Metro Pulse/Cover/The Family Issue

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My Life as Mom

Not Death or Taxes
The options for giving birth in Knoxville are numerous

Butting In
The importance of being an uncle

Families Suck
God wasn't kidding around when he slapped Eve with familial duty for biting the bad apple

Parenthood ain't for sissies

by Jack Neely

For more than a quarter of a century, I never pictured myself as a father at all, much less a daddy. For the first 25 years of my life I was convinced I'd be a jungle explorer or an inventor or a spy.

My idols were James Bond and Steve McQueen and John Fogerty and Ilya Kuryakin, the cool guy on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; you never saw those guys around small children. If I'd been honest, I would have had to admit that there was only one thing I had in common with them: the fact that you never saw me with small children, either. If any human under 17 came in the front door, I'd be edging out the back door. Except for babies, that is. When I saw babies, I ran.

However, life never turns out as you expect it to. By a series of unanticipated circumstances, I found myself at age 27 unemployed and without prospects, married to a career-oriented woman: moreover, the woman in question had just five months previously undergone something called childbirth.

Unemployment had never bothered me much before. Guys with bachelors' in liberal arts and a patchy work record get used to unemployment. When I was single, a layoff was, more often than not, a cheerful event. There's an art to unemployment, and I had mastered it. To me, all it meant was you'd sleep late for a couple of weeks. And then maybe you'd call Manpower and let them know you were free again. And then you'd spend a day or two a week loading trucks or cleaning up construction sites. The rest of your time you'd spend eating celery soup and sandwiches made from 13-cent tins of cow tripe and sitting on somebody's creaky porch in Fort Sanders drinking Blatz and talking about music. Unemployment never seemed like a very bad thing at all.

But when you're unemployed, and married to a woman who's employed, and when she has a baby that looks like you, unemployment is a serious condition. Unemployment means that now that baby is your business.

Having avoided babies since I was a baby myself—actually, I think I avoided babies even then—I had a lot to learn. The diaper-changing thing, the bottle-nipple washing routine, the burping maneuver, the well-balanced meal thing, the daily screaming business. It was, I thought, the sort of thing only women were adept at.

Up until then, I'd taken my gender for granted. I'd had full-time jobs as a truck driver and a construction supervisor and a criminal-defense investigator. I'd hopped freight trains. I'd slam-danced in cheap bars to some of the greatest punk bands of all time. For me, being alone with a baby presented a little bit of a crisis.

I wasn't exactly a stay-at-home dad. A dad's a guy who's gone all day, then comes home and reads the paper. The only thing useful he does, besides deposit paychecks, was to mow the grass and fix things. No, I was something different from a dad. I was a mom. I was a gender-challenged mom, to be sure, but by any occupational description, Mom was what I was.

Like many moms, I tried to keep alight some sad vestige of a career. I wrote stories for the newspaper. I could do the typing at home, but I couldn't very well meet with people in Rockwood or Royal Blue, and I couldn't haunt the offices, hoping the editors would remember my name and not misspell it in the byline.

I learned that there was a deal at a small Presbyterian church in my neighborhood, once a week on Fridays. Through the mom grapevine I heard I could drop the kid off for four hours there and I'd be free to do anything I wanted to do, that freedom single people so rarely appreciate. In some places, this mini-daycare service is called Parent's Day Out.

But this one wasn't called Parents' Day Out. It was called Mother's Day Out. There was a good deal of smirking my first day there. "You know, we really should call this Parents' Day Out," they said then, and nearly every time I wrote a check to Mother's Day Out. But they never did.

They seemed to get used to me. Eventually I got used to my role as an oddity. I tried to think of myself as a lone misfit in the tradition of Lawrence of Arabia, but it didn't work.

I put on a goofy smile every time I went in, and always said something like "Here I am at Mother's Day Out, Even Though, Obviously, I'm a Guy." I wondered if I should wear a sign. And, maybe, big shoes and a rubber nose—but, after all, that would have been redundant. The eight or nine other mothers that I always did my explaining to eventually formed a little clique. They'd meet each other there at the church, and have a cup of coffee. Then they'd go off on a shopping trip together. They never invited me along, for which I was grateful.

