Changing the Language of Fatherhood

My wife works outside the home and I work from within it, so to save on daycare costs the baby stays with me all day.

To keep from going utterly insane, I often make trips out to nearby coffee shops and try to work there for awhile (assuming the baby stays asleep and/or quiet). Almost every day someone will come over to me (usually an older man or woman) to ogle the cute baby and ask one of the following:

- Have the afternoon off work today, huh?

- Daddy baby-sitting this afternoon?

- Did mommy need a break?

- Mommy out shopping?

When I tell them that, no, I take care of the baby all day every day because I work from home, they have no way to respond. It's an utterly foreign concept in their world. Sometimes they simply say, "wow!" and walk off, but every now and then I get the impression that what I said was so alien that they didn't process it and continue with small talk designed around the notion that what I'm doing that particular afternoon cannot possibly be how it is every day. Mommy is still the primary and daddy is simply mommy's backup - and boy it sure is nice of me to give my obviously tired and overworked wife some time off!

I'm not really offended by this - more amused, I suppose. It does bother me sometimes that the men's restrooms almost universally lack baby changing tables. I've taken to just using the women's on occasion so I can change the baby. I look forward to the day when some self-rightous woman gets in my face about it... :) (At small coffee shops, this is easy since they are single-occupancy restrooms - but if I were at some large-scale place with multiple stalls per restroom, I'd be pretty much screwed.)

What bugs me more than the language surrounding this issue is the "unusual" situation of my being the primary daycare provider combined with being a programmer. As it is, very few people "in the public" seem to understand what programming is. Being a work-at-home dad just adds insult to injury, frankly, because the nature of the work is such that distraction and/or stress pretty much destroy the ability to do it well - and having your baby within earshot is a surefire way of becoming distracted and/or stressed out.

The response to the whole "I'm a programmer and a stay-at-home dad" thing is usually along the lines of, "it must be so nice to have a job you can easily do from home - you're so lucky!" "Easy" isn't the word I'd be using here - but since there's no simple way to associate how programming is done with any kind of work that the general public tends to understand, it's pretty much a lost cause. I'm certain most people go away thinking that I somehow get paid to play with a computer all day, so watching the kid at home must be pretty easy. Ugh.

"'Mommy & Me' is catchy and alliterative, and, in my neighborhood, it’s the standard label for parent-child events, whether fathers are welcome or not. The term is also unapologetic in its exclusion of fathers, and no analogue exists: the top results for a similar Google search for 'Daddy & Me' include disturbing news items about horrific domestic violence." An interesting look at how our language both reflects and shapes our ideas of what parenthood is.

Here in Sweden no one would make those kinds of comments about a dad and his kid. Almost all parents here share their parental leave more or less equally. I think some 60 days are reserved for each parent, the rest can be divided as you want.

Language, like restrooms, embeds a number of assumptions about the culture that uses it, for the sake of efficiency. These assumptions are usually right. A while after they stop being right, they get phased out. Optimising for all use cases is not optimising at all.

Michael Lewis On Fatherhood: http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/06/michael-lewis-on-fatherh...