Once upon a pink-and-blue time, the issues of early parenthood were cast simply: bottles, burping and bedtime. What no one explored was the effect Baby would have on marriage. And work. And sex. And the mound of dishes growing in the kitchen sink. And the ability to juggle all of them in one day, much less in one lifetime. Suddenly, parenthood becomes power struggle, and few combatants are more candid about the toll it takes than Rob and Alex and the four other young couples who populate For Better, For Worse (377 pages. Doubleday. $22.95), Susan Squire’s new book, which charts the marital roller coaster from the moment sperm meets egg through Baby’s first birthday.
“Everything is different–sleep, sex, how you feel about work, how you feel about each other,” says Squire, 42, sitting in the dining room of her Manhattan apartment as 4-year-old Emily bounds in, red-cheeked and bursting with news, from an afternoon play date. “It’s like taking a sharp, abrupt turn to the left.” That was exactly how Squire felt soon after Emily was born, when it seemed everything she’d found endearing about her life was suddenly irritating-especially the way her husband dumped his pocket change onto the table. When she couldn’t find explanations in traditional parenting bibles, she went after them herself. Courting obstetricians, family and friends, Squire found five couples-from the Manhattan activist lawyer and his frustrated-novelist wife, to the Maryland gas-station owner married to his high-school sweetheart-for whom a baby meant the end of a rational life. Squire calls it “the unadvertised part of parenting … how little time there is left for the marriage.”
The result is not just revisiting “thirtysomething’s” Hope and Michael Steadman. It’s parenthood veritre-conflicts over who goes to the Knicks game and who scrubs that sinkful of dishes, as well as who goes to work and who stays home with Baby. “It tests you and your marriage, and when people are under stress, they’re less resilient,” Squire says.
About the only issue no one tires of is sex: these are couples who are perpetually having sex (earthy Juliet Nathan coos that she, her husband and soon-to-be-born Lily can be “inside the same place at the same time”). Or not having sex (Joe Reyes frets he’ll hit Baby’s head). Or thinking about having sex (Tom Wright thinks about it, but he hasn’t been able to do it since he watched Erin give birth). Or thinking about not having sex (which Alex hasn’t had much of since Daniel was born).
Is nothing sacred? Not when there’s so much angst to spread around.
Underscoring the libidinal turmoil-and this generation’s narcissistic zeal for agonizing over difficulties their parents took in stride–Squire casts this change of life in terms befitting a natural disaster. The book begins, none too subtly, with the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. But, like the tremors, parenthood is survivable. By the end of the book, all five couples have had or are thinking about having another baby.
