The Two Dollar Date

I heard a piece on NPR last week about how to keep your marriage alive post-children--obviously a topic near and dear to any parent's heart (like we need more evidence of that after some of the comments during "Man Week").

On this particular radio segment, one caller called in to discuss the much-ridiculed "date night" and he credited it for saving his marriage. One of the "experts"--rather scornfully--said, "good for you," and then posed a challenge of sorts that seems particularly appropriate in the current economy: Could the caller do a date night on $2.00.

$2.00. Total. The best I could come up with at first was to to buy a bottle of Two Buck Chuck, drink up, call it a night! But then I got to thinking more, and I let myself go to about $5 (flush with cash!). Some ideas are below but I know you can do better than me--what do you think??

• Get a recipe from a famous restaurant off the Web--check out copykate.com, or recipegoldmine.com for inspiration--and make your own version.

• Play Twister (with 2 buck chuck...)

• Go to a karaoke bar, have a drink, embarrass yourselves.

• Give each other massages.

• Make a picnic in your living room. Scavenger your own kitchen; pack a basket; lay out a table-cloth on the ground; ; dust off the candles. Bugs optional.

• For a little bit more money: Grab dinner at a bar during happy hour--even the most high-end establishments are offering amazing drink and appetizer specials these days.

• Find out when the museums in your city offer "pay what you wish" nights and check out all the places you always say you will go, but never do. Laugh at pretentious people together and come up with your own commentary for what all the art means.
  

• Grab some snacks and head to a playground--long after the kids are all tucked in. Re-claim YOUR inner child when you can romp around and go on the jungle gym without worrying about bodily injury to or by your own kids.

• Go back to one of the places you used to hang out before you had kids. I would wager to bet that, more often than not, the places that were the most significant to your relationship were not the most expensive. A spot in the park; a particular beach; a corner of San Francisco. Have a moment (or nine) of completely cheesy nostalgia.
  

Do you do "date night"? Could you do it on $2? $5? Would you want to?

Kid-less in Mexico

5 days and 4 nights at a super luxe resort in Mexico. Without the kids. I didn't really believe it was happening until I was on the airplane, fully absorbed in my book, a baby cried--and I almost started to laugh when I realized it wasn't mine...!

At first it was like my husband and I were re-learning how to dance with each other. We kept looking for baby accoutrements on the security conveyer belt, we held hands and it felt odd that our arms weren't pulling wheeled carseats or screaming toddlers.

But, very quickly, the old moves came back to us. Perfect weather, white sand beaches, drinks with umbrellas in them and one of the most beautifully designed hotels I have ever seen didn't hurt. For 5 days we covered all the "re"s. Recharging. Rejeuvinating. Reconnecting. Remembering. That was a sort of surprise: Having the luxury of time and concentration to think back and remember everything from a funny comment somebody made at our wedding, to the first trip we took together (to El Salvador) and how excited and nervous we were, to our first apartment and the time I presented frozen spinach pie as a home-cooked meal. The stories bubbled to the surface, apropos of little, our minds uncluttered by logistics, schedules, naptimes, needs of children.

We covered a bunch of the "un"s too. Unwound. Unplugged. Understood. We took the time to think about and understand our life, ruminate on where we are going, plan and map out our future with wide-eyed excitement instead of necessity.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic: It was pretty magical. And of course I was torn about leaving my kids, but the guilt became theoretical by day 2--an internalization of the social script that I am "supposed" to feel bad about "deserting" my children. I obviously missed them, especially when I saw little boys splashing around in the pool, showboating for their parents, smiling big toothy grins and running on the beach. But I missed them in a way that made my chest pull with love, not with shame.

It got me wondering about some of the reactions I received when I told people about our vacation before we left. One close friend who is not yet a mother told me that her parents never went away together, alone, and she thinks their marriage suffered because of it. Another friend who is a mom told me to "pretend you don't feel guilty even though you obviously will." Yet another mom friend asked me if my husband was forcing me to go. All of these sentiments were voiced with the passion and certainty often reserved for politics and love.

Why are there such strong reactions to how we choose to spend our time after we have kids? And do we all--secretly or openly--condemn parents who choose to get away without their kids? Is it selfish?

