I’ve just finished a draft that I’ve been struggling with for over a year, based on an idea I first sketched out and made notes on more than two years ago. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written, and I think it’s pretty good, but I suspect my beta readers will have some other ideas. None of that is relevant, though. I only bring it up because, like Brooklyn, Burning, one central theme of the new manuscript is gender and how we connect with ours and that of others.
Another theme of the new one is online gaming, which is also relevant, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Why have I been so focused on gender the last few years? Well, it’s been moving toward the front of the zeitgeist, for one thing, from way way way in the back, where it’s been for many years now—probably since the last real thrashing our ideas about gender got, in the 1970s. Debatable, but again, not relevant. So moving on. It’s been on my mind a lot because it was right around three years ago that I became a full-time, stay-at-home dad.
Weird, being a stay-at-home dad in a stay-at-home-mom world. I liked it. Still do. In fact, when I was in high school and people asked me what I wanted to do when I “grew up,” I’d always say, “Write and be a stay-at-home dad.” No joke. That’s what I said. I suppose I’d smirk when I said it, because to some degree I probably believed that being a SAHD was something of a lifelong vacation with time to write fiction. But the smirk was also a layer of protection, because I knew that the person I was talking to would very likely think me less of a pinnacle of masculinity if they didn’t think I was at least half kidding. But I wasn’t half kidding. I think that’s pretty obvious at this point.
Monday Boy tackled the identity issues this position raises. Wednesday Boy tackled the issue of the Huxtable Complex (it’s real, and it’s coming for you). Let me a little bit combine those two matters. I’ll start with my own dad.
He died, twelve years ago yesterday, as it happens. But when I was growing up, I have a very distinct and highly predictable memory of life with him on a day-to-day basis. He got home every day a little after five. He put his briefcase down next to the couch and called out hello. He wore dark slacks and a light-colored collared shirt. He wore a tie. After supper, he went back to work for three more hours. He smelled generally of ‘Lectric Shave and Speedstick by Mennen.
When I was a little boy—the late 1970s, early 1980s, let’s say—some of my favorite shirts were Batman and Robin, Dyn-O-Mite, and Mr. October. I probably smelled of apple sauce and Coke and dirt. I looked up to my dad. I figured men wore ties and shaved and worked long hours.
Now, in 2012 as a dad, here’s me: most days, I wear jeans, if I bother to remove my pajama pants, which are covered in a pattern of Atari 2600 joysticks. Some of my favorite shirts are: Space Invaders, Star Wars, and World of Warcraft. To my son, I am essentially always around, except when I sneak away on Saturdays to sit in the coffee shop and write. For what it’s worth, I use Speedstick by Mennen.
What’s my point? This: Yes, there are plenty—plenty—of dads out there today who wear a nice shirt every day and a tie, or they wear work pants or a uniform or a reflective vest. And plenty of them work very long hours. But my experience of dads, within the (admittedly small) circle in which I socialize and generally exist (that includes an Early Childhood Family Education class of just SAHDs, and trips to Target when most people are busy working and can’t get to the grocery store yet, and visits to the zoo and the children’s museum with my son, also during office hours), the dads just ain’t what they used to be.
Is this a bad thing? I guess that remains to be seen. I don’t mind being my son’s best friend (debatable again, but please don’t tell me otherwise yet). I don’t mind that I rarely find occasion to put on a pair of dress slacks and a tie. And I really like my jammy pants.
In the draft I just finished, though, the protagonist reflects on this, and he comes away with the feeling that while girls grow into women, boys just keep getting bigger. I’m not saying that’s the case. I am saying that it seems to be getting harder to demonstrate any difference in an outward sense. If I’m going to insist on dressing like a boy, and listening to loud music like a boy, and playing video games like a boy, how exactly am I anything more than a boy with body hair and male pattern baldness?
I know the answer, somewhere in my gut. (There is one; I swear.) But I bet if you asked my son, he’d just say, “Dad has a beard.”
