Where Are All the 'Working Dads'? Cont'd
Another one comes out of the woodwork:
I am a working Stay At Home Dad. My daughter is six months old, and I have been the primary caregiver for all but the eight weeks of my wife’s maternity leave. While I am the primary caregiver and I always watch the baby Sunday to Friday 9 - 5, I have always felt the need to work on the side. I nanny a friend’s infant 35 hours a week, write for a publishing company, and tutor. I love being with my daughter and the child I nanny. This has been the best six months of my life.
Why do I do all of these side jobs in addition to being a SAHD?
1) My wife’s income is alright, but it would be tight for a family of three to live on alone. My wife is very smart and talented (full ride at Harvard) and had offers at very remunerative employers, but she chose to go into a caring profession.
2) I want to keep my resume current and maintain some career momentum. I do intend to reenter the workforce eventually. We plan to have more children, but inevitably the youngest will enter first grade.
3) It would be tough to go to a 15-year high school reunion and say that I am just a SAHD.
4) I greatly enjoy nannying and reasonably enjoy the other jobs.
As much as I enjoy childcare, my wife decided to only feed our child breast milk for the first six months. This means that my wife handles several late-night feedings and shows up to work every morning with five hours of sleep. Six months is not forever, but is also not insignificant. We have a pump and bottles, but our daughter finds nursing much more pleasant and soothing.
So even with open-minded parents, biology does exert some influence.
Another SAHD:
Having been a work-from-home/stay-at-home dad, one of the toughest things is getting frozen out by that group of cool moms. Not that I want to talk about cute boots or anything. But my son has come to me in tears asking why he was the only kid in his preschool class who didn’t get invited to these play-dates the whole class was talking about.
I finally confronted the head-cool-mom about it (hopefully non-confrontationally, using the kind of apologetic talk that Alexandra Petri recently illustrated on how women talk in meetings). I asked that they not hold it against my kid that he gets picked up by his dad and not his mom. That was super-awkward, and I think I frightened her despite my tiptoeing, woman-in-a-meeting approach. (See? Not just women in meetings!) However, my kid did finally get to play-date. Yay!
