Link to Part 1
During my first year or so of stay-at-home parenting, I went through something of an identity crisis. I had stripped away so many layers of myself until all that was left was “parent” and “stay-at-home Dad”, and beyond those labels I didn’t know who I was. It was embarrassing, and kind of emasculating, primarily because I had no frame of reference for my situation; nothing in my more than three decades of life experience normalized any of it for me. My mom stayed home to raise me. My aunts stayed home to raise my cousins. The men all went out and worked.
In fact, the only stay-at-home Dad I was familiar with was Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom (1983), a film about a man who is laid off from his engineering job at the same time as his wife starts an advertising career, leaving him to take care of their three children. The entire concept of the film is Look at that guy changing diapers, watching soap operas, and making dinner! As is understandable for the time period in which it was released, the situation is depicted as a humorous curiosity, with the expected “Aren’t dirty diapers gross?”/“I accidentally set the kitchen on fire while trying to cook”/”I don’t know how to navigate a supermarket” bits.
Mr. Mom is a cute film that I remember enjoying when I was a little kid. But I can admit that by the time my second relative or acquaintance referred to me as Mr. Mom I wanted to go ballistic. I was getting over the sudden cataclysm that turned my life upside down. I was still processing the loss of my identity and my forced acquisition of a new one that I wasn’t yet sure I was suited to and couldn’t have imagined I’d ever take pride in. I felt embarrassed and inadequate for not being the breadwinner. I felt guilty over denying my wife the ability to be present for all the baby and toddler milestones.
With the guilt came self-recrimination: If I’d just worked a little harder, promoted my business more vigorously than I did, and built a larger regular clientele, we might be sufficiently well-off to afford our own insurance. Then my wife could have stayed home with the baby, or maybe even retired and lived a life of luxury in her late thirties! She would have been the envy of all her friends and relatives!
The thing that eluded me as I fought to escape the morass of cognitive distortions was the fact that I had in fact worked as hard as I could, promoted my business as vigorously as I could, and had as many clients as I could handle. And even if I’d been able to keep that fact in mind, I’m sure the voice in my head would’ve said, “Yeah, but what if you’d worked just a little bit harder?” At that point it was less about logically analyzing my past choices and more about beating myself up for not being what I thought I was supposed to be. It had a major effect on my mental health, though I suspect I’m still not aware of the full extent of it.
In addition to the well-meaning but clueless turds who called me Mr. Mom, I quickly grew disgruntled with the narrow-minded retail clerks who asked if it was “Daddy’s day with the baby” because holy shit, a grown man out in public with a baby? Without the mother present? Should we call CPS right now or wait until the baby loses an eye? I suppose current-day Jack would tell these people to fuck off, or at least express umbrage over their conventional, traditional worldview. But 2010 Jack wasn’t convinced they were wrong to ogle the freakshow.
Oh, footnote to the above: Mr. Mom was written by none other than John Hughes. On the strength of his script, Universal Studios gave him a three-picture deal. Had he not written Mr. Mom, he might never have directed Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Weird Science (1985).
Up next: The Good Life to Which I Refer, wherein I realize that I’m actually crushing it and the whole thing probably goes to my head.