The Dad Next Door
by martha wegner

I noticed that parent at the playground again yesterday afternoon, pushing a toddler in a swing with one hand, and holding a baby with the other. Soon they are ready to go; crackers are offered to the toddler, the baby is bundled up, and both kids are strapped into the stroller. Typical summer scene, right? One difference: that parent is a dad. Specifically, a Stay-at-Home Dad, one of thousands who refer to themselves as “SAHD’s”... no “Mr. Mom” for them please.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but if this parent had been a mom, I wouldn’t have looked twice except perhaps to strike up a conversation about our children. But with a dad, it’s different. If you’re like me, you may be wondering: What could compel a man to stay at home to care for his kids while his wife goes to work? Does he really know how to take care of kids as well as a mother would?, along with myriad questions and doubts we’re too embarrassed to say out loud. We’ve come a long way, baby, but our prejudices against SAHDs can sometimes be brutal. With their numbers ever increasing, perhaps it is time for a little enlightenment.
Recently I had the opportunity to chat with some Stay-at-Home Dads. The answers may surprise you and will hopefully give you a whole new appreciation for this parent in our midst.

Some of the SAHDs were relatively new to the role; others had been doing it quite a bit longer, but they all planned to stay in their role at least until the youngest child started school; many of them planned to stay at home longer.

The following SAHDs were gracious enough to take time out of their busy day to provide us with answers:
• Todd Bascom, father to Aidan, 4 and Riley, 11 months.
• Robert Johnson, father to Maddox, 8, Manning, 5, and Maggie, 1 1⁄2.
• Hugh Barlow, father to Ryan, 9 and Matthew, 4.
• Brian Charette, father toHudson, 1.
• Richard Grady, father to Kevin, 4, and Erin, 1.
• Mark Phillips, father to Noah, 9, Clara, 8, Natalie, 5, and Anna, 5.
• Tom Pheysey, father to Katie, 7.

How did you decide to become a SAHD?
Brian: “We had decided early in our marriage that it was important to us that we handle the primary caregiver duties for our children...It was a simple matter of economics... my wife was making double what I was bringing home, with far more earning potential at her job.”

Todd: “... my wife’s career is far more lucrative financially than mine. So, when we decided one of us would stay home, I was the obvious choice.”

Mark: “Also, my personality lends itself to childcare more than hers (more patient, more flexible...).”

What have you sacrificed by staying at home?
Robert: “Male friends change, and almost disappear, because they ‘don’t know what to talk about’ ... I think isolation for the home dad is a huge factor and major sacrifice.”

Richard: “Well, aside from the obvious income, much of the sacrifice has been fairly intangible. As a stay-at-home parent, you don’t get adult conversation, it’s a little harder to stay up to date with the news, and you become essentially ‘on-call’ 24/7, since the kids look to you first when there is a problem.”

Tom: “Income, respect from others, and a bit of self-esteem. I had been renovating our 80-year-old home, and that has slowed almost to a stop. You can still see the vertical line where I stopped painting the outside when I started home schooling!”

What have you gained by staying at home?
Todd: “I have gained a very strong bond with my boys. I also love the fact that I have witnessed personally all the important milestones in their development so far.”

Robert: “The rewards are boundless and impossible to measure. Right now my baby is sitting on my lap, singing to me and pinching my nose.”

Hugh: “The love, adoration and respect of two beautiful little boys whom I can help to mold into helpful and productive members of society”.

Brian: “I gained the opportunity to be my child’s mentor as he discovers the world and the peace of mind in knowing that he is going to be safe and raised exactly as my wife and I envision.”

Tom: “It’s almost too vast to put into words. Moms understand, and perhaps take for granted the small daily things dads normally miss, like snuggling a child down for a nap, or seeing a child excel in a classroom, or learn to use a fork.”

What are the biggest challenges you face as a Stay-at-Home Dad?
Hugh: “... I will say that this is one of the toughest jobs I have ever had to do. There are no breaks. Also, the stay-at-home dad is often on his own. Many of the working fathers have dropped him from their social circle because he no longer fits. He is the Square Peg in a Round Hole. Working mothers generally have little to no contact with him and the stay-at-home mothers often look at him at the playground and at other venues where the kids go to play as a threat.”