I personally think that our trip was selfish. But lots of the things I choose to do would be technically selfish, I'm guessing? Getting a pedicure instead of spending time with my son would be selfish. Reading a novel (just finished "The Story of a Marriage"--amazing story-telling)? Weekly dinners with girlfriends? Spending money on something frivolous? Selfish, selfish, selfish, right?

When I was talking about this with my husband, who has a clarity of purpose I often envy and who feels no guilt about leaving the kids for a few days, he said, "It's important for us to do this" and I immediately nodded my head in agreement. I knew that the trip was good for us. "And it's important for the babies too," he said. I sort of laughed, thinking about our 3 year old and our 1 year old weighing the import of us escaping to hot tubs and 5 star restaurants versus playing peek-a-boo with them.

"No I mean it," he said.

I looked at him expectantly.

"It's important for our kids to have parents who are in love with each other and who have a marriage that is as strong in 20 years as it is right now," he said. And suddenly the trip didn't seem quite so selfish anymore.

What A Boy Wants, What A Boy Needs

In the last week, I have received two emails from men I don't know. Much to the chagrin of my inner seductress, neither of them propositioned me, showered me with compliments, explained how they were erecting altars to my stellar wit and unmatched beauty (how come those emails are so rare?!?). Instead, they divulged secrets. The writers were different in tone, nature, and level of ability to spell-check, but they were both making confessions. You see, these men have a deep dark admission: They like to read "Devis with Babies."

I started to think about all the forums we have as women to communicate and learn about parenthood. There are countless magazines, tv programs, and movies centered around motherhood. The "Mommy blog" is an entire genre of web space. And of course there are the mimosa-sodden brunches and the into-the-wee-hours dinners with girlfriends over conversation about everything from "That Mom" at the preschool who bakes in her sleep; to how our breasts are never going to look the same; to how our relationships with our husbands seem to continually change.

What do our husbands have in the same vein? And, is it just me, or does it seem like they would benefit from more? Why were the two emails I received from the men who read this blog sheepish? I bet they aren't sheepish about reading Maxim.

It seems to be this great irony that, just as many of us Devis are taking lateral steps away from the rocket-ship pace of our pre-child careers, our husbands' jobs and work-related lives are moving into warp speed. The husband who isn't juggling a 10 hour day with various networking meetings, conferences, and client obligations is an exception at this point. While we the wives are slowing down, trying to learn how to "savor the moment," taking a page from all the books that tell us, yes, the first years of motherhood are difficult but blink and you'll miss them--our husbands don't seem to have time to blink. Some of my favorite moments of motherhood thus far involve sitting around with a bunch of friends and swapping stories about our kids. Like how my friend J's son is currently enrolled in a Jewish preschool and knows as much about the High Holidays as he does about Diwali. Or about how L's daughter is on a two-week strawberry-only-diet. How L's new little one's first smile was to his brother, who then proceeded to spit on him. Knowing these little nuggets constitutes part of the glue of friendship between moms, no? They are the stories I tell my husband when he asks how everybody is doing, what our friends' kids are up to.

The books, blogs, articles on fatherhood, as far as I can tell, present an anecdotal, post-modern approach to the topic. They aren't about great activities to do with your family, or, say, how to tell your son stories about your work--they are about how you can wear your rock concert tshirt and be cool while pushing the buggy, or how sex with your wife changes after a baby. There's a lot of "edge" but nothing...well...non-edgy at all. Do men always have to be snarky? My husband could probably win snarky competitions (except against me!) but he is also--in my absolutely objective and scientific estimation--the best father in the world...or at least in our household...! And I know for a fact that many of the dads I know love to talk about their kids and--quel horreur--have questions about them that, perhaps, could be answered, vetted, discussed. With other men.

Does this happen?? Should it happen?

Do we even care?

We complain about our husbands. Alot. But as far as I can tell most of us really love the guys--like really do. And sometimes I feel bad for them, collectively. Even amongst the closest groups of friends, there seems to be this extra zeal to the friendship between the women. At this point of our lives--the early motherhood years--I attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that we know so much about each other's daily lives--the minutia, the mundanity, and the wonder in between. I'm not sure our husbands can say the same. And it's easy to say that they never had friendships where they did know this level of detail. But you know what? Neither did I. Motherhood changed that and I'm wondering why fatherhood didn't.

