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Husband's turn to tend to the home front
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Published: June 16, 2008
Updated: 06/15/2008 09:25 pm
I used to be one of those men who got up every morning, put on a coat and tie, and went to work for eight or nine or more hours.
Now I'm a house husband.
That doesn't mean I still don't work every day (in addition to my "full-time" job as a college professor), but it certainly doesn't feel the same way. I go about my appointed domestic tasks in glorious sunny weather, but inside I still maintain a dark sense of guilt, as if I'm permanently playing hooky.
Our current schedule makes eminent sense -- my wife now has the traditional 8-to-5 job, and I don't. So I'm the one who gets to do the grocery shopping, the runs to the farmer's market at the Dixie Classic Fair early every Saturday morning, and the pickup of our weekly vegetables that we get from a local farm out in Boonville.
I also drop off the dry cleaning, go to the bank, and pick up the prescriptions and the other odd items needed at the drugstore. I get all the home-maintenance items from the hardware store or home-improvement store, even if I can't do any of the maintenance -- my wife excels at that.
We've experienced a male/female role reversal for most of our 35-year marriage -- my mechanical aptitude is in the deficit column, while my wife is Josephine the Plumber, Ms. Fix-It and the female equivalent of the host of This Old House all rolled into one.
Some of our friends look askance at me when they stop by and I say my wife is up on the roof, fixing a leak. Why aren't you doing these manly chores, their reproachful eyes seem to suggest. You let your wife do all that stuff?
Indeed, I'm not ashamed to say that I do. If a light fixture needs to be rewired, she's on the ladder, and I'm the one steadying it. I used to feel embarrassed about my practical incompetence -- now I'm just relieved that someone I love and trust is there to do all the things that I can't.
So I go about my daily chores of dishwashing, cooking, cleaning (to a point -- I still don't do the laundry, because I'm too afraid I'll get some white mixed up with some dark and end up with a mass of clothes overwhelmingly gray), and reflect sometimes on how different things are in our lives than they were in our parents'.
My mother stayed at home her entire adult life, raising me and my brother. For the first seven or eight years of our childhood, she didn't have a car, and was marooned in our suburban Cleveland, Ohio, home, stuck with two rambunctious young boys who, I'm sure, made our small, postwar house feel even tinier. When I saw the movie The Hours, and experienced the stifling life led by Julianna Moore's character, I could see my mother in her haunted eyes.
I don't think my mom ever could have imagined me doing her kind of errands, or foreseen that my wife would be the one to dress up and go to the office. Disrupting the traditional female/male dynamic in such a radical way never would have occurred to my mother.
Much has changed in both families and societies since the 1950s, of course. House husbands began to show up in serious numbers in the 1970s, when women began to make a needed and overdue entrance to the corporate workplace. I knew several men in Hollywood married to successful female movie-studio executives, and they had that look of surreptitious hooky-playing, too.
But it's not playing hooky when this is what's expected of you. My wife stayed at home for almost 20 years, raising three kids, often as house husband and house wife, because my professional work took me away for as much as four to six months at a time.
Now it's my turn to patrol the home front. I muster myself for duty every morning, a list of chores before me and the necessity of having a nice home-cooked meal for the breadwinner when she returns from work, figuratively loosens her tie and tells me about her day at the office.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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