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The path to my wife’s heart didn’t always involve a mop and a bottle of cleaning solution, but then we had children.
I could deploy many an arrow just to make her swoon. A ready-to-eat dinner out of the Instant Pot usually does the trick. Getting the boys dressed and packing their lunches for school, that works too. But nothing lights her eyes quite like the reflective surface of hardwood floors.
When did this happen? When did it become the norm for a dad like me to handle the grocery shopping and cook the majority of meals, to put hydrangea flowers on the dining room table, to vacuum the rugs, to clean dishes?
I’m not saying I do any of these things well. I’d love to tell you I’m Anthony Bourdain plus the guy in flannel from the Brawny paper towel label and Mr. Clean all wrapped into one. That would be stretching the truth. A lot.
But after 18 months of being a stay-at-home dad, and as I approach the milestone that is 40 years old, it’s clear how, in our house, gender roles as they pertain to parenting have been scrubbed away, like old Cheerios clinging to the dining room floor beneath a table. I’m a far cry from what men in previous generations of my family would’ve considered an upstanding father.
Somewhere tonight a bunch of guys have gathered at a sports bar to watch a football game. Meanwhile after a long day of parenting, I’m content to sit with my wife and pass out while streaming old episodes of Fixer Upper on Hulu.
I’m not sure when traditional gender roles in a family began to change, but it’s a wonderful thing they have. Think of this—as of April 2018, more than 61 percent of married couples with children are supported by both parents working jobs. That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We used to be like that. We’ll be like that again when it’s time for me to return to work. And if moms are expected to work and earn income and dads are too, then it seems reasonable for the two to split household chores. Dads can no longer avoid folding clean pairs of the kids’ underwear and putting them neatly into a dresser drawer by claiming the grass over the last 48 hours grew so high that you have to mow the lawn.
You gotta be able to mow the lawn and fold the laundry, dude.
“This is a partnership,” my wife reminds me. “It’s like, let’s have a conversation, a free flowing brainstorm conversation about what we’re going to do, instead of assuming you’re going to do this and I’m going to do that.”
When we first started as parents, like a lot of new moms and dads we engaged in the dangerous game of assumption. We didn’t talk about who would do what. We just assumed. And it sorta worked out for a while as my wife, for example, started doing all the laundry.
“I kind of let it go because my understanding was you actually liked doing laundry,” I told her.
“I do,” she confessed. It’s her way of finding a moment of Zen. Truly.
“Okay, so I’m okay not doing the laundry, then,” I said.
“I mean,” she said through a few laughs, “It would help me if you did it every once in a while.”
Message received. A real man can get stains out of a Pokémon shirt. Do you prefer a regular spin or permanent press?
This often works as a two-way street, too. My wife likes to point out how, like many a father, I’m more likely than she is to engage in activities with our boys considered to be playful.
“Dads can definitely be more fun,” she told me. “Moms are more worried about if they have their kids’ needs met, are they following schedules and routines.”
Ahem. However.
I’m relieved when, from time to time, she steps in and takes the boys on a bike ride, wrestles with them, runs around the backyard playing tag, accompanies them on a nausea-inducing tilt-a-whirl. That stuff’ll wear you down the closer you get to 40 years old.
Some days, I gladly trade an hour or two of hard labor—kicking a soccer ball around on a 90-degree afternoon or pushing the kids on the swings at a local playground over, and over, and over, and over—for a chance to scrub down a bathroom.
The one constant truth I’ve discovered about parenting, reinforced during this time I’ve been a stay-at-home dad, is just how fluid our lives and our roles as parents are. Just when you safely assume you have parenting skills down tight, the routines cranking like a finely tuned machine, just when you think you know how it works best between you and the other parent, well, something changes.
Take us. When we first had kids, my wife believed she could work part-time and be a full-time mom. Then, one day, she told me she wasn’t made to stay at home most of the day, that in addition to wanting to be a great mom she also had a career and ambition to follow.
Then I became the stay-at-home parent.
“The expectation should be these things are fluid,” my wife told me about parenting and who is going to be responsible for what. “They can change. It’s an ongoing conversation we should have periodically, and that’s just the nature of it.”
“Life circumstances change, kids get older, and so maybe you or I have expectations of me as a mom when the kids are babies, and maybe those expectations change when the kids get older. And so those need to get revisited.”
I like to call these conversations our own version of the State of the Union. Have them now and then. They’re vital. It’s how I discovered the value to my wife of mopping the floors.
Dave Pidgeon is a writer and photographer from Lancaster. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at PidgeonsEyeView and at WritingIntheAfternoon.com.
