Lessons Learned from My Marriage to a Stay-at-Home-Dad
It’s not as easy as we might like it to be.
My ex-husband had issues around food. Mostly in that he would throw it when he got angry. My children and I would walk in the front door after an afternoon of running errands to find a large lump of uncooked pizza dough whizzing past our heads, accompanied by torrent of loud and colorful swear words. Directed at us? The pizza dough that was refusing to cooperate? We never stuck around long enough to find out. The kids and I would look at each other, one of us would say “Chinese food,” and back out the door we went, leaving their father to continue his own special form of kitchen therapy by himself.
Being married to a full-time stay-at-home-dad with a big, volatile personality definitely had its moments. One day while at work, I received a video by email of my 11-year-old son going around and around in the dryer, laughing hysterically. I don’t want to be sexist, of course, so I’m not saying this is exclusively “dad” behavior. All the same, I don’t know too many mothers who would encourage their to kid climb into the dryer, instruct the younger sibling to put her finger on the little button that allows the dryer to operate with the door open, and then film until the boy, through his laughter, starts to complain that being tumble-dried is hurting his butt.
On the surface, we were cool and nonchalant about our role reversal. Unlike other families we knew who were trying out the dad-at-home idea, we weren’t doing this temporarily or because my ex had a job with flexible hours or that allowed him to work from home. We were all in. I worked 60-hour weeks and traveled constantly. He parented full time. But we pretended like it was no big deal, like anyone could do it if they just happened to be as enlightened and forward-thinking as us.
We were also encouraged in our marital/parenting experiment by some very low-level media attention. We were doing this back when it was even less common than it is now, and a national (but not very well-known) magazine ran an article on stay-at-home-dads and used us as their feature couple. A producer contacted us about a truly terrible idea for a reality TV show starring fun fathers who hang with their kids while their uptight wives go off to work. (Surprising, I know, that I didn’t jump on that opportunity.)
But it wasn’t all glitz and glamour, kids in tumble dryers, and multi-page spreads in magazines that nobody reads. Beneath the surface (and not very far beneath, as was apparent from the flying food habit), there were cracks in our marriage and our parenting set-up that eventually contributed to the whole thing crumbling.
I’d like to be able to say now that I have it all figured out. That I’ve learned from the mistakes we made, and I can, as a result, describe the perfect formula for making the Mom-Brings-Home-the-Bacon/Dad-Fries-It-up-in-a-Pan situation work for everyone. “Follow these simple steps, and you’ll both be fulfilled, your children will be future Nobel Prize winners, and you’ll be the envy of everyone you know!” But no, I have none of that. All I have are these few things I learned that may or may not resonate with others who have tried it:
If you’re married to a stay-at-home-dad, expect your family to keep growing. As everyone knows who’s spent time around babies and toddlers, they are a crap-ton of work. Even aside from the hours you spend cleaning up their actual crap, there’s feeding and bathing and entertaining and dealing with Jekyll-and-Hyde-type mood swings. Not to mention the relentless societal pressure to make sure you’re stimulating their tiny developing minds every waking hour.
But then they grow up a bit. They learn to walk and talk, and there’s preschool and actual school. And your stay-at-home husband just might decide that he needs another full-time project to be working on….. You can see how another kid quickly starts to seem to him like the perfect solution, especially when he’s not the one who has to do the whole being pregnant/giving birth/breastfeeding thing.
And be warned: if you’re not willing to cooperate by adding more humans into the mix, he’ll decide that the next best thing will do, and suddenly you have a dog. And a parrot. And four baby chicks. (All four of which, to your — and your neighbors’ — dismay, grow up to be roosters thanks to his refusal to ensure that he’s acquiring properly sex-designated, egg-laying livestock.)
When strangers ask a stay-at-home-dad what he does, and he says he’s “retired,” that is a bad sign. Men have been told their whole lives that when they grow up, they must get a job. So when you hand him a small lump of human being in a diaper and a onesie, that’s now his job. Which is all well and good until you’re at a cocktail party, or a friend’s wedding, or an event for your job, and somebody asks him that laziest of all openers: “What do you do?”
For the first few years, when taking care of a demanding and high-spirited kid was a relentless 14-plus-hour-a-day endeavor, my ex-husband would proudly tell these people that he was a stay-at-home-dad.
But somewhere along the way, something changed, and he started telling people he was “retired.” If you find yourself in this situation, and your stay-at-home-dad husband describes himself this way, I have learned that you must absolutely resist the impulse to turn to him and say, “From what?”
No matter that your children are still many years away from being able to take care of themselves for more than 30 minutes or so, meaning that in your view at least, his job is still very much in full swing. Apparently, claiming to be retired can be more socially acceptable to a man than admitting that he spends his days parenting.
In retrospect, I should have recognized this change in my husband as the harbinger of doom that it was. When you’re ashamed of how you’re spending the vast majority of your waking hours, you’re not happy. Which brings us to……
There’s a higher-than-average chance that a stay-at-home-dad is going to end up being happier with someone who needs him more than you do. It wasn’t just pizza dough that went flying. It was also books, a remote control or two, and once, a large, expensive cut of raw meat that got thrown all the way into the middle of the front yard. (My son and I went out an hour or so later to retrieve it, washed it thoroughly, marinated it, and cooked it into a dish we named “Rescue Steak.”)
And while his anger and frustration were bubbling over, my career was flourishing, our children were growing into surprisingly well-adjusted, independent people, and even the various animals were taking care of themselves pretty well. All of which seemed to make him even angrier and more frustrated.
We all need to feel we are needed, and partly as a result of the family structure we had created, he wasn’t feeling that. So when a woman showed up in his life who had made a bit of a mess of her own personal life, he couldn’t resist the chance to rescue her, to provide a shoulder to cry on, to be needed.
Probably, it was for the best in the end. I assume he’s happier with her, and I’m happier with food that stays put on the kitchen surfaces and the plates until it gets eaten.
And I wouldn’t call it a failed experiment. There are good memories, and not all of them involved children climbing into household appliances. But I learned that, while it’s easy to be cavalier about trailblazing, there can be pitfalls that you don’t see coming simply because few people have trodden that path before you.
So if you’re going to try it, go in with your eyes open. And learn to duck around dinner time.
