Lefty Parent » men as parents

A Dad Learns to Thrive on the Mommy Track

Cooper Zale — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:06:40 +0000

In the 23 years since our kids were born, I have made a conscious choice to lead a more balanced life, including a primary focus on wearing my parent hat. This choice led to a strategy of trying to carefully choose my jobs and career path to minimize work hours and job stress, while attempting to also maximize the flexibility of my schedule. Based on the common nickname for this sort of work strategy, I was a male parent on the “Mommy track”.

When my partner Sally and I made the decision to have kids in 1985, and she was pregnant with our first, I was back in school getting my degree in computer science and Sally had the 8 to 5, five days a week job with the hour car commute on either side. Since her job had a good salary and came with the good benefits, including health, dental and vision and an eventual pension, it made sense to both of us that I would seek more flexible work, maybe even doable from home.

Many of the computer science majors at this time were going into entry-level corporate IT jobs working for the various aerospace companies in the Los Angeles area that were designing and building many of the weapons systems that were part of the Reagan administration’s military buildup during the 1980s. At the time these jobs were relatively plentiful, but generally involved fixed hours, good benefits (that Sally already had for our family) but only moderate pay.

Since neither Sally nor I bought into the patriarchal conventional wisdom that the man was necessarily the primary bread-winner and the woman the primary child-raiser, we discussed my employment prospects and agreed that I would try to avoid the corporate jobs in favor of a more informal and flexible job situation. This way I could be available to take care of our son Eric at home or shuttle him back and forth from day care. Putting this goal out their in the universe, we had the fortune of finding a very talented computer application designer who was looking for a junior partner. He and I had compatible personalities and complimentary skill sets, and he hired me to work for him, initially part time, at a fairly good hourly rate (more than I would have made hourly in an entry-level aerospace job), with the ability to do much of my work from home.

I’m not sure if I initially realized how much of a blessing it was for me as a male parent, to be able to spend so much time with my kids during their first years. If I had been the one with the conventional primary bread-winner “dad” job, seeing my kids during the week only for the last hour or so of their day, I don’t think I would have developed the depth of relationship with them that I was able to as their primary caretaker for these earliest years. By the time our two kids had toilet trained, I had probably changed something more than 5,000 diapers. Being male, I’m particularly proud of that statistic.

Eventually, the work with my collaborator dried up, and he and I had to go our separate ways and find work in the corporate Information Technology world. But having had the experience of working for five years doing interesting projects with high flexibility and low stress I was pretty determined to continue to make this my reality, as much as I could now that I had more of the 8 to 5 type job. Since getting my first corporate IT job in 1990, I have managed for the last 19 years to chart that sort of a course, finding generally interesting work, done for mostly caring and thoughtful supervisors, with a minimum of stress and a maximum of flexibility.

The particulars of successfully charting this work strategy have included…

1. Holding out for the right job with the right boss, even if that meant switching back and forth between contractor and employee and even being unemployed at times.

2. Avoiding working for people who “lived to work”, in favor of people (mostly parents like myself) that were looking for balanced lives and understood that I was as well.

3. Staying “off the radar” by avoiding high-profile job assignments with high expectations and high stress, including staying away from any sort of management job.

4. Looking for and taking advantage of every opportunity to get involved in projects where I could telecommute from home.

Along the way, I discovered that when I was working hourly as a contractor or consultant (rather than on salary as an employee), it was easier for me to negotiate flexibility in my work and in particular address items 3 and 4 above. Also, when I was paid hourly on a contract, they were much more likely to require that I only work forty hours a week in order to stay within the budget parameters of that contract. Of course, my working as a contractor was facilitated by my partner Sally getting our health insurance through her job (and even after she left that job as part of her retirement package).

Since my kids were born I have continued to look at my paid jobs not as an unfolding career but more as means to an end, and that my primary role was as a parent. I look back on these past 23 years and find that I am extremely happy and satisfied to have lived in that paradigm, rather than pursuing the ever more high-powered job opportunity as my primary goal.

When I meet people for the first time, particularly men, they ask me what I do, and generally expect me to respond with the paid work I do. I enjoy maybe surprising many of them by starting my reply saying I’m a parent and then go on to say that I work for so and so company too. I’m definitely all about keeping my priorities in that order.

