Stay-at-home

My New Minority Status

"You go into your classrooms, you shut the door, and you shut yourself off from your colleagues."

When I was a high school teacher the principal would often gently admonish the faculty in this way.  In truth, he was right to do so.

In teaching, being isolated was easy to accomplish.  For many of us, it was preferred.  In a job where your students feel more like your colleagues than your fellow teachers it was easy to barrel through a day without even communicating with your fellows (except to commiserate, of course).  Much of the time we didn't even want our fellow teachers' input or attention - our lesson plans were our own, our methods were our own.

I now find myself in a profession even more isolated in nature - that of the stay-at-home parent.

I could say "stay-at-home dad" but really the job is difficult for either side of the gender line.

Still, though, I'm rare.  Here's a little statistic from the federal government:

158,000 - estimated number of stay-at-home dads in 2009. These married fathers with children younger than 15 have remained out of the labor force for at least one year primarily so they can care for the family while their wives work outside the home. These fathers cared for 290,000 children. Among these stay-at-home dads, 59 percent had two or more children, and 57 percent had an annual family income of $50,000 or more.

This seems to have remained constant according to more recent numbers released in the Current Population Survey in March 2011.

 

How Did I Get Here?

I'll pretend as though some of the people who read this blog do not know me personally and, therefore, do not know how I came to be a stay-at-home dad.  Indulge me, it helps keep the narrative going.

 

I don't ask "How Did I Get Here?" in the "How the hell did I get here?" sort of way but in a more rhetorical, inform-the-reader way.

 

After being discharged from the Army in the summer of 2007 for pre-existing mental health reasons and because joining the Army was, well, a silly idea, I dawdled around a south Charlotte multi-use complex as a security guard.

 

Soon discovering that guarding yuppie-valuables was not my cup of tea I decided to try putting my BA in English (Creative Writing) to some use, hunting for teaching positions anywhere in North Carolina.

 

I taught English at a high school for three years.  Loved it.  Then in the spring of 2011 I was told I wouldn't be invited to return for another year.  In a neat-o twist of fate, this news came to me on the same day as the news of the sex of our (my wife and I) child - a boy.

 

Prior to the revelation of my impending joblessness, my wife and I had inspected various daycare centers in the town in which we then lived.  My gut twisted every time we visited one.  I stared at the tiny plastic (what looked like to me) containers in which infants were meant to sleep, the tiny signs reading, "I can roll over", placed in order to remind staff of an infants ability to fling him/herself onto the floor at will.  My own mother left her job with DuPont in Charlotte to stay at home with me, then my sister, and then my little brother.

 

Around that time I began to wonder if I would be willing to leave my job to stay at home with my son.  Fortunately that decision was made for me.

Three Months

Oliver was born toward the end of September and I was nearly made a single father in the process.  My wife was able to remain at home for three weeks following the delivery and work a patchwork part-time schedule for another three weeks.  Following that, I was left at home with Oliver to our own devices.

 

It has not been easy.  It has, on the contrary, been lonely, frustrating, lovely, scary, overwhelming, mind-numbing, boring, thrilling, fulfilling, and still, entirely worthwhile.

 

That said, Oliver is only a little over three-months-old.  He's tiny for his age, due to complications at the end of my wife's pregnancy.  He's bewilderingly strong, though, and can easily slap my glasses from my face (I'm sure he's just being playful).

 

In the time since his birth my wife and I were essentially forced to pick up and move from our home at a moment's notice (see my wife's blog post, The Worst Glitter).  The stress of this move and the subsequent adjustment was somewhat alleviated by Thanksgiving and Christmas due to the fact that my wife is an educator and enjoys the vacation time that that job allows.

 

We live in Fayetteville now, a military town and as such, a city of single-parent families both of the temporary (deployment) and permanent (casualties of war) nature.

 

My parents live roughly two hours away along the coast and, alternatively, my in-laws have their own lives in Charlotte.  Relief, even temporary, during the long days at home will be sparse.  I love my son, but taking care of such a small human being requires infinite patience, grace, and humility - I may have those attributes, maybe even in abundance, but they are far from infinite.

  

There is stress and there is difficulty and, just as I felt when a teacher, there is nothing else I would rather be doing.  That said, what I must do, and will do, is find a way to cope with the less desirable effects of being a stay-at-home dad.  In doing so I will be able to deliver my son to his initial forays into the larger world (school) with his sense of self, safety, and happiness (and my sanity) intact and, perhaps, even glittering.