A friend of mine called me recently with the news: stay-at-home dads were featured in Newsweek, and there was a phrase for me as the mom: "alpha earner." The phrase made me giggle; I imagined myself the alpha wolf, coming home after a long day's hunt, my muzzle stained with blood, a fat carcass dragging behind me. My family members fawned on me as I nobly lifted my leg to mark them as my own.
Alpha earner. As if society doesn't emasculate stay-at-home dads enough. I looked up Newsweek's May 12 cover story: "She Works, He Doesn't." (Apparently, even in 2003, raising children and running a household‹no matter who does it‹still isn't work.) The article, among other things, actually called stay-at-home dads "househusbands." Try calling my husband Jan that. I dare you.
I didn't find myself anywhere in the article. I make a decent salary, but just enough for us to live on, if our 8-year-old car holds out. I am not on the fast track, prowling the hallways of power and making the Big Decisions like the women profiled in the story. One brief mention of working-class folks was made toward the end of the article as an afterthought (working-class guys are more used to getting laid off, the slick pages told me smugly). Beyond that, dads who stay at home are only newsworthy when they have smooth, pale hands accustomed to gripping nothing heavier than a three-wood. Women work, Newsweek tells us, because they are driven career hounds empowered by education and their feminist sensibilities.
In fact, the reason my husband works at home child-rearing and I work in an office is a product of sexism, not feminism. I make more because he chose a female-dominated and thus underpaid field: he works with children. Despite working for nonprofits, I have always made more money.
Before we had Arie, Jan and I had a small but meaningful ceremony to celebrate the fact that after eight years in his field and steady advancement as a pre-school teacher, he finally broke $20,000. Briefly. Heady from such riches, Jan craved more. He went back to school to become certified as an elementary school teacher and received his license just as our state sank into a recession. Schools were hit hardest. No one was hiring.
So Jan took on the ultimate in unappreciated women's work: diaper-slinging.
Reactions to our situation have been varied. Every time he calls, Jan's dad asks him if he's had any luck finding work yet. Some folks imagine that Jan is a freeloader watching football all day, hand tucked into his belt, sucking down a beer while our son plays with shattered glass in the next room and I frantically dial ahead from the office for a pizza. Some laud him as a saint. Some, unable to understand economic necessity, praise me for being so modern. "Good for you," one woman told me. "There's no reason why the woman has to be the maternal one." As if I don't miss my son every single day. As if "not being maternal" makes you a stronger person, or more of a feminist.
Generally, I laugh off whatever opinions or judgments folks make about our arrangement, reminding myself that it fits us well for many reasons. Jan has years of experience with kids; I do not. He's an introvert happy to stay at home all day; I am an extrovert who would go stark raving mad without adult interaction. We didn't choose the situation, but it suits us, and despite the fact that the media seem to think women just started working in the '70s, the women in my family‹and in Jan's and in every other working-class family on the planet‹have always worked for pay. It never occurred to me that I would be able stay home, and the fact that one of us can is an unexpected and precious gift.
But sometimes folks get to me. For instance: recently Jan's grandmother, seeing the easy, relaxed way he plays with our son, asked if Jan "just plays with Arie all day."
I narrowed my eyes. "And cleans the house." I snarled. "And cooks us dinner." I bristled. "And does the laundry and the groceries and everything else." I growled.
It appears Newsweek had me pegged after all: there is an alpha wolf lurking inside. I even briefly considered lifting my leg.
Haddayr Copley-Woods is a writer and graphic designer who lives and works in Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park neighborhood. She promises that if you are kind enough to invite her to your home, she will not piddle on your carpet.
