As I was driving my eight-year-old daughter to school the other morning, she asked, "Mom?…I mean, Dad? Why can't you go back to work and let Mommy stay home with me like in normal families." I told her that she was culturally trapped in the '50's, that this was the 21st century so get used to it. "And besides, honey, if I went back to work and Mommy stayed home, you'd be missing me instead."
"No I wouldn't," she said.
Okay. I know that this is the wave of the future, where antediluvian gender roles are dissolving and where intelligent parents are able to decide rationally which of them is best suited for Primary Care Giving (PCG) and which for Helping to Build the New Economy (that is, if they have that luxury at all). But it isn't the future yet and it doesn't plan on being the future for a while. Even our children are still hidebound by a Leave-It-To-Beaver worldview (and mine doesn't even watch TV, much less Nick At Night). Being the dad who stays at home still requires an explanation.
My personal explanation is simple. Our daughter needed a full time parent. We were financially in a position to afford that. We weighed our mutual aptitudes for the role and observed that, of the two of us, I was the better cook and my wife was the better business head. I say this fully aware that most parents in this wonderfully productive country don’t have that option.
Of course it isn't that simple at all. Emotionally, it is hard for me, a man having grown up in a culture where men went to work and women raised the kids. Likewise I sensed in my interviews with other PCG dads the same vague awkwardness about the subject. Men don't like to talk about it. We'll do it but shut up. When I was a vice president at the largest advertising agency in the world, working on big, manly accounts like Lockheed and Coke and McDonalds, I loved to expound on my career. Now when I'm asked what I do, I cop out and say I'm retired. Otherwise I feel like it would be admitting I listen to Barbra Streisand. Which I do not.
So What Do You Do…Really?
The question I hear most is, "What are your future plans?" To which I reply it's to raise my offspring and then die gasping from exhaustion in shallow water like a salmon (one of nature's more brilliant reproductive strategies I've always thought). I recommend a similar smart-ass retort to any such presumptive question. My mother was never asked what her future plans were. Shopping. And maybe lunch and a movie.
What's the hardest part of being the male PCG? Multi-tasking. This was the most common response I got from my interviews. I've read research (or maybe my wife told me) that men are far less capable of multi-tasking than women. I regard with awe mothers who can resolve a dispute between their children over who was sitting next to whom, while never losing a beat in their conversation with an adult. I usually forget why I was heading for the refrigerator when my daughter asks me where her shoes are.
Yet there are upsides to being Mr. Mom. Number One is the Cloak of Sanctity you get to wear by being the dad who hangs up his guns for his children. Mothers still don't get that credit (unfortunately). When you're a guy, people treat you as though you're some kind of hero. Women's eyes get all big and moist with admiration as they tell me, "Aw, that's so sweet!" (It's too bad I'm not a single dad.) Unless those women are raising kids AND holding down a job, in which case they say, "Get back to work, you bum."
But I am working. Really.
