Here’s something more than a few moms out there may be able to relate to: Actress Busy Philipps recently revealed that she considered divorcing her husband, Marc Silverstein, because she felt that too much parenting responsibility was falling on her alone.
Busy and Marc ultimately worked through a solution to their shouldering-the-load imbalance, but they talked about this difficult period of their relationship with Harper’s Bazaar.
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Busy, 40, and Marc, 48, are parents to two daughters, Cricket Pearl, 6, and Birdie Leigh, 11. They have been married for 12 years.
In the Harper’s interview, Busy and Marc talk about a difficult period in their relationship when, according to them, the division of labor, as it related to parenting their two daughters, was incredibly unfair. Busy said that there was a time when she was so miserable and thought that the imbalance was so vast, she threatened Marc with divorce.
“My thinking was that if I leave, at least then maybe I’d get two days off a week,” she told Eve Rodsky. “I understand that I’m in a place of privilege, and even if I left Marc and I’d been super down on my luck, there was a version of life that I could have made work for me and my daughters. This is not the reality for many women.”
“Marc was like, ‘I’ll do anything.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, then do everything. Because I have done it all, all by myself, and I’m done, dude.’ ” Busy went on to say, “He made the call: He should be the one to stay home with the kids.”
“I was fully out the door,” Philipps admits. “I wasn’t expecting anything from him, but what we ended up doing was creating our own system.”
“He now loves his mornings with the girls,” Busy says later in the interview.. “He’ll make my Bulletproof coffee and bring it into the bedroom while I’m still sleeping, and then leave to take the kids to school. He has conversations with them that I’m jealous of. The closeness he now has with these girls, it’s really special.”
At this point in the interview, Marc joins and explains his initial reluctance to share responsibilities the way they do now.
“I like being good at stuff,” he said. “And I didn’t feel like I was good [in the home], so I stayed away.” He goes on to say, “I realized that deep happiness comes from my family. And once I figured out what I could bring to the table, things changed. I wanted to do more.”
Both Busy and Marc now say that, having worked through the division-of-labor issues, their marriage is stronger than ever. “We’ve built a new house of cards,” Busy says. “One that stands.”