He’s Perfectly at Home With Family Role-Reversals

On a recent visit to New York and my Italian family, an aunt read us a newspaper item about a man in a small Sicilian village whose wife was not ready with supper when he arrived from work.

A bit of a hothead, the man took out a pistol and shot her. “What kind of a person would do that?” my aunt wondered aloud, looking incredulous. “Supper time and no food on the table!”

Growing up as a first-generation Italian-American, I knew the mealtime ritual. At the sound of my father’s truck rolling down the driveway, my mother and sisters promptly spooned the food onto plates and, moments later, supper was in place. Tardiness, fortunately, was not my mother’s fatal flaw.

If a person’s view of the opposite sex is based on role models from childhood, what I saw was what I definitely didn’t get when I married. My coming home from work to the homey clatter of spoons and plates can only mean one thing: I’m in the wrong house. The majority of our meals are eaten out. On that rare occasion when Ellyn feels particularly domestic, we take food home.

My mother was one of the first women in our ethnic community to drive an automobile. But I never knew my father to let her take the wheel while he was in the car--no matter how long the trip or how fatigued he was.

On the other hand, when we’re out together, Ellyn always drives. And it’s fine with me. At first I thought my attitude was appropriately New Age. But when we pull out of our driveway, the other husbands on the block look up from their power tools with suspicion at this role rearrangement.

Recently, Ellyn and I, and Kirk Douglas and his wife Ann, were out shopping--separately--at the trendy Hollywood clothes emporium, Fred Segal. As the rugged screen star and his wife drove off to wherever it is movie stars go, I noticed Ann Douglas was behind the wheel and Kirk was in the passenger seat. (So why couldn’t he be one of my neighbors?)

While role-reversing seems to be coming into vogue, it’s always been alive and well at our place. I pitched in when our sons Alex and Andrew were born, long before the “thirtysomething” set invented parenting and long before it became OK for fathers to do more than bring home baseball gloves and football helmets.

When Ellyn and her friends had babies, some of the husbands would dress but not bathe them. Some would bathe them but wouldn’t change diapers. Others would bathe and change, but “number one” only. I believe I did everything but breast-feed.

Researchers assure us that women are superior in English, while we hunks excel in math and things mechanical. I shudder at the mere mention of those “m” words. I’ve yet to hit on that easy-to-assemble item that has been easy enough for me to assemble.

Ellyn loves telling people how once, when we needed a hammer, I looked for one under “H” in the Yellow Pages. (Personally, I think some things should stay within the family.) From our earliest Christmases, my wife has been the one connecting screw “A” to bolt “B” as she assembled Santa’s toys, while I Windexed and Pledged my heart out. Ellyn has always known how things worked. She’d rather curl up with an instruction manual than a Jackie Collins novel. (I’m entering year nine of attempting to master the art of setting the VCR’s programmable timer.)

Dad as the mechanical blockhead is painfully evident when it comes to our car and anything that doesn’t have to do with the steering of it. Enter Ellyn. Loudly. “They still didn’t fix that car. You get on the phone and yell at them! They won’t listen to a woman!” She’s right. Car mechanics appear to be among the last males to recognize role crossover.

Ellyn usually gets nowhere with them, even though she knows more than I do, and sometimes more than they do, about rings, valves and gaskets. So I get on the phone. And I yell at them. And they listen.

While Ellyn has helped put our boys through private schools with her interior-design work, I have been the primary wage earner. But all that could change. She has just completed her first year of law school.

Although I was warned a major lifestyle adjustment was coming, things changed abruptly around our house. I am in the throes of two more years of getting no supper, no housework and no sex. Though, if the truth be known, only the first two denials are a shock to my system.

I focus on the carrot at the end of the stick. In a few short years, Ellyn will not only be pulling her share of the load, she may very well be earning more than I do. That works for me. I don’t expect this will spell my emasculation.

This past weekend, we decided to take a ride out to Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu. As Ellyn chauffeured us out of our driveway, I felt several sets of eyes looking on disdainfully. I remembered the Douglases. Was there ever a more macho movie persona than Kirk? Would Spartacus have let Mrs. Spartacus take the reins of the chariot while he sat passively, seat-belted in the passenger seat? Ten drachmas says no.

It must be that Kirk Douglas and I are secure enough to just sit back and let it happen.