Full-Time Dads;
The E-Magazine for Caregiver Fathers
Issue 4, originally appeared in print - October 1991
Some of the aspects of being a full-time dad took me completely by surprise. I didn't expect to enjoy the job so much, to receive so much unquestioning support from family and friends, or to become a minor local celebrity. And I certainly never guessed that I would become a neighborhood dad.
In many neighborhoods, a majority of families have two working parents. Any woman who stays home with her kids is likely to become the neighborhood morn. The working parents look at her as having an abundance of free time, so they are not reluctant to ask her for special favors: watch for a package to be delivered, shuttle the kids from school to soccer practice, or sit for one child while another is taken to the doctor.
Of course, a full-time dad can assume the same role. At first, I was used in the traditional sense: providing child care at a moment's notice, watching for important packages to be delivered, housesitting while a family was on vacation, taking a bunch of kids fishing, or even getting awakened in the middle of the night to stay with a toddler while her mother and father went off to the hospital to give birth to her little sister.
Neighborhood dad took on a more distinctly male flavor with the first of the animal calls. Women assume that men know about animals. So, when a strange bird showed up at the birdfieeder, my phone would ring, an excited voice rushing, "Craig there is a huge yellow bird out here with black wings and a yellow beak and red eyes and there are about a hundred of a hundred of them and they are eating all my sunflower seeds! What is it?" As I tried it figure who was calling, I identified evening grosbeaks, the same flock of which had just left my yard after devouring a pound of my sunflower seeds.
The phone rang again when a hummingbird was trapped in a neighbor's house, but that call was calm compared to the mouse call. As I answered the phone, a voice screamed at me "There's a mouse caught in a trap under my kitchen sink." When the caller told me she was talking to me while standing on the kitchen counter, I knew it was serious situation. She explained 1 was the only male in Los Alamos close enough to remove the mouse in an acceptably short period of time. When I arrived a few minutes later, the kids let me in; their mother was still perched on the counter in a state of panic. Amid all the commotion, the mouse had freed itself and was again roaming the walls to terrorize on yet another day.
Not all the potential duties of the neighborhood dad are small favors. A new woman at playgroup told how she and her husband had just bought some land and were planning to build the house of their dreams. When she heard that as a young man I had been a framing carpenter, she pounced. "Could you help us with the carpentry?" I agreed, thinking nothing would come of it. But that summer I spent four weeks of backbreaking labor (and loving every minute of it) framing the house with her father-in-law, while she took care of my daughter all day. What a way to take a break from the regular duties of a full-time dad!
I must admit that being a neighborhood dad is not all work. Each year during the first week of May I have a standing agreement to act as fly-fishing guide for a playgroup mom's visiting father. It is a cooperative agreement; I provide the secret fishing locations, and in return I get a week, with child care provided as part of the deal. I could use some more deals like that.
Now, even the neighborhood men are catching on. When one husband told his seven month pregnant wife he would be out of town on business next month, she was mildly concerned. "It's okay, he explained, "Craig is just around the corner."
I think this neighborhood dad thing could go a bit too far.
Copyright 1991 Craig Martin
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