Todd: “... stay-at-home moms tend to avoid me like the plague... On more than one occasion, I’ve gone to playgrounds with the boys and groups of moms have pretty much run away from me if I try to strike up conversation. Perhaps there is some feeling amongst them that men are constantly on the prowl or something. All I want to do is have a conversation with an adult from time to time!”

Tom: “I’ve had moms turn their backs and walk away mid-conversation, I’ve had playmate phone calls not returned. Whatever gains women have made in the workplace are definitely NOT reciprocal on the home front, where dads are the maligned minority.”

Richard: “I think what makes this especially hard is that SAHMs often have various support groups (such as MOPS) and informal playgroups. These groups either explicitly forbid men from joining (as MOPS does), or have an informal bias against men, one which can leave you feeling unwelcome and keep you away from support. I’m not talking about emotional support, but rather the sharing of which doctors are good, which teachers are bad, which dentist has the shortest waiting time, and so forth.”

What stereotypes have you faced as a SAHD?
Richard: “... that I am a SAHD because I could not hack it in the real world, that (as a man) I am less capable in caring for my children than a mother is, etc. I used to get asked at least once a week if I was babysitting my children, and I would politely reply, ‘No, I am being a father to my child. Parents do not baby-sit their own kids.’”

Hugh: “I am from the Rio Grande Valley, and there is a very strong culture of masculinity called, ‘machismo.’ According to the machismo tradition the man takes care of the family by working outside of the house while the woman stays home and takes care of the kids. To do otherwise is to seriously lose face and to be considered less than a man.”

Brian: “I’ve had to deal with the stereotype that if I’m not working, I must be lazy or unable to hold a job somehow. I’ve had to deal with people thinking that children should be with their mother rather than having dad raise them full time.”

Tom: “Fathers’ competence is always questioned, and the only way to overcome that is by repeated demonstration. I won the trust of some moms in my daughter’s co-op preschool because everyone saw me interact with the children.”

What have your children gained from you staying at home?
Robert: “My children know they are more important to me than anything else, that they are the primary obligation; that I want to be with them more than anything else.”

Hugh: “I think that my sons have both gained some valuable insights into what it means to be a male in our society by having me as the stay-at-home parent.”

Brian: “I think that it will teach my son that it’s okay to go against stereotypes. I also believe that being male gives me a unique opportunity to model all day the traits I think would help shape him into a strong, confident young man.”

Mark: “My kids have a slightly wider view of the world than those in ‘traditional’ families. Almost all kids today recognize that women can work outside the house (unlike a few generations ago). Mine take for granted that Daddy is home with them all day. That opens up the possibilities that they can do whatever they want when they get older.”

Tom: “The gain will be in the future. If it holds true that the relationship between a daughter and a father plays a subconscious role in the woman that daughter becomes and the relationships she has, then I imagine my daughter not tolerating any guy who can’t do his own laundry or sew on a button, or who is not deeply involved in the lives of his own children.”

RESOURCES Dynamite Dads Group

Call The Parent Place at 587-3840.

• www.rebeldad.com

• www.athomedad.org

• http://careerplanning.about.com/cs/altoptgenl/a/stay_home_dads.htm

• http://www.lifescript.com (search words Stay at Home Dads)

The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook by Peter Baylies and Jessica Toonkel

Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad by David Eddie

Stay-At-Home Dads: The Essential Guide to Creating the New Family by Libby Gill

The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the Twenty-First-Century Family by Jeremy Adam Smith

The Day My Father Went Wild
by rick epstein

My big brother and I stood with our father at a railing, gazing down through iron bars at a big brown bear that lay sleeping directly below. I was six. “HEY, BEAR! WAKE UP!” I yelled.

Dad gave me a disapproving look, and I explained, “I want to see if I can grin down a bear like Davy Crockett tried to do on TV.”

“Grin him down?” he asked.

