If I do something for my kids, I get a medal, because most fathers don’t. If a mother makes a tremendous effort for her kids and does incredible things, no one gives a shit, because she’s a mom, and that’s what she’s supposed to do. It’s like giving a bus driver a medal for driving straight ahead. Nobody’s interested. And that’s really not fair, but it is the way it is.1
What are you doing here? This is a question that fathers are asked all the time. Sometimes, it’s not a direct question. Sometimes, it is a question wordlessly and yet no less insistently posed by circumstance. When a gathering is called a ‘mothers’ group’, it frames itself immediately as a group to which fathers are not invited. There might as well be an electric sign flashing ‘What are you doing here?’ if ever a bloke walks through the door.
Sometimes, the question is more direct than that.
Damien Walker lives in Launceston with his wife and daughter, and is a full-time dad. He used to be a national operations manager in the pay-TV industry, a job that consumed his attention around the clock. He’d come home at 7 pm and have dinner – if he was lucky, he’d see his child – and then by 8 pm he’d be on the couch, back on his laptop, continuing the day’s work. One day, he noticed that he was missing his daughter’s life.
‘Before my daughter was born, people told me all that stuff like, “You’ll see. Things that matter to you now will stop mattering. Everything will change,”’ he says. ‘What I found, though, was that everything that mattered to me still mattered just as much as it had, it was just that something else now mattered more.
‘It occurred to me that one day I would just come home and find that my daughter had grown up. I couldn’t continue to think about the future when I would have more time to spend with my daughter. Things happen for the first time every day – you can’t have that again. It had to be now. So I made the choice.’
Damien quit his job, and the family moved to Tasmania. His wife worked part-time. When his daughter went to school, Damien joined the crowds of mums dropping their kids off at school for the first time.
‘You know what happens, all the parents mill around with their kids; they’re tiny so you take them into class, make sure their bag’s hung up, and they’ve got a little friend to sit next to,’ he says. ‘I used to do it every day, and I got a really strange vibe off some of the mothers; like I shouldn’t be there or something.
‘Not very far into the school year, I said to the teacher that I’d love to get more involved – maybe come in and do some art, or something. She said: “I really don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of the other mothers aren’t really comfortable having you around. The classroom really is a special place for mothers and children, and perhaps it would be best if you didn’t come in so much.”’
This story isn’t typical, of course; or I hope it’s not – most schools are thrilled to get offers of help from any parent. But the pattern of assumptions about who the helpful parent is most likely to be is amazingly resistant to change, and the reflexive view of schoolrooms as a ‘special place for mothers and children’ is reinforced, silently, every day. In my daughter’s classroom, there is a roster for school reading: it has fifteen names on it, all mothers’ names except for Jeremy’s. (He put his name down anyway, because he’s amazing.) It’s not that fathers aren’t allowed to come in for reading – far from it. It’s just that they’re not really expected to, and if they don’t, no one is going to think any less of them. Wordlessly, the reading roster – with its oestrogen-soaked line-up – poses an implicit question to any bloke who turns up: ‘What are you doing here?’
Do you come here often? ‘I got hit on all the time,’ says Damien Walker. ‘When I was younger I used to love taking my puppy out for a walk – a baby German shepherd, because girls would always come up. But, man. Pushing a baby around? There are a lot of women who think that it’s really sexy for a man to take time out from work to raise a child.’
Of all the things you have to navigate as a mother, tricky dating etiquette is not usually one of them. And yet dads who turn up in the female-dominated school-gate community can find themselves in awkward situations from time to time, arising from being the only bloke in the area. And a bloke giving off powerful ‘good with children’ pheromones at that.
It’s not always sexual, of course. ‘You know that look when you’ve got your toddler in the pram, maybe asleep, and you’ll catch the eye of a lady and she sort of puts her head on one side and gives you a little smile and says, “Oooohhhhh”?’ says Tom Slee, a business development manager in the superannuation field. ‘I got it all the time, from sixteen-year-olds to 96-year-olds. At first, I found it kind of amusing, but then after a while I thought: God. Just stop it.’
There are upsides to this wave of lady-love – ‘You could get away with murder in a shop,’ admits Tom – but there are downsides too.
‘At the local playground, you’d see all the same faces quite regularly – mainly it was just mums, but on school holidays the dads would be there too … the mums would come over and say “Hi”, like usual, and you’d see the dads checking you out, and thinking “Who’s this guy?”’
And when I say ‘downsides’, I include anything from mild embarrassment up to off-the-dial awkward. My friend Greg Cousins, an Adelaide-based teacher and artist, looked after his daughter Ruby when she was little, and was routinely the only dad at various playgroups, reading sessions at the library, and so on. He fell into regular conversation with one of the mothers; they talked about art, architecture – anything rather than kids’ clothes, developmental milestones, and the rest of it. After a while, they agreed to have lunch at her house – a perfectly normal sort of thing that parents who meet through their children do all the time.
