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In my 18 months as a full-time stay-at-home dad in San Francisco only one person has called me “Mr. Mom,” and that was a lesbian mother who added an ironic nod. Over the course of a week at my in-laws’ in Minnesota, I heard the term nine times.

The first three were at a party given by my sister-in-law and her husband. They have a daughter who’s nearly two, just five months older than my own Boobaby, her cousin. As a result, the yard was crawling with toddlers, and I was in hog heaven. Little Kate was particularly attached to me, and over the course of two hours, we taught each other to play toddler basketball, “Repeat the Squeal,” plastic fork-estra, and a dozen other invented games. I had a blast, and wondered only slightly about why Kate’s parents hovered by the food table, not playing. Oh well, I figured. They must be catching up with old friends. I was just happy to have someone to play with: as usual, my own daughter had been nabbed by grandparents.

As the party wound down, I sat on the lawn smashing blueberries with Kate and feeding them to her. I looked up and saw a row of lawn chairs filled with people looking down at me with confused expressions. One of them was Kate’s dad, who thanked me profusely — “for all your work,” he said. Even worse, he made Kate thank me for playing with her, which completely perplexed the little girl: who gets thanks for playing? But to the dad, I wasn’t doing something natural or pleasant: I was working.

If the subtext behind the gratitude was that playing with children is “working,” then family vacations for any stay-at-home parent are the proverbial busman’s holiday: What’s so different about caring for Boobaby in Minnesota from back home in California? Mainly, it’s that playtime gets usurped by relatives, leaving the more onerous tasks — tantrum-soothing, for example — to the parents. A stay-at-home parent on family holiday handles the labor but gets fewer grins and giggles than usual.

For stay-at-home fathers (and especially urban ones like me), the working vacation is even more thankless. Our parents and their more suburban communities are a shade less likely to have ever witnessed a dad voluntarily stay home to raise kids. Here on the left coast, it usually takes a few weeks of acquaintance for a new friend to ask me “what I did before” — in the Midwest, that was often the first question I got after revealing that I’m a stay-at-home dad. To my in-laws’ circle — sophisticated, well-educated, thoughtful people — I was just a guy with his “career on hold,” a term I loathe only slightly less than “Mr. Mom.”

Ahem. For the record, and loud enough to be heard across the country: Being a dad is my career right now. And it’s the best job I’ve ever had… except for the terrible vacation plan.

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[tags]kids, parents, dads, daddies, mr. mom, judge, judgmental, vacation, respect, sexism, parental roles,sexism, parenting, SAHD, stay at home dad[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by lmnop88a, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved