Musings of a Happy SAHD

This guest post is written by Robb Peck, an avid letterboxer in Vancouver, Washington, and a stay-at-home dad. Read more about his family at Out & About w/ Happy SAHD

Musings of a Happy SAHD (as in Stay At Home Dad)

I started being home not long after our second child turned a year old and I lost my job, catapulting our family into a new place. Like millions of other Americans who have had this happen, I felt a bit betrayed and more than a little dismayed. I had spent better than half of my life training and practicing my profession, and suddenly I was no longer in charge. It was hard to shake that off and get going on looking for a new job while helping out around the house.

At first, I resisted the whole “Mr. Mom” thing. Sure, I would get the kids up and fed, do some cooking (more chances to use the grill!), and tidy up the house, but I was still in charge of the 'big' things – the cars, the yard, maintenance & repairs, etc. After all, I was still looking for a job, and my focus had to be on that. But, as life would have it, my wife and I ended up in a complete role reversal when she rather quickly found a great full-time job that paid better than mine.

We had a hard choice to make: If she kept her job and I eventually found one, we would have no one at home, and our kids raised in daycare – a choice we had long ago decided not to make. And it kind-of made sense: I had spent the better part of my life training to become a teacher, with 13 years of experience in the classroom – why not stay home and raise our kids?
So I've been a SAHD through the "terrible twos," potty training and preschool to now kindergarten and the wonders of the 5-yr-old "why" with our son, and from kindergarten and favorite 'dollies' through scouts and sleepovers with our 8-yr-old (going on 18-yr-old) daughter.

I've been the kids' social director for play-dates, birthday parties, summer camps, and sports.

I've gotten to do things many fathers miss: celebrate the first time my boy used the 'big potty'; spend an afternoon playing pirates on the playground, build massive 'forts' out of all the chairs and every blanket in the house (and then have it all put away before mommy comes home!); see my children grasp the concept of phonics and read something brand new; or hold my daughter after school the first time another girl made fun of her clothes and crushed her ego. I also get to do amazing things like chaperone field trips to the pumpkin patch, help out in my kids' classrooms, and take my kids after school to volunteer down at the homeless shelter.It's different, however, being a SAHD.

Most moms wear it as a badge of honor if they are a SAHM: they are sacrificing their 'working life' to spend the quality time it takes to raise kids right, and be there for them.

But many of these same SAHMs treat a SAHD as if there must be something wrong with you, as if it’s not okay for a man to stay at home and let his wife go earn the paycheck. I've experienced the strange, guarded looks from the mommies at the park and the children's museum. I've actually seen mommies guide their little ones to the other side of the playground when I was playing with my son on the slide or swing. And I've had play-dates turned down because only I—not my wife—would be home to supervise.

Oddly enough, even though I'm there with my kids – just like them – it takes a bit for some to realize that I'm not out 'cruising' to pick up moms, or stalking their kids. Once I got past the stares and snubs, several of the SAHMs have become good friends, with us trading off watching each other's kids now & then.

Some working fathers aren't exactly sure how to treat a SAHD either, especially when I might spend an afternoon at their house – or their wife might spend an afternoon at our house – while our kids are playing. One thing that seems to help a lot is to invite the whole family over for dinner one evening so everyone gets to know each other a bit better first. (And yes, I do the cooking. If you're passing through town some time, we'll have you over. I make a mean stir-fry and pot roast, and have become a bit of an expert with homemade breads - especially pizza crust. I even cook once a month at our church for about 100 people or so...) Then there are the friends who can't imagine that you actually like being a SAHD. Again, there's the perception that there must be something wrong with me since I've stopped looking for a job. I've had the ex-coworkers ask about when I was going back to the classroom. And I've fielded calls on my cell phone from my old buddies 'ribbing' me about being "Mr. Mom." Of course, I was playing with my kids at the zoo when they called!

Though a lot of my new ‘job’ is fantastic, it's not all fun and games. When a kid is burning up with a fever, or puking their guts out, my wife heads off to work and I get the 'pleasure' of dealing with it. I've picked up a lot more of the housework, of course, but I still take care of the cars, yard, maintenance, repairs, etc. I also do the bulk of the laundry (kids' clothes, sheets, towels, etc. - my wife prefers to wash her work clothes herself), the shopping (which is really fun with a 3-yr-old), and most of the errands.

All-in-all, it's wonderful being a SAHD - with an incredible, intense time to really bond and get to know and help shape your kids - and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

A lot of our society looks at mommies who stay home as almost 2nd-class citizens. Yet, I've learned the real secret – they have the best job in the world!

