Winter
Cold and raw the north wind doth blow,
Bleak in the morning early;
All the hills are covered with snow,
And winter's now come fairly.
This past weekend, my big little girl and I went to visit the grandparents. Grandma had a birthday on Saturday, and we thought a surprise visit would be just the thing to make the day memorable. The drive down was uneventful. She slept for two hours while I drove. When she woke up, it was time for food, gas, a diaper change, and a short walk around the mall we stopped at so I could stretch my legs. Even two hours in the car is enough to make me start feeling stiff. I guess that happens when you're tall enough to earn names like “Beanpole” and “Ogre”. Most cars just don't seem to fit quite right. My feet also get cold when I drive, and the walk helps to warm them up. I suppose it has something to do with being folded up like a tent pole in the car, but it may not.
My daughter and I have traveled like this before. When she was only two months old, we took her to Florida on a family vacation. The flight down was not a problem, but Frau Hausmeister was very concerned that because our daughter hadn't yet been issued any official identification, it would be impossible for us to prove that she was ours in the event of an emergency. This is one of the events on that trip that stuck in my mind. The other involves the flight back.
Our return flight was uneventful until the fasten seatbelt light came on as we were preparing to land. At about that time, Frau H, who was holding Baby H, announced that we had a full diaper. I, being the procrastinator that I am, and not wanting to try to change a diaper in a landing airplane, said that we could just wait until we landed and could take care of things in the airport restroom. Having made that easy decision, I went back to looking out the window and watching the landscape. A few minutes later, Frau H. moved our daughter and discovered a large, tan, wet blotch on her pants. We had a leaker.
Before anyone had a chance to catch a whiff of what we were up to, both of us had turned our vents on to spread the smell evenly throughout the cabin, flipped on the overhead lights, dropped the tray table, and started stripping our daughter. I remember apologizing to the man seated on the other side of Frau H. while I was rummaging in the diaper bag under the seat for wipes and a clean diaper. It was like being in an operating room – fast and efficient. The spotlight from the overhead light added to the effect. After bagging up the diaper in a barf bag, cramming the annihilated clothing into a ziplock, digging out clean clothes for Baby H, dressing her, and scrubbing at the tan stain on my wife's pants, we were done. As we finished, the plane reached the jetway and everyone disembarked, leaving the sickly sweet smell of wet wipes and fresh baby poop behind.
I was thinking of this incident on the way back home on Saturday while I listened to one of the radio stations that had been hijacked for 24/7 Christmas music. I was listening for the weather forecast, which I though had said that I could expect 3-5 inches of snow on the roads I was driving, with another 1-2 inches by morning. In the back, Baby H was strapped into her car seat, which was a good thing, because otherwise she would have been in orbit. She was crying and fussing, which made hearing much of anything impossible. Apparently, she hadn't heard the plan for her to sleep until the halfway point again, where we'd stop for food, a diaper, and gas, before hitting the road again.
It's not that I didn't check the weather map before I left. I did. I saw the storm, which covered most of the map. My plan was to cut through the heart of it, and then the second half of the drive would be smooth sailing as I drove up the back side of the storm as it moved east. The snow trucks would be out, Baby H would be asleep, and the drive would be uneventful.
As I slipped and slid along in the only lane of a six lane road that was still open, I was reconsidering this plan, and seriously thinking about stopping and spending the night somewhere along the way. The road conditions were such that the car drove like it had a rudder. It was snowing hard, and the best way to get good traction was to play follow-the-semi. What looked like clear pavement beneath the blowing snow was really just ice. My cell phone had died an hour ago, and I was averaging 40 mph. Baby H was getting so mad in the back seat that her cries were ragged. And there was that awful Christmas music. It was not a good night.
A stop to call home about the weather ended up taking 25 minutes. My phone card was out of minutes. My attempts to reload it failed. I dropped coins in the snow trying to use the pay phone. When the call went through, my dad told me that the road conditions were bad and would be getting worse all the way home. My wife wasn't happy about the prospect of me spending the night somewhere, and neither was I.
