The headline says it all. The jig is up. My life has been exposed. I'm busted.
In a previous column, I mentioned that our decision to have me ' the
dad ' stay at home with our new baby while my wife kept working was
based on several factors. One of the most compelling reasons was
that, as a teacher, my wife enjoys a two-month-long summer vacation (or
what she calls 'comp time'). With me already at home with the
kid, we could really take advantage of spectacular summers together.
Yes, we planned well. That's the good news.
The bad news is this: in just her first week off from school, my wife
has quickly discovered two little secrets. First, I've been
living ' literally and figuratively ' in the land of milk and honey (or
formula and honey, as the case may be). She's quickly figured out
that I'm leading a fantastically comfortable and relaxed life as a
stay-at-home dad and it's just not fair. Second, she's seeing
that I'm molding our son to share my own interests. That's not
only not fair, that's just plain scary.
Before I go any further, let me be very clear about one thing.
The remarks I'm making in this column are about my own situation and my
own son. He's a not-yet-mobile infant; an agreeable eater; and an
all-around amiable child. I'm well aware that the day will come '
very soon, in fact ' when he will climb the walls, throw food against
the walls and probably drive me up a wall. That's when being a
stay-at-home parent gets tough. But that day has yet to come.
And so, for the nearly seven months that my wife has been back to work,
I've tried to downplay this fact: my life is a breeze! I don't
know if it's possible to have too much fun, but if it is, then my son
and me are.
Each day, when my wife returned from work she'd ask what we did all
day. I found that a somewhat vague response worked best,
something like, 'uh, we horsed around... a little of this, a little of
that.' Sure, I'd mention that I fed and changed the baby, just to
let her know that a minimal amount of work was involved. Add any
more detail than that, though, and I was bound to make her outrageously
jealous of my cushy lifestyle.
But now, my wife sees exactly what we do all day. And it's pretty great stuff.
We listen to a lot of music. Though my wife is a classically trained
flutist with visions of her son becoming a classically trained brass
player, she's realizing that I've fed his brain a steady musical diet
of country and rock and roll. Instead of an early start on
the French horn, my son must be envisioning playing the steel guitar
with George Strait's Ace in the Hole Band, or the dobro for Alison
Krauss and Union Station.
We also read a lot. Or at least I read and my son rolls around
the floor grabbing his toes and learning through osmosis. What my
wife is finding out here is that I read him the good stuff, stuff that
expands the imagination, stuff I like. You know, classics like
Aesop's Fables and old-school Mother Goose where little boys fight
dragons, get roughed up by stray wolves, and enjoy tasty blackbird
pies. (Mmmm, blackbirds.) So, this summer, it's back to the
Poky Little Puppy.
We also play a lot. I've been working on the boy's hand-eye
coordination by rolling a soft baseball back and forth with
him. Over and over and over again. He loves it.
Really, he does. We also bounce up and down and tickle each other
until we can barely catch our breath. Mommy, however, has
postulated that we may be 'horsing around' too much. My son's
been taking more regular naps since she's been home, a tribute to
the cool-down period that was lacking under my 'all fun, all the time'
regiment.
So, I guess we'll be making a few changes this summer. More
Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, and more home improvement projects just to
make sure I don't get too comfortable. But mark my words, we'll
still be having too much fun.
Brian Kantz is a stay-at-home dad and writer living in Amherst, New York. He invites your comments and can be reached at
. Visit his website at http://users.adelphia.net/~bkantz.