Consistent with one of the most commonly stated new-age principles, when it comes to the jobs I have held, I have pretty much been able to “create my own reality” and have had a string of some dozen bosses, 10 of which have been a pleasure to work for. It has become what I expect out of each new position that I search for (as the need for a new job arises), and I can usually meet that expectation.

Now that I am in my 50s and my kids are grown up young adults, I guess I no longer need to stay “off the radar” and on the “mommy track”. I am at an age that is often the most profitable, statistically speaking, for men in the workforce. Now mostly beyond the bulk of work as a parent, I am now defining my “life’s work” in terms of continuing to advocate for youth, youth rights and more of a partnership relationship between adults and youth. Since I have not found a way yet to make a living pursuing these goals, I guess my paid work will continue to play second fiddle, a means to other ends.

Interchangeable Parental Units

Cooper Zale — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:05:37 +0000

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. After 23 years of being a parent, including changing thousands of diapers when my kids were little, I have found no biological or psychological reason that men cannot be just as good parents and homemakers as women. Actually, there is one thing… men can’t breastfeed. Other than that, as far as I’m concerned, moms and dads are (to paraphrase the “Cone Heads” of Saturday Night Live) “interchangeable parental units”.

American commercial and popular culture is not necessarily going to let you in on that little secret. American advertisers I’m sure have done their focus groups and other research to determine that most housework, parenting and childcare is still done by women, and probably have other research that it would be demeaning to our supposedly fragile male egos if we men are portrayed as cleaning a bathroom or changing a diaper. It still makes many people, male and female alike, chuckle at the sight of a man in an apron and/or holding a toilet brush… a foolish fish out of water.

The reality is that we do still live in a patriarchy that is all about ranking us, leaders above followers, white-collar above blue-collar, men above women, and adults above children. Even the professions are ranked by how much we pay for those professional services, and generally the lowest paid “professionals” are teachers, which are more likely to be women than men. Certainly I can make considerably more as a business analyst with my bachelor’s degree than any K-12 teacher can make with a master’s or PhD.

Parenting is outside the realm of paid work, but those who are paid to do similar work, teachers and especially childcare workers are relatively poorly paid. Working with children is low status work, critical for the future of our society perhaps, but apparently a critical function assigned to lower status people.

It is probably true that many men have not gained the knowledge set to properly clean a poopy bottom or a dirty toilet. Conventional wisdom through family tradition and commercial and popular culture tells them that this is a skill set they are not expected to acquire and therefore can often make it to adulthood, to parenthood, with no experience with these very important hygiene tasks. Of course it is also true that these are each skill sets that can be learned in ten minutes. Many men, and the women in their lives, just don’t want to go there, for a complicated set of social and psychological reasons associated with our underlying patriarchal culture. Men understand that these are not tasks associated with status, and that generally speaking; many can claim and take a pass.

Perhaps I am getting (or at least feeling) a little snarky about this… so I will return to talking about my own experience!

As a youth, I don’t think I ever changed a diaper, and never proactively offered to do so (including having to endure the ten minute training) when the opportunity presented itself. I did have a home situation as a teenager with a household run by a divorced mom (wrestling at times with depression) that led (though not actually forced) me to step up and learn to buy groceries, do rudimentary cooking (at least for myself) and take out and do the laundry (after our washer broke).

I also had the advantage of a minimum-wage-paying summer job as a “houseboy” at a Hilton motel, which if I hadn’t had a penis, would have been called a “chambermaid”, since the bulk of what I did was clean guest rooms. That is where I was professionally trained to clean toilets and change bed linens. My tone of sarcasm (am I getting snarky again?), by the way, is to make the point about ranking of work. Having cleaned several hundred rooms myself, I have great respect for the people, mostly women, who add to the quality of life of travelers who stay in their employers hotels. Remember to tip your housekeeper when you check out!

And for several years after that I worked as a short-order cook where, on a salary just above minimum wage, I learned many basics of preparing, cooking and preserving food, plus additional cleaning skills associated with a kitchen type environment. I still find it interesting that most people who are paid to cook are men (even if at a low wage), while most unpaid cooking is done by women. I haven’t quite figured that one out.

