'A Vaccination Against Isolation'
Humorist Dave Barry once warned that giving men responsibility for housework was a recipe for disaster. "The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now," he wrote. "They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything."
When I heard of the National At-Home Dad Convention, I felt a certain inescapable curiosity. I was a proud at-home father, who spent the days shuttling my toddler from coffeeshop to playground to swimming pool. The idea that my peers absolutely required a weekend of keynote speakers and breakout sessions to keep current with the latest fathering trends struck me as inherently silly. I had to see it for myself.
So a little more than a year ago, I attended my first at-home dad convention, arriving at the conference site - a sprawling community college in the Chicago suburbs - prepared for the absurd. I wasn't disappointed. Amid the trappings of professional life, the PowerPoint presentations and the notepads and pencils, the meeting was notable for its general zaniness. One dad grabbed a guitar and sang a number about his impending vasectomy, another warned of the perils of playing James Brown for his toddler.
A year later, I felt a compelling need to travel to the convention again. It wasn't that this year's program sounded stellar, instead, I realized that the event offered a solution to a problem I only dimly understood: the isolation of the at-home father.
Isolation takes many forms. For some guys at the convention, it's acute: they feel like they get the cold shoulder at the playground or ignored when offering to volunteer at school. For me, it's more subtle. Right before the conference, my daughter and I walked into a busy family restaurant on a Friday night. The hostess's first reaction, upon seeing a father and child together, sans mother, was to assume it was the result of a custody agreement. "Sweetie," she cooed, "are you spending the weekend with you daddy?" It's hard to explain those kinds of stories to the guys on my old softball team, and the even the wonderful, accepting, forward-thinking mothers in my neighborhood can't relate to those kinds of snubs.
But at-home fathers understand it perfectly, and that's what makes the convention powerful. It's a vaccination against isolation, a reminder that there are lots of guys in our exact position, however rare at-home dads seem to be when we saunter into the coffeeshop or the playground.
The convention draws a relatively small group of guys - about 100 - and most of them are return conventioneers. Their camaraderie is powerful. Beyond the annual gathering, there's an active e-mail list where successes and challenges are fleshed out, and even a virtual fantasy baseball league, with a gold-painted Diaper Genie serving as a championship trophy. But when it comes to connections, it's hard to top the face-to-face experience of the convention. I asked one old-timer why he kept making the trip, year after year. He paused for a moment. "I'm just here to see the guys," he said.
No one has made more convention connections than Hogan Hilling, the author of "The Man Who Would Be Dad." But Hogan, who recently returned to work after more than a decade of at-home fatherhood, sent a note around the month before the event apologizing for not being able to make it. The money to fly across two time zones, rent a downtown Chicago hotel room for two nights and attend the convention was simply not there.
But Hogan was there. The organizers waived his fee, one dad offered to share his hotel room, and others scraped up enough money to fly Hogan across the country. His convention buddies - his erstwhile allies against isolation - weren't going let him miss it.
