- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Case

May 14, 1999 | When we imagine what it takes to raise a happy, healthy child, most of us picture fresh air, a green yard with a blow-up wading pool and maybe even a golden retriever standing guard. Most important, we imagine a nurturing, attentive caregiver willing to dedicate endless days to encouragement, discipline and guidance. In this perfect parenting scenario, most of us probably visualize ideal moms like Carol Brady or June Cleaver, no matter how progressive we may be.

Most of us probably wouldn't conjure up someone like my old friend Tal Birdsey. Here's a guy who, when we met during college, could go for months without washing his hair, a guy who bragged about laundering his sheets only once a semester. The closest he came to taking care of another human was nurturing his gut, a jiggly beast widely known as Joe, which he kept healthy on a strict regime of barley and hops. And now he's molding in his image not one, but two tiny lives? Simultaneously? With no help?

"It's like this," he says. "When I was first taking care of the kids, my wife Blair had to come home every three hours to breast-feed the baby. One day she's real late. The baby starts wailing hysterically -- I worry he's gonna drop. So I fix him a bottle, which he's never had before. I'm trying to convince him the plastic nipple works just as well as him mom's, then nature calls -- urgently. I don't know, maybe the stress loosened my bowels.

"Next thing, I'm sitting on the loo, cradling the baby, balancing his bottle under my chin. After a few moments repose, 'brrrrrrnng, brrrrrrnng.' It must be Blair calling from a pay phone. I've got to get it before the voice mail picks up.

"So with my trousers around my ankles, the baby in my arms, I scurry, bent at the waist, across the living room. I pick it up -- a man's voice. The bank calling about our mortgage application. From behind, the 3-year-old senses my momentary vulnerability, and attacks. Giggling like a madman, he starts spanking me. Funniest thing he's ever seen -- his daddy bare-assed in the living room cradling the baby and talking on the phone."

This certainly isn't a scene that could have transpired under my mother's roost. But a growing number of men in their 30s find themselves at home full time, changing diapers, hunting down lost socks, playing daddy rides the hay wagon.

By the 1970s, women had earned their right to careers -- and why not? The American family could, of course, use more income. But when the revolution spawned offspring, women were left with a heavy weight to carry. Sure, society said, you can work, but you'd better be ready to juggle, to multitask, drop your kids off on the way to work, stop at the store on the way home and run the vacuum cleaner while everyone else sleeps.

Where, pray tell, was dad while this was going on? The tacit assumption was always that men would continue to work, that the wonder woman of the '70s and '80s was so empowered she could somehow continue her role as full-time mom. No one expected dad to soil his business suit with drool. And statistically speaking, he didn't.

"When I was a child," remembers Tom Funk, 33, who shares the parenting and income-generating more or less equally with his wife, Liz, "I remember a neighbor's father, during a rare bout with solo parenting, being confronted with a dangerously dirty diaper. He packed the crying child in the back of the car and drove 45 minutes to find a woman who could change it for him. That doesn't cut it anymore."

Well, men, we've got something to thump our chests about. More and more of us are pulling our weight at home. In the late '90s, men in dual-earner couples take on 60 percent more child care than did our fathers. And we do an impressive 2.5 times more housework, according to Scott Coltrane, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Riverside and author of the book "Family Man: Brotherhood, Housework and Gender Equity." Sadly, that brings us to a mere 28 percent of the housework and 33 percent of child care. The emerging class of stay-at-home dads, or SAHDs, are no doubt helping our stats.

Next page | SAHDs escape the "boring" route of professional success