A Mr. Mom Looks Back With Satisfaction, Love
Twenty years ago, I was the only man in the park. In the supermarket there were no other males wandering the aisles with a child strapped to his back and absolutely no idea what to fix for dinner. And certainly in the small Midwestern town where we then lived, I was the only man who had volunteered to stay home and toil in the child care ghetto that was the normal domain of women.
“What are you trying to prove?” both friends and perfect strangers would sometimes ask. “And what about the consequences for your daughter? You know, how’s this going to affect her?”
“Well,” I replied, “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
A Confession of Confusion
Two decades later, I confess that I wasn’t sure of anything. I did not know any more about the consequences of that role reversal than I knew about pinning a diaper to a kicking infant without drawing blood. What my wife and I did know was that we had been blessed with a baby girl we named Annie, and that the best arrangement for us included my staying home to take on the chores normally handled by the mother, while Mom went to work.
It wasn’t an experiment. It didn’t seem dangerous or daring. It just suited us.
But would it suit Annie? Would a man with good intentions but no real training make a mess of the job and the child? I had spent a few years in newsrooms where co-workers could act like big babies, but I never had to bottle-feed and burp anyone. They did that themselves.
So I was unprepared. But what first-time parent is prepared for a newborn? No book, and not even the most graphic testimony of friends and family, can fully ready rookie parents for the fraternity of the sleepless, the relentless demands of an infant, or the piercing wail of a colicky child that can move the family dog to howls of sympathy.
Nor can anything but the sudden dawn of parenthood itself awaken a man or woman to the depth of love and wonder roused by a tiny being who wasn’t there the day before.
Of course, men are uniquely handicapped when it comes to child care. We weren’t paying attention when preceding generations were passing on the secret lore of the nursery, because we never imagined we would need to know. We didn’t practice with dolls or baby-sit as teens. Until the day Annie was born, I don’t think I had ever held an infant in my arms.
True, there are also many women who have little or no experience with children before they become mothers. So we’re all overwhelmed.
But men at home all day with children have to keep explaining themselves. Why? people want to know. Your wife called out of town? You lost your job? Lost a bet? But what do you do, really?
Annie, I would say, mixing defiance with defensiveness in equal measures. I do Annie. She’s full-time.
But you’re a writer, the skeptics insisted, unable to get a comfortable grip on the situation. You must be writing a book.
No, no. I’m doing this because I want to, because I’m pretty excited about this kid, and someone has to look after her, and my wife has a new job. . . .
OK, yes, I did eventually write a book about my first two years as Annie’s full-time caretaker (“Daddy’s Home,” Seaview Books, now out of print), but that only happened later, after I had gone back to work myself, and after our son Joey was born and I returned home to care for two children.
But in all those years at home the kids were my primary job, and what I learned was that it isn’t easy. Child care may be noble, necessary, even rewarding, but it’s not always fun. There is no paycheck, no pat on the back from the boss, no refuge at the office water cooler. I recall longing for a boring business lunch, after which I would not have to wipe up spaghetti sauce from the floor, the walls, me.
Caring for children also can be isolating, even lonely. After baking two batches of pretty decent peanut butter cookies, I finally infiltrated a mom’s morning play group when Annie was about 18 months old and I was desperate for community. These women were my peers, and I figured I could worm my way into the sorority and there find fellowship over chitchat about bedtime rituals and car seats.
Alas, I got in the door, but I never got into the club. The cookies were fine, the women told me. But I didn’t really fit in.
Now men are not so alone. According to some estimates, there may as many as 2 million fathers in charge of kids during the workday. And there are support groups, newsletters and Web sites for at-home dads, Internet chat rooms, even guidebooks on child care written expressly for fathers. In supermarkets there are other men with kids in tow and no idea what to fix for dinner.
“Being a father at home was once considered freakish. Now it’s just unusual,” says Peter Baylies, 42, who publishes At-Home Dad--a quarterly newsletter for 800 subscribers--while caring for his two young sons in North Andover, Mass.
Changes in child care roles come through evolution, not revolution, as Baylies points out, and the movement is still too young to have produced quantifiable proof of what we really want to know: Does it matter? Is Annie a different person today because her dad was the one to change all those diapers, haul her to the doctor for all those checkups, put in all those mornings at the cooperative preschool, to sigh in sweet relief when she went down for that afternoon nap?
We have only anecdotal evidence. But it’s telling. Annie graduated from college several weeks ago and came home with a degree in English, a $10,000 debt and only the vaguest notion about what to do next. First, she said, she’d return to her summer job waiting tables to make some money, then drive to Seattle with a friend, maybe go to Europe in the fall and eventually apply to graduate school in advertising.
Does that sound normal? It does to me.
Influence on Dad Was Profound
Still, my influence as a stay-at-home dad on Annie’s psyche remains unclear. But I know what caring for Annie, and then for Joey, all those years did for me. It changed the way I view the world by inserting into my daily rhythm other heartbeats that at once were more insistent and more important than my own. They made being a dad central to my identity. And although it seems almost compulsive to say it, rarely does a moment go by when I am not aware of that.
Thanks to remarriage, I have four children now, all between the ages of 17 and 21, and each of them move about the world with an independence that parents often find startling. They are all in and out of the house this summer, making noise, messing up the kitchen and costing me more than I think I can afford.
Still, I’m dreading already the time when there won’t be any kids at home, when I’m in bed and not subconsciously registering the sound of the front door opening and closing at all hours of the night. They will be gone soon. But I will always be their dad.
On Father’s Day this year the kids gave me a T-shirt and a book, along with a funny homemade card that included a collage of old photographs and an extremely unsubtle reference to my disappearing hair. Then Annie gave me a hug and said, “Thank you for everything.”
No, really, I replied. Thank you.
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Fathers in Charge
* The number of single fathers grew from 1.7 million to 2.1 million between 1995 and 1998.
* In 1994, there were 6.2 million married-couple families with preschoolers and employed mothers. In those familes, 27% of the fathers cared for their children during the mother’s working hours.
* Fathers now spend 43% as much time with their kids as moms do, up from 33% in the late 1970s.
* Fathers spend an average of 2.5 hours a day on weekdays and 6.2 hours a day on weekends with their children.
* Four of five fathers report they help choose their children’s activities, while two of three help select day care and schools.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; University of Michigan Institute for Social Research
Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times
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For More Child Care Information
* An extensive list of child care resources and the complete Caring for Our Children series are available on The Times’ web site: https://latimes.com/caring
* The Fatherhood Project, an effort to develop ways to support men’s involvement in child rearing:
https://www.fatherhoodproject.org/
* At-Home Dad, a quarterly newsletter for fathers who stay at home with their children:
Peter Baylies, At-Home Dad, 61 Brightwood Ave., North Andover, MA 01845-1702
* National Center on Fathers and Families:
NCOFF, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Box 58, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216; (215) 573-5500
Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times