You were always pretty quick to say you'd be happy to stay home
with the kids. When the possibility first arose, you figured that, being a man, and
therefore totally competent and possessed of vast amounts of strength, you could easily do
as well as your wife. You might even do as well as (gulp) your own mother. Remember those
idyllic fantasies? In the morning, your lovely spouse, resplendent in power clothes, would
be cuddling obedient little darlings, spending the last few minutes of her precious home
time saturating the offspring with motherly love. You, meanwhile, would be seated in the
breakfast nook, table to yourself. The dust motes (not too many) would waft gently in the
dawn rays that caressed the morning paper, your steaming breakfast, and your fourth cup of
excellent java. After giving you a tender peck on the top of the head, off she would ride
to contest among the vermin. Your children would scatter to their rooms, eager to play
with their superb educational toys.
Okay, here's the reality.
Before the sun comes up, you hear the first peal of those small yet powerful lungs.
Scuttling crab-like through the dark, you hurry to the baby's lair and clamp a hand over
the little mug's mouth as you drag him from his cage. Stuffing baby clothes into your
pocket and grabbing a clean diaper on your way past the bathroom, you whisk Jr.
downstairs. It's time for Teletubbies, a fact that determines your child's circadian
rhythms, to say nothing of his whole universe. You usher the pulling little darling into
the TV room, only to find that your wife is on the couch, having abandoned the master
bedroom sometime in the night. She has trained one huge hairy eyeball on the pair of you.
You stifle the urge to utter indignantly "Snore? Moi?" You give her your best
smile of greeting and gesture apologetically at the fleshy little alarm clock who is
scrabbling madly at the remote, trying to crack the code. I could go on, but we all have
war stories, most of them having been reduced to titles like "The Orange Juice
Incident." The severity of the war story, it's casualty list as it were, is given out
in loads of laundry.
Most of us At-Home Dads
spend at least some time trying to figure out why our fantasies of being the primary care
giver don't equate with the reality. Here are some examples of these inequalities, and the
logic (usually faulty) behind them.
Fantasy #1:
Her day off from work should equal your day off from childcare.
Reality:
Her day off means that you have to follow around an extra person, still doing all the
things you normally do, plus cleaning up after her.
Faulty Logic:
You believe you get days off. This is a hold-over from the idyllic period when
(a) you had a job, and
(b) you had no children. You no longer work for pay; you no longer have days off.
Fantasy #2:
You can do laundry without separating whites from colors.
Reality:
You will no longer have any white stuff. On the one hand, this solves the separation
problem. On the other hand, it may lead to a more severe kind of separation. Why? Because
women value clothes the way men value tools. Imagine your wife trying to loosen a lug nut
by whacking it with the nose of your finish nailer. Now you begin to understand.
Faulty logic:
You believe that if no one is looking, no dye will run. Do you really need help
understanding this one?
Fantasy #3:
You can pay someone else to help you. Babysitting, cleaning, repair work, all of these are
things with which someone else could help you.
Reality:
No one else can do it right. Being an at-home dad, you have taken on all the traditionally
female tasks. You are still lord and master of all the boy-stuff as well. The result is
that your control of the realm rivals Charlemagne's. From snow-blowers to the throat of
the toilet, it's all yours.
Faulty logic:
Having vast control over all the details includes being able to surrender to anyone else
the completion of tasks in your domain. Who are you kidding? For things to be done right,
you cross the line into obsessive-compulsive behavior. Without Prozac, you cannot give up
control without suffering tremendous guilt or, more likely, death. Haven't you noticed
that, when your wife cleans up the kitchen, you hate the way she stacks things up in the
dish-drainer? And when she vacuums, she's hopelessly inefficient at moving the furniture,
then leaves things out of place! Isn't it incredible how much extra work she loads on you
by her thoughtless and ill-conceived efforts at being a homemaker? Who does she think she
is, anyway? Someone's mother? This leads us to the next fantasy.
Fantasy #4:
It's possible to catch up with the housework.
Reality:
You will never catch up with the housework.
Let's skip the faulty logic
and get right to an analysis. Start seeing the condition of the house as a large rock. You
are Sisyphus. The more times you clean up, the more times the house will get dirty. The
more you understand this, the less frustration and anger you will feel. Wife's an
inconsiderate lazy slob? Smile and relax. Emotions like anger just deplete your
energy--energy that will help you meet your housework objectives. Being a home- maker is,
therefore, a meeting between Western philosophy in the figure of Sisyphus and Eastern Zen
tenets. Under the latter, if you can't let go of your feelings of frustration, you'll only
be reincarnated as a tapeworm. And think of their living environments! Your goal,
therefore, is to achieve inner peace, a truce with filth and entropy. This is not to
encourage you to live in blissful and dirty sloth. You must decide what it is possible to
do on a given day. Every person has their own threshold of filth. Chances are, your
threshold is incrementally above your mother's. Make your list in the morning. Maybe clean
just one bathroom before you change the oil in the truck. Leave a little time for yourself
during naptime. You can run yourself ragged trying to get caught up, or learn the truth:
Someday you will die, and the house will not be clean. In this way, you are far better off
than Sisyphus.
Fantasy #5:
Not working is easier than working.
Reality:
Staying home is so much work that you are mystified as to how your other raised you and
all your siblings. On the other hand, you can now account for some of the more eccentric
behaviors in the family. Anyway, not having a job must mean a life of ease, n'est-ce pas?
Faulty Logic:
When someone is paying you, you have to take whatever tasks and crap come your way. Thus,
not working means you don't have to do anything or take crap from anyone. Okay, let's lay
it on the line: If your child were your boss, you'd quit. Your boss never threw a
screaming tantrum on you in the supermarket, topped it off by pooping one and a half loads
into a one-load diaper, then made you wash his or her butt. The compensation for this
situation--since there's no money in it--is what you get out of it. You get to raise your
kids. You have more fun, because you are invested in the outcome. You have more stake in
the future of your children than you ever had in any job. You will take all of the hard
work and thanklessness of it because the rewards are huge and because of one other key
point: it's not forever. It may feel like forever. And by the time you pack the youngest
one off to school, you may have changed so much that you'll be a nodding yes-man to Dr.
Laura Schlesinger. But you will have done something few other men ever get the chance to
do: see your children grow up. Put that way, it sounds almost obscene that most males go
off to work all day, then come home insular and estranged from their families.
No, it's much harder
staying home than it is holding a job. And the pay is much lower. But the pay is much
better.
David Epstein is the father of Leo (22 mos) and
they are expecting another in March. David specialized in working with juvenile
delinquents, which taught him much of the patience one needs for parenting.
At-Home Dad
