Why I Was Jealous of my Wife

For two years, I have spent most of my time as a stay-at-home dad. The experience has opened my eyes to ideas about gender that I have come to realize are quite rare. These intellectual notions are important, but I have been ignoring the personal challenges of changing places with my wife. Here is one issue that I'm only just coming to terms with.

Parenting (Well) is Hard Work

I was changing 80% of the diapers, feeding the baby all day long, cleaning up, and paying a lot of attention to the kid. This last is harder than it sounds. In the first couple of months, while there's still that new-baby smell, it's easy to just sit and stare at the baby, or read a book while the baby is sleeping, or simply poke at the baby and make silly noises hoping for a smile. But as the baby gets older, and becomes a toddler, xi needs you to be in a state of constant yellow alert.

Yellow alert is a concept that gun owners talk about often. When you're conceal and carrying, you are supposed to be at yellow alert every moment of your day. Some of the NRA-types talk about how there wouldn't be any crime if everyone were always at yellow alert. The only problem is... yellow alert is really boring.

When driving down a highway across Nebraska or Wyoming, I am supposed to be paying attention at all times, I should be watching my blind spot and looking as far ahead as I can see for trouble. But at some point, it is inevitable that I realize I've completely forgotten the last 15 miles. People are just too social to be at yellow alert all the time. But being a mothering dad of a toddler is like driving down that highway, only your a long haul trucker. You're putting in sixty to seventy hours a week watching your kid try to stack one block on top of another. "Look at that, sweety. You stacked the blocks," again. "What would you like to do now? Oh? Stack some more blocks?" Yay! "If you stack another block, that would be great and I am going to throw myself out the window." Oh, did I say that aloud. "Don't worry baby, it's a first floor window, so I'll probably be okay."

The thing about watching a toddler for seventy hours a week is that toddlers don't know how to do all of the neat things that we humans know how to do (like hold conversations). So, the job of a mothering dad is essentially to watch the toddler learn how to do things that I've known how to do since I was a toddler. Oh, I could help, but I also know the research, and if I help the toddler too much, xi will never learn how to do it xirself, and xi will never become a fully functioning and actualized adult. So, I put myself on yellow alert and sit down to watch the kid stack blocks... again.

On ne Nait pas Femme, On le Devait.

When my wife got home, inevitably my kid would glow and shout, "Mommio!" The kid would run to the door shouting in joy and proclaiming her arrival like a trumpeter at court. At first, the mothering dad is relieved. Finally, yellow alert can be turned off. I can read the newspaper (online of course), and catch up on my email. I can finish making dinner, and clean up all the stacks of blocks that have been created around the house and somehow remind me of Manhattan, only shorter, wooden, and proclaiming "Z" or "B" where the billboards should be. I can do the dishes, start the laundry, or vacuum the floors.

Two problems with this relief. The first is that it fades quickly when I realize that all the things that I want to do are just the things that will make me feel like an adult again. This kind of self-care is the most challenging part of being a professional mother. Without it, you are not as good a parent because you are taking out your neurotic needs on your children, yet being an adult is a full time job and being a parent is more than a full time job, and there are limited hours in the day.

The other problem is that I can't entirely turn off yellow alert. You see, my wife is a very good parent. She is probably better with young kids than I am. While I was out trying to mow lawns as a kid, because I was a boy, she was out finding gigs as a babysitter, because she was a girl. That's an oversimplification, and I did some babysitting as a child, but before my baby was born, I had never cared for a child younger than 18--months-old (see child's play blog from 2010). Nevertheless, my wife didn't know the kid as well as I did. And of course, that made me feel guilty.

While my wife was out working, I was bonding with our child, getting to know the little places that he liked to stack blocks, the things that he liked to pretend were blocks and stack, and the blocks that he liked to pretend were missiles. I got to know the cord that he almost strangled himself on several times during the day, and the kinds of bowel movements that he was having requiring rapid-fire diaper changing. I could tell you if his spit up was going to be white, blue, or green.

But these were the kinds of things that my wife always wanted to know about her kid. She was the one who wanted to be a stay-at-home. She is the one who played with baby dolls her entire childhood, babysat when she was ten-years-old, and envisioned what her future husband would look like coming in the door, giving her a kiss on the cheek, and then awaiting his scotch on the rocks aperitif. Even if her imagining has been shifted by gender studies' classes, she still had the urges, partially programed in by genetics (though the research shows that this is a lesser influence than social programing), and partially programed in by a life of being told, "this is what good women do."

Breastfeeding Makes me Jealous

But Not for the Reason You're Thinking (sicko)

I felt guilty that I was depriving my wife of her chance to be "mom," and at the same time, I felt shamed that I wasn't helping to earn money. When I had broken my gendered activities to play house with the girls (which I did more than most boys), I was the dad who came home to the kiss and the aperitif. Most of this blog has focused on what it meant that I was ashamed to do something that I and my wife both wanted to do (it is the same barely cloaked shame in the fantastically complex Mr. Mom song by the country singer Lonestar).

But I was so focused on the shame of not being the earner, I didn't realize until recently that I was being denied one of the rewards of being the mothering parent. Because my kid was getting most of his calories from breast milk, xi had become primarily attached to my wife. Despite everything that I was doing to be Mr. Mom, I was as much second parent as if I was the aloof business traveling megabucks earning working dad. From the moment my wife got home, I was practically ignored, though still watching the kid out of the corner of my eye for some pitfall that I was better acquainted with than my working wife. I focused on how guilty I felt that she didn't get more time with the kid, so I never dealt with my own feelings of jealousy that I was only getting half the rewards of being the stay-at-home parent.

It has only been in the last couple of months that my child has become less reliant on breast milk (yes, we are still breastfeeding at two, I am proud to say, as is recommended by the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and any other none-industry scientist that has ever studied it). When I got home from teaching a class on Monday, he was staying up and refusing to sleep until he got a kiss and cuddle from his "daddio." It is just a phase, but it is the phase that I expected and wanted long ago. My jealousy has been replaced by relief. I was convinced that my child's attachment to his mom, despite the fact that I was the stay-at-home, was a sign that I was an incompetent mother, and my greatest fear (the one expressed in this song my Justin Roberts) was that men were naturally incompetent mothers.

photo courtesy of SaglchMaSo.
SaglchMaSo is not associated with RightBeDone.

No matter how much I understood, mentally, that men, like women, are created, not born, this small proof that I was failing as a parent haunted me. Now that my child has shown attachment to me as well as my wife, I feel vindicated. I am a great mother. My child is the best behaved, most sensitive, and all-around greatest two-year-old I have ever met, and xi loves me. I may not have birthed our son, but I was made a mother none-the-less. Never in my life have I felt more free.