Where's Daddy?

If I were a casual reader of yesterday’s supermom post, I would have one big question: Where’s her husband? In fact, there were times yesterday when I asked myself the very same question, though at least I knew the answer.

I’ve stayed quiet on recent mommy controversies, partly because I’m increasingly disinterested in motherhood as a topic, but also because I really don’t have anything new to add--I do think a lot of women are losing themselves in motherhood and that would be fine if they were happy about it, but a lot don’t seem to be; I don’t think mommy-bashing is a very useful response to anything; I do think we need better public policies to support families; I don’t think overly attentive parenting is serving our children well; at the same time, I see a lot of great mothering of all varieties, as well as a lot of great kids, so I’m not convinced we’re in a crisis (of course I live in Red State Capital City Suburb where life is pretty easy, so what do I know?).

I was going to respond to getupgrrl’s argument that mothers’ ideals and anxieties are produced by the powers that be trying to keep us down. I wanted to suggest that perhaps some of today’s obsessive parenting is a response to the sense of neglect that many of today’s adults associate with their own childhoods in the 60s and 70s, when the adults around them were pretty preoccupied with their own lives (that is, I was going to assert the possibility of agency against the hegemonic social forces argument, to put it in theoretical terms). Then I saw that a bunch of people had already said as much in getupgrrl’s comments, so there was no real need for me to say it again.

But the one thing that really does bear repeating, even though a lot of people have said it, is that IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT MOTHERS. Oh god, I can’t even bear to explain why, and most of my readers probably get it already, but let’s just say that a public discourse of parenting that completely ignores fathers is…well, let’s just say it’s totally sexist and leave it at that.

Still, I’m begging the question of why I had to handle yesterday’s crises by myself, or perhaps I’m making the question even more urgent. But the thing is, the answer to that question is not political at all, it’s personal, and not the kind of personal that makes for political analysis.

S is a chef. This is a dominant factor in our daily lives. It certainly makes for good food--when he’s around--and awesome bring-your-daddy-to-preschool days, and even a lot of fun visiting daddy at work. But it also means a lot of absent daddy.

I keep trying to come up with comparisons to a chef’s work, but they all have problematic implications, so I’m just going to stick with the subject at hand. Chefs work a lot. S’s workday starts at ten hours, on a Tuesday or a rainy day (people don’t go out to eat so much in the rain), but it goes up from there. Eleven is frequent and twelve is not unheard of. Add to that his half hour commute each way, and he’s gone between eleven and thirteen hours a day (and he’s half an hour away). Sometimes he leaves at 6:00 a.m.. Sometimes he gets home at 11:00 p.m. Luckily, he almost never does both.

And the thing is, he has to be there. What do you expect when you go to a restaurant? Food. Who cooks that food? A bunch of interchangeable line cooks. Who orders and plans and preps that food, and makes sure it goes out on time looking good? A chef, and there usually aren’t very many of them. I won’t go into the details of how the restaurant where S works is organized, but let’s just say that when he has to be there, he has to be there (in fact, you’d be disgusted if you knew what chefs do when they’re sick--they go to work).

S is a great husband and dad, one of the best. He does 95% of the shopping, most of the cooking that’s worth mentioning (with me you get frozen waffles for breakfast and noodles with butter and cheese for dinner, unless I’m in a Nigella chocolate cake kind of mood), at least half the laundry, and all the guy stuff like lawn and garbage. When he’s around, he knows which kid likes water on her toothbrush and which wants her toothpaste dry. He does doctor’s appointments and preschool snacks and endless games of checkers--when he’s around. But when he’s not, he’s not, and then it’s just me--and the sitter, and the neighbors, and my friends…thank goodness.

[M update: Woke up at 4:30 a.m. with a fever of 102.7 and a pounding headache, lay in bed this morning refusing even to watch TV because it made her head hurt, but has had a mini-post-Advil recovery and is watching TV again and even ate a bit. Needless to say, I’m typing this on the laptop sitting next to her. Work will survive without me.]