My brother Steve, age eight, explained, “Yeah, it’s how you hypnotize a bear. You stare into his eyes without blinking and smile a big smile.”

“Like this:” I said, showing a double-row of baby-teeth while squinting into my dad’s eyes.

Steve said, “If you do it long enough, the bear is supposed to calm down and become friendly.”

Looking back at the bear, Dad said, “You can’t get much calmer than that – and still be alive.” But he went and found a flat stone about twice the size of a lima bean. We didn’t suspect what he was up to until he took careful aim and dropped the stone through the bars so it landed on the bear’s side. “Dad!” we exclaimed, first looking at him and then looking around to make sure there had been no witnesses.

The bear didn’t stir, and the stone lay where it had landed, rising and falling with the relaxed breathing of the big creature. “I guess he’s not going to wake up for us,” said my dad.

Someone could come along any minute, see the stone on the bear, see us, put one and one together, and know that we’d been throwing rocks at a helpless caged animal. I willed the bear to move so the stone would slide off, but he didn’t. Pretty soon we went away, leaving the circumstantial evidence behind to excite speculation by whoever came along next.

The incident is seared into my memory because I never saw my dad do anything else half as reckless and illegal.
He said he’d received a traffic ticket once for failing to come to a complete stop, but I hadn’t been born in time to see it happen. My father was one of those corny dads who can’t drive by a family landmark without saying, “Here’s where we found Ricky the time he got lost,” or “Here’s where Frisky was born,” and the site of Dad’s brush with the law was part of our Heritage Trail.

It didn’t occur to me during my childhood, but my dad was a paragon of virtue. He never cursed, littered, cheated, complained or spoke ungrammatically. He thought that the best bargain was to buy quality goods at full price. He bought us loads of books, took us to places of wonder and history all over North America, and treated us to four years at any college we could trick into accepting us. He knew every joke that had ever been made and was known for his wit.

He loved his wife more than life itself and always bought his gasoline at the same filling station. He treated all men and women with respect, paid his bills early, and never called in sick. He read lots of newspapers and watched only solemn TV shows like Meet the Press. He would as soon have watched The Brady Bunch as he would’ve danced naked in the street. He advised us that “liars need good memories” and that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” He saved his receipts. He believed that a hitch in the Army would straighten out almost anyone. He distrusted artificial sweeteners.

When I was a kid, I thought my father was pretty much the basic model. I assumed that making a child write a 300-word essay on “Moderation” was a standard punishment, and that nearly all fathers shave on their day off and make their children a gift of Yellowstone Park, Niagara Falls, the Alamo and the Grand Canyon.

I always aspired to meet my dad’s moral high standard and about six years ago I asked him about it. He never was a religious man, but I expected to hear some kind of uplifting expression of the ideals and principles that had kept him on the straight-and-narrow path.

Imagine my letdown when he attributed his lifetime of good behavior to one motive: “I was always afraid I’d get into trouble,” he said. Talk about stripping away the mystique!

Here I’d been hoping that someday I’d see the light and be magically transformed into the disciplined and righteous specimen I’d been raised by. I would be a guiding beacon to my children, the way my dad has been for me. I’d been hoping for grace, when all I’d been needing was anxiety.

So I guess my dad deserves extra credit for dropping a stone into the bear-pit; he risked public disgrace just to gratify a child’s whim. Which reminds me that I never did get to see if Davy Crockett’s trick can really work. My grin nowadays isn’t as winsome as it once was, but it is larger. Maybe I’ll indulge myself on Father’s Day and take my wife and kids to the zoo, seek out a promising subject for hypnosis, and see if I remember how bear-grinning is done.

Or maybe we’ll go see my old dad. I know HE can be charmed by my smile. One time long ago, it caused him to turn outlaw for a minute.

It's birthday party time and your little buckaroo wants a rootin’ tootin’ genuine cowboy themed birthday party. Here are some rough and ready ideas that will please even the toughest cowpokes. It’s easier than you think, you can get the kids involved and your birthday boy or girl will have the time of their life.