After another 20 minutes of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”, which was the furthest thing from my mind, the weatherman came on again and confirmed the bad news I had heard earlier. Fortunately, by this time, Baby H was asleep. I had been feeding her Corn Chex while driving, and had given her enough to satisfy her. I would reach back and hand them to her one at a time, and wait until her little hand found mine and she gently took the cereal to eat. This required some gymnastic contortions in the front seat, but it beat listening to her cry. By this time, we had reached the halfway point, and the roads were clearing. Furthermore, there was a steady stream of traffic coming from the opposite direction, so we pushed on.
The second half of the trip was almost anti-climatic. Baby H was sawing baby logs in the back seat, the snow began to let up, and the closer to home we got, the better the road conditions became. The trucks were out, and for the last hour there were even two lanes open. However, it was wonderful to be home. The knots came out of my back a day later, but the Christmas songs are still stuck in my head.
Only two more weeks until we make the trip back again for Christmas. I'm hoping for good weather, and have ordered a new phone battery and car charger. I'll be prepared next time. And I'll know all the words to “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”.
My office these days is mostly on the floor of my daughter's room. As I work, I'm surrounded by so much brightly colored plastic and cloth, that you'd think I was either working in the playpen at McDonald's or in the large intestine of the boss's Gloworm. My office chair isn't an Aeron. It's either my grandfather's old rocking chair, or a couple of pillows on the guest bed. While neither offer the "distinctive looks and pioneering ergonomics" these chairs claim, I suspect that they do beat it in "adapting naturally and adjusting precisely to fit people of all sizes and postures doing all kinds of activities, all day long". Do they have a comforting creak when you rock the boss to sleep? Can you slump down and sleep in them when you're tired? Nah.
I sit in the rocking chair with my laptop and phone most of the time, or sit just outside her door at a desk when the boss is in her jumper. Actually, moshing is a better description of what she does in that thing. While I work, I watch her crawl back and forth across the floor, warning her away from the electrical cords and fending off her hands as she grabs at my laptop screen and tries to correct my coding errors or proofread my work.
The majority of my work takes place while she's sleeping. During nap time, I sit totally still at my desk outside her room and work as quickly as possible . . . most of the time. Some days, like today, I find that even though there is plenty of work to do, I am unable to do much beyond surf the internet and read up on some of the topics I am interested in online. Soon enough, a call from behind the closed door indicates that my exile is over, and I scoop my daughter up and go back to work in my office, while she ping-pongs around the room.
When I started working from home, the idea of a home office was one of luxury - a room where everything was organized, full of computers and papers, that I could escape to and work undisturbed. That dream didn't last long. The offices featured in IKEA are illusions. The closest I come to that is a desk at the top of the stairs on our second-floor landing, which has equal parts work stuff and baby stuff spread out all around it, and is so full of papers that the desk top is invisible under a sliding pile of papers. It is also the temporary home to a bunch of computer parts, manuals and CDs while I try to breathe life into my computer after a crashed hard drive and failed RAID setup.
From time-to-time I move my office around. This can usually can be done in one trip. The small human gets one arm, my cell phone, along with a pen, gets stuffed in a pocket, and my laptop is carried in the other arm, with the power supply balanced on top. Using this arrangement, I can leave the upstairs landing and work in other exotic locations, like the kitchen table or the floor in the family room.
I have a couple of friends who think being able to work from home and owning your own business means you have truly arrived. They think I have it all. I can set my own hours, dress however I want to, and I don't have to commute. Yeah, right. My hours are now whatever it takes to make the customers happy, some days I don't get a shower, and others I am clawing at the walls for an excuse to get out. I have to clean up or live with my own messes, there's no IT support, and I don't have people around to bounce ideas off of - just the echo of my own thoughts. And the belly laughs, yowls, and chuckles of my little girl as she zooms past to climb up on another piece of furniture.
It is true that there are some perks to working at home. The flexible schedule means that my little boss can call me in for meetings whenever she wishes, or we can go do lunch together if we choose. I can take advantage of the office rec center, which is open around the clock (ride my bike on a trainer in the laundry room), see what's been left out in the snack room, or adjust the vents so that the draft in my office isn't blowing down my neck. I can also meet with other business associates for lunch - the boss likes lunch with Mommy, or take the company car out for some errands. My favorite perk is being "out of the office". Since I am almost never away, this usually means either that I have something slimy smeared up to my elbows, or that someone is taking a nap. What and who, I'll leave to your imagination.
Well, it's getting late, and I'm the only one still at work, so I think I'll close things down and lock up for tonight.