Porn for Devis with Babies

Household chores are the number one thing that couples with children fight about, according to a survey I read recently. Indeed, in today’s society where gender roles have become largely undefined, it’s up to each couple to figure out the division of labor. Will you cook while your husband cleans, or vice versa? Who will do, fold and put away the laundry? How about the bills, the grocery shopping, the light bulb that needs changing?

You may have read Lisa Belkin’s New York Times article over the summer about couples who do everything equally. They "work equal hours, spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for their home.” This small group of people understand “that this would mean recalibrating their career ambitions, and probably their income, but what they gained, they believed, would be more valuable than what they lost.”

I read the article with avid interest, and then thought of whether I actually know any desi couples who practice “equally shared parenting.” You already know my answer, don't you?

The vast majority of Devis with babies still take on most of the housework. We usually cook and clean more, spend more time with our kids than our husbands do, and have more responsibilities around the home. Even if our husbands share the household tasks, we are still the proactive ones who know when the laundry needs to get done, what the diaper bag needs to be packed with, what’s for dinner. At parties, we're usually the ones in the kitchen, setting out the plates and making sure the food is warm. I also realized that among most of the desi couples I know, the husband/father spends more time working. So it could be argued that both female and male roles among second-generation desis are more traditional. Either way, we usually get stuck with the mundane daily tasks.

This may be an obvious observation, but it interests me nonetheless. What is it about us Devis that makes us more prone to embrace traditional gender roles? Is it because our parents were more traditional, and we’re just once removed from the homeland? As far as I know, we didn’t know when we got married, or had kids, that it would inevitably be this way. Many of us planned for it not to be so.

Also, it doesn't come easily: most of us go through periods of figuring it all out (a.k.a. fighting), and then arrive at some imperfect yet livable situation for awhile, until we get sick of it and try to find a better solution again. A friend of mine jokingly told me that while her husband uses porn to get off, all she needs is a house that he helped her clean to get her in the mood.

Why, all these years after women's lib and migrating from the homeland, are we still stuck with the housework? And, perhaps as a more productive discussion, what works and doesn't work with the division of labor in your home?

The Enigma of Marriage and Ambition

My husband is a trooper. Anyone who’s married to a writer deserves a medal of honor, in my book. We are moody types, prone to long bouts of introspective reticence, sudden bursts of manic energy, and a tendency to over-analyze everything from the state of the world to the state of our daily lives. “What’s it all for?” we’re constantly asking. Of course, we never have a definitive answer to that question.

It can get tiring for us, but at least we can explain it away by saying it’s all fodder for the book we’re going to write or the short story we’ve been working on in our heads for the past two years. (Or, in my present case, a blog entry I’m putting up the next day!) For our partners, however, it’s maddening. They don’t understand why we have to live so much of our lives in our heads. They also carry a heavy burden: that of being our muses, our cheerleaders, and at times, our punching bags when things go south.

I use the term “punching bag” figuratively, of course, but for one of my favorite writers on the planet, it turns out this term is very close to describing what his ex-wife, Patricia Hale, was to him. I’m talking about Vidyadhar Suraj-prasad, “Vido,” Sir Vidia -- V. S. Naipaul. In The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul releasing in the U.S. next week, this “cruel and unusual” relationship is depicted in all its horrors. Astonishingly, the biography is authorized: Naipaul gave French intricate details of his marriage, even handing over his late wife’s diaries to French.

Naipaul and Hale met at Oxford, married quickly, and spent the rest of their lives in pursuit of his many literary ambitions. Hale gave up everything to marry Naipaul, “a scholarship boy with no prospects, contacts or money at a time when the racial prejudice endemic at every level of British society prevented him getting a job or even renting a room in London.” She served as his editor, typist, and secretary, even on her deathbed as she lay dying of cancer. And in return? From The Guardian:

He stopped her acting on the grounds that it offended him, refused to buy her a wedding ring ('I had no interest in jewellery,' he explained blandly to his biographer) and stamped out any hope she may have had of an independent career, except in so far as he needed her initially to earn his keep.

Her world contracted as his expanded. He undermined her confidence, derided her opinions and told her she was too dull to take to parties. She stopped travelling with him because, for the last 20 years of her life, he shared his favours with a far more sophisticated and no less compliant Argentinian mistress who crisscrossed the globe at his side, providing services, principally boastful, energetic and violent sex, outside the scope of his mute, sad, stay-at-home wife.

