Posted on 22. Apr, 2004 by Brian Reid in General
I was a little confused by the plot of this year’s must-read beach book, Little Children, a tale that centers around an affair between two at-home parents. In a previous post, I wondered aloud about the book’s choice of subject. Suburban parents live interesting lives, to be sure, but not the kind of epic ones that make for good novels. So I’ve wondered where the souped-up love and conflict came from.
As it turns out, the author, Tom Perrotta, has done a stint as an at-home dad, and he told the Boston Globe about it. He didn’t smooch anyone at the playground (as his characters do), but he did have some observations about life as a Rebel Dad:
“When I first started going to the playground, I thought I would meet a lot of other stay-at-home dads. And I didn’t,” he said. “In the daytime, it was a world of women. And I noticed sometimes that it would make the women uncomfortable to have a man there, and they would be unfriendly.“But then, other times, there would be a mom who didn’t fit in with the other moms, and I would be more likely to have a conversation with them. And it was sort of the Sarah-and-Todd dynamic.”
Who knew that there was such a seedy underbelly to domestic life?
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07. Apr, 2010
[...] (and the ensuing spousal tension). This is not an entirely new concept; Little Children (both the perfectly good book and the even-better movie) was centered around the endless possibilities you create when you set a [...]
The Zero Boss
24. Apr, 2004
I’ve noticed that during the times I’ve taken off work and taken the kids to mom’s club activities, especially when my wife was on bedrest for four weeks. For those moms, club activities are as much (if not more) about socializing with one another than about doing something fun with their kids.