One kid had asthma and a tendency for ear infections, so we spent a lot of time at the pediatrician's office. There, too, I was almost always the only dad. Like many pediatricians, our doctor had a policy of filing all babies under the name of the mother. I'd walk in with a sick baby, and the receptionist's first question was, "mother's name?" I'd give it, then sit down and take my choice between this month's Ladies Home Journal or last month's Cosmo. When the nurse came out to the lobby to call us in, I'd answer to the name Janet.

We only had one car, an old Chevette, that my wife took to work except when we had a doctor's appointment, in which case we'd drop her off. Unable to tote the kid on my bike, I was more or less stuck at home all week.

The being stuck at home turned out to be the easiest part of all. Maybe because I didn't have to fold my duties into other folks' expectations of my gender, I improvised.

I developed a complex set of rituals that, looking back at them, seem almost military. I'd get up and give the kid a bottle for breakfast. We'd drill in the living room for a while. We had a little wheeled wooden dachsund on a string, and Sam would chase it around, crawling or toddling along in his walker. We'd do maybe 80 or 90 laps that way, while I tried to work out things in my head. Sometimes we'd take a break and watch Oprah.

Then, every day at about 10, whether the weather was perfect for it or not, we'd take a long walk down by the river. It was more or less a cross-country hike and a good workout, shoving his heavy-duty stroller partly through gravel, partly through tall grass, partly along a rutted path, maybe two or three miles. The riverside was beautiful on a weekday morning, but we rarely saw anyone at all but a few subsistence fishermen on the banks, and herons who were doing more or less the same thing. We'd wave at both.

Then I'd shove him back home and feed him his rations from tiny jars with a rubberized spoon. There was the bright-colored mush, which was usually fruit, and there was the tan-colored mush, which was usually meat, and a cup of milk with a sealed plastic lid. Then I'd hope he'd fall asleep, which he usually did. I'd load him into his crib and rush back to enjoy every possible moment of the silence in the kitchen. Mid-afternoon was my R&R, and it seemed to be every bit as great as Saturday night on the Strip had, just a couple of years earlier. Never before had I so deeply savored silence.

I'd make me a slow pot of clam chowder, and after I ate it, I'd make a pot of tea and serve myself two pieces of shortbread—we couldn't afford more. And as I drank tea, I read War and Peace, one or two chapters a day for over a year. The peace never lasted for more than two Tolstoy chapters, at most. It was the best part of the day, and I always looked forward to it. But at that rate, I didn't even finish the book.

Sometimes I worried about how much I was enjoying this life. Here I was changing diapers and washing bottles and fantasizing about a quiet cup of tea. Maybe to head off anxieties about creeping femininity, I developed this fantasy of myself as the sole tender of a remote Arctic weather station, a guy who knew he wouldn't see any other human for six months, but had to be there to keep things running, take notes, and be ready to tend to sudden emergencies. I began keeping a notebook, recording the boy's every little change in behavior or ability, keeping a daily tally of the words he had learned. Wednesday, October 13. Cloudy, a possibility of thunderstorms. A curious change in Sam's temperament. He seems drawn to extremely dangerous situations concerning high places, stovetops, and large canines. Must confer with him re the risk of serious injury.

I lived that way for 14 months, doing no work except for a freelance article or two a month for the daily. I'd occasionally apply for a job. After a while, though, I began to hope I didn't get one. Walking the baby, I'd see a neighbor in a coat and tie driving to or from work, and I stopped envying him. Who the hell does he think he is? I wondered. Kojac? Barnaby Jones? Mr. Drysdale?

Employment, especially in an office of any sort, began to seem like a phony state for which I had nothing but contempt. This job, this taking care of a growing, malleable human who was every day learning things that he'd know long after I was dead, this was the real business of life.

People talk about staying home with their kids for the opportunity to be there to see the first steps, hear the first words, etc. I was there, and remember those events vaguely. What I remember most vividly, and most fondly is the ritual of the day. It was the only year of my adult life when I knew every day what had to be done.