What’s Harder, Marriage or Parenting?

January 9, 2009

By Lisa Belkin

What’s more challenging — parenting or marriage?

That’s the question on the table this week over at Momversation.com. The site is filled with videos of conversations among changing combinations of some of the Web’s most trafficked “Mommy bloggers.”

What caught my attention was a question posed by Heather Armstrong, whose Web site is the popular Dooce.com.

“I’ve read some research recently that shows our mothers spent more of their time working on being better wives as opposed to better mothers,” she says. “Whereas, for our generation it seems like it’s kind of the opposite, that we concentrate more on being better mothers than better wives.”

She concludes, ”For me marriage is much easier than parenthood.”

The two other bloggers in the video disagree.

“Motherhood is so easy compared to marriage,” says Rebecca Woolf, of GirlsGoneChild.net and author of “Rockabye: From Wild to Child,” the story of her unexpected pregnancy at 23, and her marriage to the boyfriend she hardly knew. “The first two years of my marriage, both of us were trying to co-exist with each other without killing each other.”

Alice Bradley, from Finslippy.com, agrees: “What does it mean to be a good wife? I don’t know what that means. I know what it means to be a good mother. When you have a baby, its very clear what you have to do — you have to keep the baby alive and love it … It’s hard to neglect a baby, if you’re not crazy and evil. It’s easy to neglect a marriage; you have to work at it and it’s easier to forget that you have to work at it.” (If you find yourself on her site, read her description of giving birth to her son, Henry. One of the funniest birth stories ever…)

You don’t realize you see the world through a fixed lens until someone else sees things differently. For me, being a new spouse was easy, being a new parent was hard. Getting married meant rearranging the metaphorical furniture of my life. Becoming a mother meant knocking down the house and rebuilding it from scratch. Marriage required skill sets I’d had practice using. Parenting required skill sets I wasn’t sure I had.

Armstrong, too, was surprised that everyone didn’t see things they way she had. She’d been so debilitated by postpartum depression when her daughter Leta was born nearly five years ago that she’d needed in-patient psychiatric treatment. (Her book about all that, piercingly titled “It Sucked, and Then I Cried,” will be out in March.) So she’d never really imagined that someone could find marriage the tougher adjustment than parenting.

As she explained on her blog:

It was pretty clear cut for me. I mean, six months into parenthood I checked myself into a mental hospital. That’s a pretty good indication that the software was not compatible with my operating system. Whereas my marriage has caused its fair share of wrinkles, but it hasn’t ever made me consider checking out of life.

Armstong is expecting her second child in June, and says that her feelings about motherhood are worlds removed from where they began:

The instincts I thought would kick in immediately took their damn sweet time and I had no idea what I was doing for about a year. Those instincts finally did settle in, and when I look back at those first few months the memories have the same tone and color as the memory of being dropped into a pool not knowing how to swim.

Which was easier for you, becoming a parent or becoming a partner? (To quote Armstrong, “Since some of us aren’t allowed to marry the ones we love, let’s extend the discussion to relationships in general.”)