My Freakish, Impossible, and Maybe Immoral Family Life

I'm a 44-year-old man, happily married for almost 20 years. My wife and I have three kids, all of them born to us since we married. I work full-time and supplement our income as a freelance writer. My wife stays home with our kids, who range in age from 11 to 17.

Note that I referred to "our income." While I'm the sole wage-earner in our family, the way I see it is that my wife and I both have the same full-time job: the job we both have is that of making a home for our family and doing our best to raise smart, well-adjusted, happy kids who will make the world a better place for having passed through it. While we both have the same job, our primary daily tasks are different: by mutual agreement and in accordance with our religious beliefs, my primary daily task is gathering resources from outside to keep us fed and sheltered and reasonably comfortable, while my wife's primary daily task is organizing our home and caring for the kids while I'm out gathering resources. That distribution of tasks isn't absolute, though. When I get home from the office, my workday hasn't ended because our work isn't done -- our work is raising a family. That means my wife and I are both still working until the kids go to bed, and sometimes afterwards. When I get home, one of us cooks dinner (often me, because I like cooking and find it relaxing). Afterwards, whichever one of us didn't cook supervises the kid whose turn it is to clean up -- assuming that we're not jumping up immediately from the table to run to soccer or dance or whatever, which is about 50% of the time. Still, we almost always eat dinner together, even if that means "dinner time" has to be a bit flexible from day to day. I probably fail at this, but I do try hard to hold up my end of the housework. On Saturdays one of us tackles the bathrooms and one of us does the vacuuming while the kids do smaller chores, and I almost always do the grocery shopping (because I enjoy it and my wife doesn't particularly).

This arrangement has required a certain level of sacrifice. Supporting five people on a single librarian's income has sometimes been difficult, and while we've never really been poor, it's only in the last few years that our financial situation has started to feel "comfortable."  We have no summer home, no boat, our two cars are base models, and we have no plans to travel by airplane as a family in the foreseeable future.  We have very little consumer debt, but we also have very little savings (though I do have a good retirement account). But the sacrifices we've made have been deliberate and feel pretty modest compared to the benefits we've realized.  We knew what we were going to give up and what we'd be likely to get in return, and it has never seemed like a bad trade. We made these decisions early on, together, before we were married.

Does this all sound like a parody of a parody? Like the kind of unrealistic domestic scenario that would never pass muster with a half-decent fiction editor? Well, wait -- there's more. Not only were all three of our children born to us after we were married, but our sex life began after marriage as well. And I don't mean we technically refrained from intercourse before marriage -- I mean we didn't have sexual relations of any kind. We're not prudes, and we don't believe that the sole purpose of sex is procreation. But we do believe that sex matters: that it actually does have purposes beyond pleasure, that there is a moral as well as a logical connection between sex and procreation, that sex is powerful, and that its power has to be respected if you want to avoid heartache.

What's the catch? So far, there doesn't seem to be one. Our marriage isn't perfect; like most people, we've struggled to learn how to be a husband and a wife, but we knew that would be a struggle and we're making good progress, and we're not going to give up. We're not perfect parents; I yell at the kids too much and with far too little provocation, and my wife argues with them when she ought to just smile and say "OK" and let them be wrong. Our kids aren't perfect either; in addition to being smart and beautiful and sweet they are also snarky and oblivious and sometimes disgusting.  As a family, we don't do everything we know we should, and we screw up every single day.  But our home is happy and warm and we laugh all the time, and I can't wait to get home from work.  I'm pretty sure my wife and kids feel the same way.

So here's the thing: I feel like we're really pretty normal.  In some ways we look like a very "traditional" family of the type that Republicans are supposed to approve of, and in some ways we're not that traditional at all.  We've made some good choices, some of them fitting a traditional model and some of them not, but we make bad ones too, just like everyone else.

And yet, and yet.  I read a lot, and I listen to NPR every morning and I watch the news, and pretty much everything I read and hear tells me that what we're doing is unreasonable if not impossible, that my wife and I are sort of freaks.  It's apparently not actually possible to refrain from sex before marriage; it's not possible to support a family on a single modest income; intelligent, accomplished women like my wife can't possibly feel fulfilled doing noncommercial work; men don't do housework even if they say they do, and if they try they're too stupid to do it right; it's not even reasonable to try eat dinner together regularly as a family.  Sometimes what I read tells me that we're not just abnormal, but that we're actually a bad influence in the world.  My wife is selling herself short and making the world a worse place by keeping her talents out of the market economy; teaching our kids to save sex for marriage just means that they're going to avoid contraception and therefore get pregnant in high school.  It goes without saying that I'm a patriarchal fascist for my role in this whole arrangement. Every day I get the message that a) we're weird, and b) we should feel guilty for our particular brand of freakishness.

I don't get it. If these things are impossible, how did we manage to do so many of them (even imperfectly)? If it's wrong to do them, why do we have such a happy life, and why do people constantly tell us how wonderful our kids are?

If it sounds like I'm complaining or feeling victimized, it's because I'm explaining myself clumsily. Honestly, I'm not up in arms about the "liberal media" or about some kind of "war on traditional values" (as devout Mormons, our religious beliefs inform our nontraditional choices as much as our traditional ones). And I'm not going to get on anyone's case for choosing a different kind of family life from ours, though I'll very happily talk to anyone who's interested about why we've chosen the life we have.  I'm mostly just bemused, and sometimes a little bit frustrated.  Every time a smug news commentator or magazine essayist takes it as a given that what my wife and I are doing cannot be done, or is only done by wackos, I want to jump up and down and wave my arms and say "No, no -- seriously, you can do it, and it's not that hard, and you don't even have to be a conservative." But I feel like I can't say that, because if I do I'll just come across as some kind of religious zealot or sexist tyrant or unrealistic yahoo.  I don't think I'm any of those things, and my wife isn't a stunted sycophant (trust me on this), and our home isn't a cold, regimented prison.  We're just normal people with a happy life, and I'm pretty sure that what we have isn't really that far out of most people's reach. If they want it. And if they don't, okay.