Making the decision to stay at home and take care of our daughter was probably one of the most difficult decisions I've had to make recently. Choosing to step away from work which I found both challenging and rewarding, and which shaped (and certainly continues to influence) how I see myself was tough. Furthermore, that initial decision led to a cascade of other decisions which were easier, but all stemmed back to that first decision to do what I'm doing now.
Even on the crummy days, when our daughter is screaming, I'm sleepy and impatient, and I feel under the gun, it was still a decision. I don't have to be doing what I'm doing. I could stick our daughter in day care, load up my schedule, and work. But I choose not to. That's important.
When my wife was still on maternity leave, we got a lot of questions about what would happen after her leave was up. When we said she was going back to work, people would look at me and say, “Oh, so you're going to be Mr. Mom?” Hardly! I'm a dad, and I am running two small businesses from home besides taking care of my daughter – as a father. Mom is mom, and I'm not her. The idea of Mr. Mom brings up connotations of some wimpy guy who can't handle working in “the real world”, so is staying home with the kids to hide out and has a bossy wife. Sorry. That's not the story here.
I think the term Mr. Mom is demeaning to the dads who are at home with their kids. It's not that they can't hack it, or are somehow lesser men, or aren't accustomed to work, though the phrase implies it. Maybe they just happened to be one of the guys that married “up” and hooked up with one of the smart, bright, attractive girls. That may be one of the dirty secrets of the stay-at-home dads; they're the ones with the real trophy wives.
Setting that aside, there are other reasons we are doing things this way. I'm better wired to work with people than my wife. I can also handle the at-home schedule a little better than she can. She also enjoys her job and has the potential to make significantly more money than I do down the road. Regardless of how we're wired as a couple, my wife and I were already on a different trajectory than most people in the area we live long before the idea of having kids ever came up. This is just another step along that path. Neither of us draw our identity in our marriage from who can earn the most, so whenever it has come to working, we have just gone with whoever has had the best opportunities. In terms of education and credentialing, we are nearly equal, though the opportunities available to me are not as good as hers.
That's not to say that the transition to becoming Superdad is easy. It's tough. I was shocked at how much I drew my identity from the work I did (and do), and how much I valued myself based on goals, achievements, accomplishments, accolades, and rewards. This wasn't a pleasant discovery. Our daughter doesn't know jack about this stuff, but she gets mad if she isn't fed, doesn't get her naps during the day, and isn't snuggled and played with enough. It was also hard to get up in the middle of the night to feed and diaper her so that my wife could get enough sleep to do her job well. This was especially true during the month when our daughter was recovering from a broken femur and had to be checked on every night at 1:30. I don't like giving up my time, and fight to protect it, but there's someone else who needs it. What makes me cringe is knowing that I'd been like this all along with my wife, but that it took a baby and change of lifestyle to force me to see it. Ouch.
Being an at-home dad has also changed the way I relate to my friends. Before we had the baby, my title seemed to be “small business owner” and people respected that, because of the supposed glamour of owning your own business. In reality, it was pretty ugly, but I'm not sure I was able to convince anyone of that. When that label was replaced with “Mr. Mom” in most people's minds, they also seemed to change in how they related to me. This may be a perceived change, however, as I was suddenly much less accessible than I was before, and if I was a hermit before, I probably seemed to be a monk who'd taken a vow of silence after my wife's maternity leave was up. I just didn't have time to do anything else.
One of the potential downsides of being a Superdad with girls in the house is that the likelihood of them turning into tomboys seems high. It's not that it's what I want necessarily, but because of how daughter's wired, it seems almost inevitable. She's big, determined, and on-the-go. In my mind, I see her as a big, tall girl, wearing pink and saying something like, “I like motocross!” in a high squeaky voice. Or, as one of my younger cousins used to say, “Don't mess with the big girl!” It probably doesn't help that we wrestle a lot, run together, and that she's big for her age. I know that big babies don't necessarily turn into big adults, but we've got the right genes for it to happen.
Am I Mr. Mom? No way. I'm a dad. I do dad things with my daughter. I just happen to do a lot more of them than a lot of other guys get to do with theirs. And I'm not hiding out. I chose to do this because it's the best thing for my family. When it isn't anymore, I'll stop. Meanwhile, Superdad's going to bed. He may be able to beat up Mr. Mom, but he still needs some sleep.
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