But when Greg and Ruby arrived for lunch, something was weird. ‘As soon as she opened the door, she looked really, really embarrassed and uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t work it out, but then suddenly she said something about how she hoped I wouldn’t get the wrong idea about lunch, and that it was just lunch and nothing more. It was weird, but also sort of hilarious. I mean, my kid was there, and two of her kids, and these two enormous dogs that she had jumping around; how exactly were we going to pull it off if we did decide to leap into bed anyway?
‘The lunch was great; it was really nice, but it was funny, like she needed to set things straight.’
Are you okay? Or When are you going back to work? This is another implicit question, often hovering in the minds of people who are awkward around stay-at-home fathers. Another way of putting it is: What happened to you? Can’t you get a job? Can’t you keep a job?
The writer John Birmingham, who works from home, lists the assumptions about stay-at-home dads: ‘They’re considered half-men. Less men than they should be. They’ve lost their job. They can’t get another one. They’re just not up to it. They’ve gone for a lazier option.
‘I am almost shamefully grateful that I worked from home for many years before I became trapped here by family necessity. If I didn’t have a bunch of books and articles to be taking up with every day, I’d feel exposed to the same criticism.’
Assuming that there is something wrong with a man who stays home is not just a casually occurring piece of thoughtless discrimination. It’s so hard-wired that it can enter professional pathology, as an American study of therapists revealed in 1990.2 In this study, two groups of therapists watched a simulated video counselling session with a man, who played the same person with the same problems in each version but was introduced to the first group as an engineer whose wife stayed home and looked after their children. The second group was told that he was married to an engineer, and it was he who stayed home with the children. The therapists in the first group did not proffer any questions at all about the man’s domestic arrangement and whether it generated any stress or difficulty for the client. But in the second group, nearly all the therapists asked questions about his home arrangements,
as well as deeper ones like: ‘What messages from your childhood do you have about what a man is?’ The man insisted in both video versions that he was happy with his work arrangement, his wife, and his family.
But the second group nonetheless rated him as severely depressed, and made recommendations including: ‘You probably need to renegotiate the contract that you’ve got at home.’
The power of Australia’s strong male-breadwinner culture is almost elemental. It’s not impossible, illegal, or even particularly impractical for a woman to be the main breadwinner in a family, or for a father to stay at home with his children. It’s just that the gravitational pull of the orthodox arrangement is very, very strong.
Things change, of course; the standard family arrangement from fifty years ago was that a family unit had one main breadwinner – the man. And part of that arrangement has broken down, certainly. Mothers are much more likely now to be in employment of some kind. In 1983, only 40 per cent of couple families were dual-income. By 2013, that proportion had risen to nearly 60 per cent.3
Simply having a job, though, is only one step for women. Working in a full-time job is another, and only 22 per cent of mothers do that. Earning more than your husband is another step, and only 14 per cent of mothers do that.4 Being the family’s sole breadwinner, as a woman, is the most confronting step of all. And only 3 per cent of mothers do that.5)
Why is it confronting? Because however modern we have become, or think we have become, we retain presumptions – rebuttable though they may be – about which job probably belongs to whom, in an ‘average’ family.
And that is why questions are asked of families in which mothers earn and fathers don’t; to some extent, some people will struggle with the idea that it isn’t all just a big hoax, and that everybody won’t at some point burst out laughing and go back to their proper jobs. What are questions such as ‘But where are the children?’ and ‘When are you going back to work?’ after all, if not thinly disguised and plaintive entreaties for the reinstatement of normalcy?
Jane Morrow, the publisher and family breadwinner, lives in Sydney’s inner west, the organic foodbowl of Australia’s most cosmopolitan city. Instinct tells you that a working woman out-earning her husband there should barely raise an eyebrow. But the questions, the comments and the reactions to her family’s arrangement indicate otherwise. ‘They add up to a persistent, daily feeling that we are doing something very countercultural and that a role reversal is still freakishly rare for this day and age,’ she says. She is genuinely puzzled. Even her parents – both feminists, both of whom raised a daughter to believe that there were no limits to what she could achieve – baulked initially at the idea of Jane’s husband leaving his job, even though Jane had left hers twice before without adverse comment.
‘Role reversal’ – that’s what these arrangements tend to be called, because they are the brute inversion of what we accept to be the standard model. And when men get teased for working in the home, the jokes are all about inversion: Pop on your pinny, mate! Got your hoover? Even the labels ‘house husband’ or ‘Mr Mum’ are cheery reworkings of terms originally designed for women. A mother who works is a ‘working mother’. A father who works is just a normal guy.
‘Trading places’ can be complicated, for a number of reasons. The first is that there will always be people hanging around asking incessant questions, or giving you an Order of Australia for remembering the sunscreen. And it’s hard to feel normal in those circumstances; ‘normal’ mothers and fathers don’t get questions.
