RebelDad

Moms, Dads, Harmony, Baloney and Babble

Posted on 11. Jun, 2010 by Brian Reid in Uncategorized

(I’m about to rant about an article on Babble. As my blood pressure is about to spike and my grammar and logic will go all to hell, please check out the story now, before you get blogged down in my spittle-spewing rage. (Unless you’re boycotting Babble. Which I totally respect.) Do not read the first half of the piece. Go down to where they start quoting kick-ass at-home dads like Phil Andrews, Hogan Hilling and Lance Somerfield. Just read that.)

Apparently, the Babble people have a friendly bet with the Pamper people to see who can drive me the most nuts. Up to this point, the Pamper people have had an edge, but Babble stuck back in a big way this week, with this piece called “Playdates with Other People’s Husbands.”

The title is a tip-off. The piece is about playdates with dads. But it doesn’t say “dad.” It says “other people’s husbands.” On the surface, this has a steamy OPP vibe to it. I mean, if this were a piece about the strange dynamics between, say, male and female surgeons, I can’t imagine someone referring to a respected female cardiologist as “another person’s wife,” as if that were the most salient fact. But, hoo boy, throw a dad and a kid into a coffeeshop at midday, and you apparently teleport into some kind of repressed-sexuality-driven soap opera.

It goes downhill from there, describing author Jamie Rich’s experience meeting an at-home dad for the first time. She writes about it as if she’s Jane Goodall and has just found some strange and alluring tribe of parents. I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that a mom could go 3 years without seeing a caregiving dad, but I find it amazing that Rich finds it amazing to actually be talking to an AHD.

Apparently, Rich isn’t the only one who lives in her bubble. She does a very scientific poll of her 300-odd Facebook friends and found that only one (1) has regular contact with a father. The odds of this are pretty staggering (especially when you consider that she used to live near my old stomping grounds. I mean, I was a 6′ 3″ redheaded stroller-pusher. I was pretty hard to miss). But it says a lot about where she’s coming from: a world where dads and moms don’t ever meet. I don’t live in the world. And neither do more and more people. Which is good.

At the risk of repeating myself: any tension, sexual or otherwise, between moms and dads at the playground is purely an illusion. If you’re a mom who feels uncomfortable because the guy next to you at Music Together is smiling and laughing a lot, it’s in your head. If you’re a dad who feels like you’re getting frozen out by the moms at the park, it’s in your head. In pretty much every workplace in this country, men and women work together without hand-wringing about the consequences. And it should be no different when your office is the playground or the ice cream shop or the YMCA.