Round ‘Em Up
Before the birthday party you will what to do some basic planning. The first thing will be to pick the date of the party at least at month ahead of time. Now you can make the invitations. This is where the fun begins. For your western showdown try making invitations in the shape of cowboy hats, boots or pistols. Purchased invitations are nice but it’s just as easy to make your own and much more fun. Use cardstock and let your child help you decorate the invitations. Mail them out about two weeks before your party.

Decorating - Cowboy Style
Next you want to plan the decorations and background for your party. A cowboy theme is fun to work with; there are lots of choices for setting up your party. A neat idea is to make a cowboy town. You can make an authentic looking store front by getting large boxes from appliance stores and decorating them to look like a real western town. This is one activity the whole family will enjoy helping you do. Be sure and include a mercantile (general store), barber shop saloon or restaurant, stable, jail and blacksmith’s shop. The jail can be a focal point of the party. Make fake bars on the windows and use it for some great photo shots of little “bandits.” Set up the store to do some actual business. Prepare small items—candy, water guns, sheriff’s badges, stickers—that the kids can buy with the “gold” they acquire from their gold mining activity. Place hay bales, cowboy boots and blankets around the yard. Make some large cardboard cactus and animal cutouts to add to the fun.

Cook Up Some Chuck Wagon Goodies
What’s a birthday party with cake and lots of good food to eat? We all know cowboys lived on beans while roaming the range so be sure and include baked beans on your cowboy menu. A suggested menu is:

Baked Beans
Wagon Wheel Stew (see recipe below)
Cattle Drive Biscuits
Cactus Juice (any green drink will do)

This menu is simple, easy and will satisfy the hungriest cowboy out there. Bake a cake in the shape of a boot or do cupcakes and place a plastic cowboy on top

Ring the Dinner Bell
Before you ring that dinner bell you want to make sure your tables are ready to go. For this birthday party you can use picnic tables or even wooden crates. Use colorful bandanas for tablecloths or red and white checkered tablecloths. Put the forks and spoons in plastic containers shaped like boots or small metal buckets. Use tin plates and tin cups. Another option is to place the tableware in a bandana tied with a piece of raffia. Plastic cowboy hats or larger metal buckets lined with bandanas make great serving bowls for napkins, chips and other snacks.

A Rootin’ Tootin’ Time
As your child’s guest start arriving hand each one cowboy hats and bandanas. Then direct them to the craft table which you have already set up. Supply each cowboy with a paper bag that has been cut down the middle and two arm holes and a neck hole has been precut. Let them decorate their vests.

Then move on to more fun on the range. Here are some fun activities for little cowboys and cowgirls:

Thar’s Gold in Them Hills - spray paint different size rocks gold. Bury them in a sandbox or large container. Give the kids small sifters and let them “pan” for gold. Make sure each child get some gold. They can use this to “buy” items from the general store.

There’s a Snake in My Boot - Use a pair of old cowboy boots and some small plastic snakes. Two children can go at once with two boots. Allow each child a turn to toss three snakes into the boot from a designated distance. Give out gold nuggets or some cowboy treats to winners.

Calf Ropin’ Time - It’s time to rope and brand them little “doggies” Set up some calves you make yourself out of cardboard. Set them upright and anchor them to buckets or large bottles. Let kids toss rings on to them or try to rope them with a piece of rope.

Horsin’ Around - Have a stick horse race. You will want to plan ahead this. Include a note in the invitation or make sure you have enough stick horses on hand.

Wagon Wheel Stew
1 pound lean ground beef
2 cups wagon wheel pasta, uncooked
1 can (14-1/2 oz.) stewed tomatoes
1-1/2 cups water
1 box (10 ounces) frozen corn, thawed
1/2 cup barbecue sauce
Salt and ground black pepper, to taste

In large skillet, sauté beef over medium heat 5 minutes or until well browned. Stir in pasta, tomatoes, water, corn and barbecue sauce; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low; cover skillet and simmer 15 to 20 minutes or until pasta is tender, stirring occasionally. Season with salt and pepper. 4 servings.

Belinda Mooney contributes lots of fun-at-home ideas to Montana Parent.