Marriage Less Important Than Prenatal Bonding

There's a fascinating new study published in the December issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family about the importance for dads to bond with their babies in the prenatal period in order to establish a stable family life and continue being an involved parent.

As reported in a News Bulletin on Mothering.com:

In their analysis, Cabrera and her colleague, Jay Fagan at Temple University, found that fathers involved during pregnancy were significantly more likely to remain involved in raising their child at three-years-old.

"The unmarried father is much more likely either to maintain or move into a more committed relationship if he's involved before the birth, and that's the critical difference," Cabrera says.

"As you might expect, research has consistently shown that creating a stable home life predicts whether a father will be an active participant in raising the child, but what we've learned here is that the prenatal months are when that kind of family structure is most likely to coalesce."

The Holiday Hard Stuff

[This post was originally an article by Jennifer Margulis in the Ashland Daily Tidings]
“I’m just afraid that this will be the last Christmas that they believe in Santa,” my husband James said sadly. “I just want it to be fun for them. And special.”

These were the first conciliatory words from James all evening. Santa was running late and we were frantically wrapping presents, stuffing stockings, and placing surprise ornaments on the tree. Every time we passed the kitchen table we took a bite of Santa’s cookies. Santa wrote a note in response to 5-year-old Athena’s, thanking her for the cookies, praising her and her siblings for being good, and suggesting our 3-year-old stop sneaking sugar.

Now that our kids were in bed, we adults should have been enjoying these Christmas preparations. But we weren’t. James was having something akin to an anxiety attack, and I was starting to feel like I wanted to cut December 25th out of the calendar.

My foul mood had started earlier in the day, after being awakened at dawn by my children, who were eager to know how many days were left until Christmas, who had a deluge of last minute present requests (after refusing for weeks to hint at what they might want from Santa), and who were all voicing their needs in high-pitched whines.

“I hate Christmas. Next year I’m going away,” I said to them grumpily. “I’m skipping the whole thing.”

“How can you say that?” James asked in a hurt voice when they were out of earshot. “It’s one thing to say it to me, but not to the children. What if I said I didn’t want to celebrate Hanukkah?”

But on Hanukkah, which we celebrate in a haphazard way, there’s no gift giving. Instead, we light candles, sing the traditional Hebrew incantations, and eat traditional foods. This year we had potato latkes and doughnuts dripping in oil. We invited friends over to share the candlelight and the meals. And, as is our custom, we exchanged poems instead of presents. There wasn’t much to do to prepare for each night of Hanukkah except for putting candles into the menorah and cooking. My children didn’t expect hundreds of presents, and since the holiday is as much for me as it is for them, I didn’t worry about whether they’d be happy.

Christmas, on the other hand, was feeling very stressful. It involves a lot of things I don’t like: spending too much money on plastic toys made in China by laborers in substandard factory conditions, wasting paper to wrap presents. No matter how many times we read Dr. Seuss’s “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” or “The Berenstain Bears’ Christmas Tree” it always comes down to presents. Christmas Eve we invariably stress: did we buy enough toys? Will the kids be happy?

But maybe the anxiety is really about our own childhood baggage, and since I didn’t celebrate Hanukkah as a child, I don’t have difficult memories associated with it. After my parents divorced they still celebrated Christmas together for the sake of the children. My father would express his anxiety by manically throwing away wrapping paper while we were still opening our gifts. I would have a lump in my throat all morning, awkward around my parents and feeling guilty for something I couldn’t define. And I would feign excessive enthusiasm for each gift, as if showing gratitude would prove to my parents that I was a good child, and perhaps even motivate them to love each other again. The only part of Christmas that I remember without ambivalence was how my dad would awaken early to go to the bagel shop in Newton Centre, coming home with a dozen warm bagels and a tub of hand whipped cream cheese.

For James, an only child, the living room was covered with presents. He has fond memories of the mountains of gifts but his yearly anxiety tells a different story. The Christmases when he was four to nine were the years after his mother, who had a drinking problem, divorced his father so she could live as a single woman in the swinging Seventies. Being a mom was not her first priority. The holidays were like make up time. A few months later, she would go on a cleaning frenzy with a trash bag, picking up each new toy and suggesting he throw it away.

The kids wake us at dawn. “He came! He really came!” They marvel at the bulging stockings and the presents and the day is a success.

I hope their childhood memories won’t be as fraught as mine.