Am I commenting on my own blog? Yes. But still. This is great.
I too, as a SAHM, love my jammy pants. Especially in January and February, because really, what’s the point?
I don’t have anything of consequence to add, except that I think it’s wonderful you and the other SAHDs out there are doing what you do. Because a side-effect of that is the slow erosion of gender stereotypes. You’re showing your children that men can be so. much. more. than the preconceived notions society sets for them.
As a SAHM, I frequently feel guilty for making the choice I did to stay home with my children, simply because I’m perpetuating a woman’s gender role. But it was the right choice for me and for my family. So whenever I feel that guilt (usually when Republicans are trumpeting their beliefs about a woman’s place in the home), I try to remember that part of being an empowered INDIVIDUAL (man or woman) means choosing your own role in society, whatever that may be.
You might feel like a giant boy, but it takes a real grown-up with real guts to stand up to society and go, “You know what? Screw you.”
Aw, thanks. Who says you have a face like an asshole?
I wish your blog had a “like” option for that comment.
Love this comment. As a stay-at-home writer (not yet mom, but someday) I too sometimes feel guilty. For the investments my parents made that let me do this; for the boyfriend who supports me emotionally and ignores the question marks from his friends and coworkers. But you’re right: feminism is about giving women choices, INCLUDING the choice to stay at home. Perhaps men need a movement like that now too.
Steve,
good stuff. I’m reminded of my own childhood and my (still unfulfilled) dreams of being that SAHD yet I often wonder how that perception would impact my kids. I think, on occasion, that our coddling of our children -telling them they’re all super-stars, that they can all be Steve Jobs or J. K. Rowling or JJ Abrams may have ramifactions down the line when most of the aren’t these people. As a father, I would dread not telling my daughters they can’t be anything they want -maybe it isn’t so much the telling as it is the demonstrating that if you do want this thing, you better be prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. Be prepared to fail over and over again and then, with failure and sweat tucked into your belt, you may have a shot.
Okay, I’m done with my mental diarrhea for today.
This whole post reminded me of an excerpt from a Russell Banks novel I never finished, but found really intriguing:
“Little girls. Just thinking about them – never mind talking to them – makes him self-conscious and insecure. And oddly scared. With little boys he can at least pretend they’re as old as he is himself no matter how young they are in reality and he can talk to them the same as he would a grown man. Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men – at least he always did when he was a kid – because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. Even old men playing golf or pinochle or watching TV in their retirement homes or sitting half-asleep in a Jacuzzi tub are only pretending to be adult men. But little girls are more complicated and mysterious than little boys. At least to the Kid they are. They don’t want you to talk to them like they’re grown-up women. Maybe it’s because grown-up women aren’t like men. Maybe women really are adults and not little kids in disguise.”
from p. 37 of Russell Banks Lost Memory of Skin, HarperCollins, 2011.
This passage makes us think women are superior creatures who become ‘grown-ups’ and maybe it’s true, but mostly it leaves me cold. Like my lot is to become a responsible naggy serious scold. If you are just a giant boy, what am I, spending fortunes on lotions that smell like buttercream frosting and being giddy about cute boys (I’m 37)? I have a mortgage and a kid and life insurance – who says either of us has to wear pinstripes and talk like bankers and worry about the life of our hot water heaters, blah blah blah? There’s being an adult, and being a grown-up – grown-up to me is about being serious and losing touch with the crazy wonder of being alive.
I haven’t read this novel either, so I can’t speak to that excerpt. But I will say that, yes, I am implying that I have this inkling that women are grown-ups, and men are not, which is a vast generalization, and one which I know not to be true. I can’t explain any better than that. But the main thing is this: I do not by any stretch of the imagination think that “grown-up” and “a responsible naggy serious scold” are synonymous. In fact, if I knew what it meant inside to be a grown-up or to feel like a grown-up, I’d probably have to be one. I don’t.
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