, and in certain circles it's kind of a badge of honor, but for men it's a little like they're on the edge of being a loser, despite the fact that in liberal circles it's the cool thing to do.

Annie: Some of that might be your thirteen-year-old self.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. I don't want to be too dire though. It's been really rewarding, and I've been remarkably happy in this role.

mamazine.com: When I was on maternity leave with my first baby, that was the first time I'd had a really extended period of time off work or school since I started kindergarten, and I can remember reveling in the lack of structure during those months. Is that something you noticed?

Matt: For me, it was wonderful. I quit my job in the summer, and it was probably the first true summer I'd had since high school. I hung out at the pool and the playground with Simon, and despite the fact that I was dealing with a lot of anger and grief about my last job, it was a lovely summer, a real summer with nothing happening and long days.

mamazine.com: How did having your second child three months ago change family life for you?

Annie: Well, I was in such a cloud [of exhaustion] when I was pregnant, and then being on maternity leave was such bliss because I could finally be at home with Simon. I could finally get the refrigerator cleaned out that hadn't been cleaned for six months, and I just felt like I could catch up with all the things that I'd been thinking should have been getting done and I just didn't have enough time to get done when I was working full-time. So I had been feeling this great pressure of the workload of the job and home, and that was kind of all lifted.

And then when he was born, the wonderfulness of having a child—even with the intense workload of having a child—is that you really have to let go of things and cut down to what's important. Being at home and seeing how Matt functions at home, I realized that it really didn't bother him when the house was a mess. It wasn't that he was lazy, but actually he could have a good day when the house was a mess. It really wasn't a part of how he checked out if the day was going well. And now, after returning back to work, I no longer feel that huge pressure to make sure that the house is clean before I leave, to clean it before I go to bed so that they'll have a good day tomorrow—like I felt this great responsibility to clean the house every evening so that they would have a good day at home the next day when they didn't even care. So having Gus forced me to reevaluate what is important, and really all he needs from me is the breastmilk, so I have to pump every night, and Matt's got a freezer full of milk, and everything is going to be fine.

The other thing is that Gus is really willing and able to roll with things in that wonderful second baby kind of way. I also see that a lot of my beliefs about what it means to have a baby are really not true. They're really about what it was to have Simon as a baby.

I was on the fence about whether I'd go back to the same job after my maternity leave, and I realized that part of the intensity of that job was having to be gone five days a week and that if I could consolidate it into longer shifts, I thought it would be easier. So I think that having Gus has helped me to sort of clear out a lot of things in my mind.

The other thing is that I think when we're both at home, there's much better recognition that there is a lot of work taking care of the kids and we help each other a lot more. It's not so much,"You take care of the kids, and I'll go do my thing." It's "I'll take this one if you'll take that one," or "you take care of them now and I'll take care of them later." It's much more of a trade-off kind of thing and with Matt being the only one with them when I'm gone, when I'm home I feel like it's really reasonable to be the primary parent for the kids. It's obvious to me that he's doing so much, and when I'm home, I feel like he needs to go do his own thing.

Matt: One thing that struck me was that with Simon, the pregnancy was this really happy, expansive space for both of us, and the immediate postpartum period was a very contracted, unhappy space—very poignant and beautiful in a lot of ways, but our world went from way out here to this tight, contracted, kind of fearful place. I think Simon's difficulties with breastfeeding were part of that, and 9/11 was part of that because we were in New York.

This time around it was the opposite: the pregnancy was one of the most contracted and difficult spaces in our whole relationship thus far, and the postpartum period has been a much more relaxed period. It's kind of like the contraction broke, and there's sort of this open space in our lives that's happening, and that will change, but it's a nice time right now.

Annie: It's such a nice thing to reevaluate our lives because of something good. A lot of times people do that because of a loss or a horrible job, and it's great to have this wonderful reason to reevaluate, to think, "Do I really want this job? No. I'm going to find me a different job." And by doing a job search during my maternity leave, I sort of embraced the fact that I was the one working. I'm gonna find a job I want and I'm not going to work at a job I don't want. If I have to do this, I'm gonna do it how I want to do it. So I walk to work. I'm on postpartum, not labor and delivery, so it's less stressful, less intense. It's been really great. It's such a gift to have maternity leave, that there is this space to reevaluate.

Matt: That's something to be thankful to the state of California for—for helping to create this expansive space due to the paid family leave program. We've both used it, and it's really increased our happiness as a family, our ability to function, our stress level. That helped a lot. The social support, the other mothers, are great, but they're no substitute for the state.

Annie: Also the [local] mothers' club and the preschool families brought us a month of dinners. It was unfathomable; we were really lucky. It made things so much easier.

mamazine.com: Has access to childcare been an issue for you at all?

Matt: We've been really lucky on that so far.

Annie: But there is a little bit of concern about that right now. Matt has a job interview coming up, and because my hours are really weird, if he gets a job, I'll have to drop one of my jobs.

Matt: We're also of that class situation where we can afford to have a parent home, even though we're not living any kind of glamorous lifestyle. But I think there are a lot of parents who can't afford to have both parents not work. The whole childcare issue is a different issue for the poor than for the middle class, not that it's not a difficult issue for everyone, and it may become difficult for us at some point. But we've been really lucky with our childcare so far.

There's this part of me that's very anxious to get back into the job market right away, and yet if I do, that raises the issue of childcare—a) how do we do that, and b) is it right to? And I don't know how to weigh that—my strong desire to have some of my identity back in the work world and making sure that Gus is properly cared for.

mamazine.com: How do you share the work of caring for your home and your kids?

Matt: When I was working full-time, I did half the cooking and all the shopping. And when she was working full-time, she did none of the cooking and some of the shopping.

Annie: (laughing) I was also pregnant, and I was still the one who put Simon to bed. So I would be putting Simon to bed when you were doing the grocery shopping. And I was pregnant!

Matt: And right now, we're sort of easing back into Annie working.

Annie: Evenings, we usually work together to clean up the kitchen and stuff. I do most of the sweeping, vacuuming, picking up, and we share the kitchen cleanup and the grocery shopping. Matt cleans the bathroom, but I probably do it 3 or 4 times to his one time. I do the laundry. I'm determined to teach these boys how to do all these chores, though!

mamazine.com: What advice would you give to a couple expecting their first child?

Annie: When I was pregnant with Simon, Matt's uncle said to us, "You guys don't know what you're getting yourselves into, and if you did know, you wouldn't do it." It was so hard for us, for me, that first year, and I think the one thing that was a big help was that people kept telling me it would get easier. And as hard as Simon was—he would only sleep half an hour at a time, but now he sleeps great, and the next baby isn't necessarily like the first one...[I would say] that it's really, really hard at first, but it gets easier.

Matt: I had heard that cliché of having a child is like having your heart walk around outside your body, but I wasn't prepared for that being so literally true. And particularly with Simon not breastfeeding well at the very beginning, that was really scary for me, and also he's had some issues with asthma. It is like falling in love, like opening yourself up to this capacity for joy and also for pain. For me, much more than the difficulties of negotiating the work of parenting, the feeling of worrying that here is my precious child, please let him be all right, has been the most difficult thing about parenting for me.