It was July 4 when the revolution began at our house – I quit my job as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis and came home to be a househusband and caregiver for my then-sixteen-month-old son, Seth. What I thought was going to be my first day of independence was really my last day of freedom.
My wife, Lora, and I had agreed to undertake this grand experiment in parenting, in which I would be the full-time stay-at-home father and homemaker, of sorts, while she would continue to work, bringing home the bacon necessary to keep our small household functioning. A role reversal like that sounds laudable when you read about it in the newspaper, but it’s somewhat daunting when you try it yourself.
This book tells the story of that experiment – how a sports-loving, red-blooded American guy adapted to changing diapers ten times a day, kissing owies, picking up legions of toy cars and blocks, soothing his wife’s fragile mother-ego, and cooking broccoli at every other meal. It’s been an incredible test of my creativity, a battle of wills where the mighty doesn’t always win,and more than anything, a transformation for myself and my family that surprised us at every turn.
For me, it’s true that I was no longer reporting to the office to extinguish the deadline fires burning beneath my editor’s desk. Instead, I jumped to the call of a busy toddler, whose demands grew with his awareness of all the things in the world that can be demanded. As a reporter, I was chained to my computer and phone by the need to get a story out – at home, I was tethered to my son, whose constant (and sometimes precarious) tearing about the house has sapped the energy out of my thirtysomething-plus body.
Lora and I put a lot of thought into our lifestyle-change. Frustrated with missing most of Seth’s waking hours and exhausted from every virus he brought home from day care, we wanted to be raising our child ourselves. For six months prior to this July day, we labored over the decision, arguing back and forth over how it could best be done. The final result was me, sitting on the patio on the Fourth of July, unemployed.
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