So moving forward in time, when I moved in with my fellow feminist and future life partner, I was prepared to meet her expectation (or at least her hope) that I was going to do my share of the domestic chores. I was also enough of a feminist, well trained by my “Feminist Aunts”, to know that I was not “helping her with the housework”, but that we were equally dividing that work. Prior to marrying, in our first year living together in her apartment, I actually did more of the grocery shopping, cooking and laundry, plus applied my expert skill in cleaning the bathroom, while she did more of the dishes and generally cleaned the kitchen and vacuumed elsewhere, plus plied her better developed skill of paying the bills (I never had that bookkeeping job in my youthful resume!).

When we made the decision to have, conceived, and brought into the world two kids, which prompted a move from our easy to maintain one-bedroom apartment to a more challenging though still small house, I knew that I should, and was determined in fact to do, my half of the homemaking, parenting and childcare related tasks. This was facilitated by the fact that my partner Sally and I had roughly equally paying jobs, that were not particularly stressful or all encompassing for either of us.

I have to admit that maintaining balance of domestic work gets more challenging when one partner has a way more high-powered job than the other. But I think it is a real loss, particularly to men, if they don’t have that opportunity to get “down and dirty” with their kids (including their excretory functions) and spend lots of time with their kids. More time than that “quality time” of current patriarchal mythology, where dad perhaps takes the previously cleaned, dressed and fed kid (by mom) to little league or soccer practice.

Me… I made a conscious effort throughout my work years to stay on more of a “mommy track”, eschew the patriarchal ladder game and avoid rising to that level in the corporate work world I was employed in where the time and stress of my job would make it harder for me to be an equal parent and homemaker. I must say, as a side benefit, though I was able to advance my skills and (more slowly) my compensation), I generally did work that was of significant value to my team but mostly kept me “off the radar”, where stress-levels tend to skyrocket.

Cat’s in the Cradle

Cooper Zale — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:51:22 +0000

I don’t know if it was true for previous generations, but I got so much of my “ethical instruction” from songs that I would here over and over on the radio. Whether it was the Beatles telling me that, “All you need is love”, or The Supremes invoking the Golden Rule in, “Let me get over you the way you’ve gotten over me”, or a hundred different songs from a raft of insightful lyricists.

But of all the lyrics all those songs, I sometimes wonder how much the sad and ironic lyrics of Harry Chapin’s song has saved my generation of male-type parents from making the mistake that many of our dads made not playing a larger role in parenting and thus contributed to my own kids’ generation.

Chapin sings…

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talkin’ ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew
He’d say “I’m gonna be like you dad
You know I’m gonna be like you”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home dad?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

I still can’t hear it (or even read the lyrics) without chills going down my spine, and it can be a painful experience, even today, to listen to the whole song. I’m not sure why it is still so painful. It’s not like I ignored Chapin’s strongly implied advice. I have spent as much time with my kids as any dad I think. I guess it is just so profoundly sad to choose to miss the opportunity to give the gift of your self, your love, and your wisdom (a gift no one else in the universe can give) to your progeny.

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, “Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let’s play
Can you teach me to throw”, I said “Not today
I got a lot to do”, he said, “That’s ok”
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
And said, “I’m gonna be like him, yeah
You know I’m gonna be like him”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home son?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

I don’t know if anybody has studies to back this up, but at least anecdotally, among the male parents I know, they seem to be more involved in their kids’ lives than the dads of my own peers growing up. I can remember that as a teenager I barely got to know several of my best friends’ dads (even being often at their houses), though I did get to know their moms. I know all my kids’ good friends, at least the ones that pass through our house.

Well, he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
“Son, I’m proud of you, can you sit for a while?”
He shook his head and said with a smile
“What I’d really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys
See you later, can I have them please?”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home son?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

That verse still stings sometimes because it makes me wonder if my own kids know how proud I am of them, and then, whether “pride” is even the right term, and what separates an appropriate acknowledgment of them as emerging human beings developing their own agency with patriarchal narcissism at ones progeny.

I’ve long since retired, my son’s moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind”
He said, “I’d love to, Dad, if I can find the time
You see my new job’s a hassle and kids have the flu
But it’s sure nice talking to you, Dad
It’s been sure nice talking to you”

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He’d grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home son?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then

How could the “narrator” of Chapin’s song ever recover from the implications of that last conversation with his son? The gravity of it made me swear to myself, even as an adolescent, that I would never let that happen to me. I am truly curious how many of my fellow travelers, male in this current incarnation, have been similarly affected.