The second reason is that men and women usually have entirely different routes to becoming the breadwinner or the homemaker. If you dig through the information from the Census, and find the people who mark ‘Not in the workforce’ when the Census forms ask them what they do: that’s where your stay-at-home parents are. They’re not unemployed, because they’re not looking for work. They’re working at home, and very busy they are too. But there is a crucial difference between stay-at-home men and stay-at-home women. About 80 per cent of ‘Not in the workforce’ women say that they are there by choice, or because they have family responsibilities. But only about 20 per cent of the men give that reason for being out of the workforce. They are much more likely to say that they are there because they can’t find the right job, or because of health reasons.6
This is the genesis of the ‘Are you okay?’ question. And the origin of the strongest stereotype of stay-at-home dads, which is that they are there because they lost their job. In truth, a lot of stay-at-home fathers do start out there because of an external shock of some kind – redundancy, illness, or sudden change of circumstance. Whereas women take time out of work to look after children because that’s what’s expected of them; they don’t need the extra push. Childbirth is the thing that happens to them. Men need something else, as a general rule.
Daniel Petre’s ‘push’ came when his sister was killed in a car accident. The shock of her loss, and the realisation that life was both short and fragile, triggered a significant rearrangement in his thinking, and a determination not to lose time with his family.
‘I think, sadly, you get a massive wake-up call that brings into focus the frailty of life and the short amount of time you’re going to have,’ he says. ‘You develop your relationship with your kids between the ages of zero and nine. After that, it’s pretty much set.’
But he can understand why stay-at-home dads might not classify themselves as such. ‘I do think men are reluctant to admit it. “I’m still looking. I’m still in the game. I’m still a player.” You see them – you see the stay-at-home dads and they do look and feel ostracised. There isn’t a social network for them. That’s where playgroups came from – it doesn’t exist for men. Men who are working don’t really reach out to men who aren’t working.’
The third reason is that even when men and women ‘swap places’ – if we assume for a moment that the orthodox arrangement is the standard one – it’s hardly ever a clean job-swap. Women who earn the household’s main income don’t let go of their other roles at home. Men who stay at home with the children hardly ever behave like classic housewives. And in some instances, all parties involved start exhibiting some very strange behaviour just to cope with and compensate for the fact that everybody around them thinks that they’re freaks.
Housework first. You will remember from Chapter 5 that some weird stuff happens when you look at women’s housework plotted against her earnings. As wives earned more and more of the household’s total income, their housework hours dropped away … right up until the point at which they earned 66.6 per cent of the income, whereupon they started to increase their housework again.
Women who earn all the income in a family, in other words, are likely to do more housework than women who earn the same amount as their husbands. This appears to be a special and unique Australian arrangement.
What explains this seemingly crazed behaviour? Well, the orthodox assumption that still governs Australian families today, for the most part, is that the father will earn more of the money, and the mother will do more of the unpaid work. Simply inverting those two things is not as simple as it sounds. Actually, given all the sensibilities and matters of pride involved, there’s a fairly intense degree of diplomacy involved in shifting any of it about. And when a woman upsets one part of the orthodox equation, by earning more than her husband, one of the things she may try to do – either consciously or subconsciously – to correct the balance is to strengthen her commitment to the other part of the equation.
Put it this way: a woman who earns more money than her husband may be worried that this makes her less womanly. This will not usually manifest itself as a classic Martha Stewart panic attack about the state of the curtains; more usually, it will be a fit of the guilts about being away from the children, or not cooking enough nutritious meals, or persistent secret worrying that everyone thinks she is a Bad Mummy. Guilt about not being very good, in other words, at the job that the majority o
f universal opinion still identifies as your job.
Or, of course, she may not give a flying fork about it. But then there is the ancillary question of her husband’s feelings. That might be another matter entirely. If she is already earning more than him, and thus exposing him to real or imagined opprobrium on that account (taunts, whispers, hilarious remarks about being a ‘kept man’, for instance), then she might feel on some level that having him do the vacuuming as well is a bridge too far. So maybe she’ll just do it, to smooth things over. This might sound silly, when laid out in black and white. And maybe it is silly. But it’s also real; the pattern in which higher-paid wives pick up a bigger share of housework is beyond dispute.
PhD student Karen Reeves, from the University of Sydney, undertook an in-depth study in 2013 of Australian female breadwinners and their experiences.7 On the question of housework, she found that in about two-thirds of the homes she looked at, cleaning was either outsourced, shared, or argued about rather than largely undertaken by the ‘house husband’. Reeves argues that these couples are ‘managing the threat to masculine identity’.
‘There was a sense in many families that the domestic and childcare role was not seen to be the man’s role,’ she wrote. ‘The man, as a father, engaged in primary caregiving but not – as a man – in any cleaning or domestic duties.’8
One of Reeves’ subjects, a solicitor who earned upwards of $200,000 a year, praised her husband for doing all sorts of jobs around the house including cleaning, but noted that he would not iron, because ironing was not a man’s job. ‘He does stamp his foot every once in a while and say “I am not going to be a house husband”,’ she reported.9
It is a tribute to the depth and complexity of the human spirit that ironing could become a sophisticated sociological oar with which a man could hold back a rising tide of imagined emasculation. But there is a nuanced language in tasks, and not all tasks change hands when men and women ‘swap roles’.
The Wife Drought Page 20