Look up the word “househusband” in the dictionary and you’ll find “A married man who manages the household as his main occupation and whose wife usually earns the family income.” Good enough. But the role behind that word is foreign to most men (whether it’s due to nature or nurture I will leave to the experts). I should know: I’ve been a househusband for more than 10 years.
What does that mean? Many things. But let’s start with an analogy from popular culture. The other day I was watching a rerun of Frasier. It’s an episode where Frasier meets a high-powered female attorney, she asks him to dinner, initiates sex, returns business calls on her cell phone while they’re on dates, leaves him stranded with her partners’ girlfriends and wives at office parties, and tries to make up by buying him flowers and an expensive watch. Frasier is bewildered and asks his family what’s going on. His friend Daphne then says something like, “You’re the girl.” And she tells Frasier that she and other women have been putting up with this type of stuff forever. Frasier denies the truth of what she’s saying until he realizes that the night before he was the subject of a booty call! It was pretty funny.
Now, I don’t live my life for laughs, although I believe it’s important to have a sense of humor. And I’m definitely not a girl – I’ve got the Y chromosome, all the normal male equipment, including facial hair, (slightly) receding hairline, etc. I wear normal male clothes and drink beer and watch sports on TV. But after 10+ of being a househusband, I have a pretty decent idea what Daphne meant. If you’re at home, taking care of the kids, and dependent on your wife for financial support, you basically play the traditional female role whether you like it or not.
And what does that mean? Many, many things that life did not prepare me for, the main of which is that I’m often invisible or taken for granted. For example, about 4 years after I’d last worked, my wife and I met with our (female) financial planner to make a comprehensive estate plan (isn’t it great to be approaching middle age and contemplating disability and death?). Anyway, I’ve never been particularly good with numbers, so it wasn’t surprising that the main part of the conversation was between the two women. That was bad enough. But nothing focuses you on your financial worth like thinking about death. We settled on life insurance policies in which my wife’s policy was worth about 10 times as much as mine because, in the immortal words of our advisor, “Mark, Terri’s your provider and if she dies you’ll have to make up the lost income; Terri, if Mark dies, you’ll have to hire a nanny to take care of the kids and maintain the house.” It put things in perspective.
It’s important to be realistic. I know I’m quite a bit more than a glorified nanny. I have a rich life with my wife and our kids. I’m well educated and usually well spoken. But as I sat that day while we filled out forms in the office, I couldn’t get out of my mind that my staying home had caused the balance of power in our family to shift dramatically. My wife, earnestly signing documents with her flowing handwriting, had become the head of our household. I had become, well…fill in the blank. In virtually every important account we have a “dependent,” “co-borrower,” “insured’s beneficiary,” “other,” or the like. Men aren’t conditioned to have these words apply to them all of the time. As we left the office, I thought about raising this delicate issue with Terri, but decided not to. She was in a hurry to get to her car and back to her office. I kissed her, got in the van and went to pick the kids up from the neighbor who’d been nice enough to watch them.
Mark Kemp, current househusband and former head of household, lives with his wife and family in Scottsdale, AZ
Photo credit Thomas Hawk/Flickr