She records this all in a painful, self-loathing way in her diaries. From The Atlantic:

Vidia’s unconscious hope may have been that if he were sufficiently horrible to Pat, she might disappear. Alone in her room at the cottage, she dutifully recorded his insults … “He has not enjoyed making love to me since 1967 [the entry is for 1973]”; “You know you are the only woman I know who has no skill. Vanessa paints, Tristram’s wife paints, Antonia, Marigold Johnson” … Even when she was alone, Pat felt she had failed her husband. After going up to London to watch a play with Antonia, Francis and Julian Jebb, she concluded that while she was there she had “lived up to Vidia’s dictum: ‘You don’t behave like a writer’s wife. You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.’”

It finally became too much for her when Naipaul publicly announced in 1994 that he had regularly paid prostitutes for sex in the early years of his marriage:

The shock of this revelation devastated Patricia Naipaul, who had been in remission from a cancer that now became terminal. 'It could be said that I killed her,' her husband conceded dispassionately to his biographer in one of the brutally frank interviews that provide the backbone of this extraordinary book.

The insult didn’t stop after her death, however. Naipaul proposed to his current wife, Nadira Alvi, a Pakistani journalist 20 years younger than the writer, as soon as it became clear that Hale was going to die:

'He felt angry that she was dying,' Nadira reported, 'and angry that she was not dying fast enough because he wanted to carry on with his life.' The day after Patricia Naipaul's brief, austere and impersonal funeral, her successor moved into her house and a few months later scattered her ashes in the nearest wood while reciting a prayer in praise of Allah.

Naipaul’s “extraordinary callousness” has been well-documented in the past, most famously by Paul Theroux in his scathing 1998 biography of the man, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. As a student, I read and re-read his books, marvelling at his mastery of the English language. He was my favorite writer for years. He’s won the Nobel and been knighted, and it’s a prodigious accomplishment, especially given where he came from, as a penniless grandson of an indentured laborer.

But now, perhaps in part owing to my perspective as a Devi with baby, I chafe at what happened behind the scenes while all this was going on. All sorts of thoughts run through my head as I read. That poor woman! And, what kind of a man could treat such a loyal partner in this way? And, what kind of woman would put up with that?

We've often heard about how great men and women in history often have had flawed personal lives. So many examples in recent history come to mind, from Bill Clinton to Madonna. It makes me wonder if a worldwide level of fame or achievement is almost intrinsically at odds with a functional personal life. It seems to be the sacrifice one has to make in order to be great, because other parts of your life inevitably have to suffer.

Is Naipaul still one of the greatest writers in history? Yes. Can we still adore and admire his books knowing the pain and degradation he inflicted upon another human being in order to create them? That answer is personal for everyone. I am also a firm believer that you can't judge someone else's marriage, because you really have no idea what happens behind closed doors.

What I do know is, if that’s what it took for me to be as great a writer as Naipaul, it’s not a sacrifice I’d be willing to make. Would you?

“Do you fantasize about other men?”

Somebody (WSRN) asked me this question last week. It was in the context of a larger discussion we were having about marriage. She suddenly turned to me and asked me this question. I told her the truth, which was that I have in the past, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I did so. Maybe it’s the mommy instinct kicking in -- or maybe it’s just lack of sleep!

She ended up telling me she does all the time, and that it’s a very healthy thing for married women to do. She said she even fantasizes about other men while she’s being intimate with her husband.

"Does he know that?" I asked her.

"No, he just thinks I’m really into it," she said. "But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him."

I asked her if fantasizing about other men "all the time" made her less interested in her husband, because, ostensibly, she’s always getting her rocks off to the image of another man. She had to think about that one for a minute, but ended up with, "No, it just adds variety to the situation." She said fantasizing about being with another man is just like fantasizing about being on vacation in Tahiti, or being Angelina Jolie. It’s something that would never happen, at least not in the short term, but it helped her think about something other than her worries and the mundane daily aspects of life.

I started thinking about this later. Personally I agree it’s perfectly fine, and mostly healthy, for married people to have fantasies. It’s something that happens almost automatically, and it probably saves many people from major boredom. Is it okay, though, when you’re actually in the act with your partner? Is it an innocuous form of adultery? And as devis, do our stricter rules on sexual topics make us prude for even raising this topic?