Posted on 04. May, 2004 by Brian Reid in General
It’s Book Review Week! As I mentioned this weekend, I now have a copy of The Bastard on the Couch, which bills itself as “27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom.” I suppose the topic would be interesting on its own account, but given that is a more-or-less direct response to The Bitch in the House (“Bitch” editor Cathi Hanauer’s husband edits “Bastard”), it’s getting even more attention.
Before I get to the essay by the at-home dad, I should lay out my conflicts of interest here. ONE As Amy, writing in the “Comments” section to my last post, feared, the vast majority of the writers are professional writers. While this makes the group representative of Rebel Dad (and, probably, many readers here), it ain’t a real diverse group from which to draw broad conclusions. Writers tend to have flexible schedules, healthy egos and understanding spouses. TWO I went to high school with one of the essayists. I didn’t realize that he had gone on to become a writer and live a life that sounds a good deal more interesting than mine. THREE Another essayist now lives in the teeny, tiny town that I grew up in. It’s small enough that knowing someone lives there creates a very specific bond.
So … there is one essay by an at-home dad, a gentleman named Rob Jackson. Rob’s story is interesting for a number of reasons (not only because he is not a professional writer). Demographically, he’s unique in that he’s been an at-home dad pretty much his entire life, marrying into a family of four. And he’s been doing the job for going on two decades now, which means he was doing the job long before the recent trend of society warming to at-home dads had emerged.
But his essay deals very little with how society viewed him, instead focusing on how the household roles were allocated within his home. It’s perhaps the best snapshot I’ve seen of how an at-home dad marriage operates — the ongoing tug between a working woman looking to come home to a house cleansed of chaos and a man whose best efforts can’t always keep chaos at bay. Jackson comes off as honest and refreshing defensive at times, especially when he talks keeping “the entire house” — not just the kitchen counter, but the sewage lines and the frozen pipes in the basement and the shingles on the roof.
The other couple pieces I’ve read from the book are interesting but not entirely on-target with at-home dad issues. Still, I can only hope that the book becomes ammunition for the very attractive idea that there is no stock father-role worth stereotyping men into.
The Race Is On. Peter Baylies and I both received our review copies of How Tough Could It Be (“The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad”) yesterday. Given the backlog in my life, I think you might be better off visiting athomedad.com than waiting around for me to review it. It’ll happen. Eventually.