#141: The other side of relationship doubts

+ working-parent guilt, money differences, and the kid question

Good morning!

It’s the last Sunday of the month, which means it’s Dear Baby time. Today I’ll be answering four reader questions: about how to deal with the double-guilt of being a working parent, how to reconcile different approaches to career and financial ambition within a relationship, how to process being broken up with (I’m always writing about experiencing doubts in a relationship, but what if you’re on the other side of that equation?), and lastly, how to interpret wavering views on whether or not to have kids. I guess this week is fairly focused on family life…maybe a coincidence, maybe a sign I’m in my mid-thirties?

That said, proper tone change coming care of the new ep of Dear Danny this week: We’ll be answering questions about being haunted by a threesome, dealing with depression, being married with a crush, having a clingy roommate, going crazy in New York, and more. Ep drops Tuesday at 9 a.m. As always you can submit written questions here or leave us a voicemail at 802-404-BABY. Thank you for all your amazing questions! I’m always bummed we can’t get to every one.

1. On working-parent guilt

“Hello! I am a new-ish mother and I recently got back to work as a journalist. I love my baby and I love my work, maybe not equally but still very much. I managed to find a nanny my son actually enjoys spending time with, which is a blessing, so if I am being honest, I feel less guilty to leave him behind than before, when he cried every time I had to go. However, I still feel guilty and not whole whenever I leave him and equally guilty around my work as I need to be home earlier than my co-workers. Even if no one complains about me working less than other journalists, the guilt piles up. All this introduction to ask the simple question, how can I find ways to allow myself to be okay in both my roles (plus probably adding an extra layer of guilt-free fun that includes neither baby nor work)?”

As someone who’s interested in parenting and not interested in giving up my job if I do, I’m personally invested in this question, but I’m working in theory for now, so grain of salt. Congrats on being a new parent! My instinct is to urge you to understand these commitments in less literal terms, i.e. what you give to them beyond minutes logged. Time is a crude measure. Just like an employee can technically be in the office all day but not do much, a stay-at-home parent can spend all day with their kids but never be truly present. Which is to say you can have an engaged working parent or a disengaged stay-at-home parent, or any combination of those factors. The difference is the quality of the time spent doing these things, not the amount of it.

I’m not saying you have to be the perfect employee at work or the perfect parent with your kids—I think some amount of stress and zoning out is unavoidably part of both worlds—I’m saying there’s a big difference between a loving parent who cares about their job and a neglectful parent who uses work to escape parental responsibility. The working isn’t the problem. My dad worked my entire childhood and I never doubted his love for me, nor his commitment to parenting, which I know he took very seriously. As I got older and my mom got super busy with side jobs and community work, I never doubted hers either. I remember kids at my school being really proud of their parents’ jobs. The kids I felt bad for were those whose parents seemed emotionally absent or abusive, but working parents weren’t the common denominator among those kids.

I’m deeply grateful that my mom gave up a lot to take care of the three of us when we were little, which I know was straight-up hell for a number of years, but later, in a way my dad never did, she had to come to grips with how much of herself she’d set aside to do it. She had to re-find herself as an adult, and I won’t speak on her behalf, but it didn’t always look easy. I don’t think there’s a magic combination of selflessness or sacrifice that makes everything turn out perfectly. Every approach has its upsides and downsides. Your kid may get less explicit face time with you, but they’ll have a mom who’s a working journalist, which they’ll probably think is super cool and inspiring one day, and they’ll have multiple adults in their life who have cared for them—their parents, their nanny, their neighbors, a village! America is obsessed with parenting as individual achievement, as if there were some elaborate point system for opportunities sacrificed and soccer games attended, but that’s not what kids really need. They just need to be loved, cared for, and known by the people around them, in whatever form that may take.

When it comes to blurry pursuits like writing and parenting, it’s really tempting to gauge success using trackable parameters like time logged, or through external validation like peer approval. When we don’t have those things, we long for them, and when we do, it’s never enough, because we’ve agreed to a perilous contract whereby our sense of self is never actually sustained by ourselves. The ultimate challenge, then, is learning to accept less obvious, objective, or satisfying metrics. It’s in developing a more abstract and personal intuition about what feels right and good to us, and trusting that’s enough. It won’t necessarily be enough for those who fixate on tidier narratives—especially as they pertain to mothers, as I know these judgments are often gendered—but that’s their loss. Your challenge is to recognize their voice in your head and replace it with more flexible ideas. I think there’s dignity in what you’re doing—living in the ambiguous in-between, refusing both the idea of working yourself to the bone and parenting until you resent it. That takes a strong constitution, something I have no doubt makes you better at both roles.

2. On being the dump-ee

“I'm currently processing and grieving a breakup of a happy three-year relationship. To be fair, things between us had been distant for a while, but it still came as a shock. I knew at one point they were having doubts, which I thought we’d worked through, but I guess they came back. People often submit questions about situations like this, but I feel like I've rarely seen inquiries from people on the other side. What words of advice and comfort do you have for the people left behind? How can I find peace with the truth that they simply no longer wanted our relationship to continue? I’m taking it day by day and doing okay. In quiet moments though, I can’t believe they’re gone.”