Being Daddy
Being Daddy is back! Bless Blogger for absenting itself from the web on Saturday -- I clicked on the long-silent Being Daddy link, while I was surfing around trying to figure out what was up and what was down on the web, and there was Being Daddy, all updated. He left for the Thanksgiving holidays a year ago, and never came back. The Girl is a year older now, and The Wife seems to be back from active service, and I gather Daddy is still wrassling the societal forces that can't figure out he's a stay-at-home dad, and insult him at the grocery store.
They probably don't bother him as much as they used to, now that The Girl is three. I noticed that Sam was left alone the older the child got. At first, he was harassed constantly. The child had colic, which didn't help things at all at all. Absolute strangers think nothing of giving advice to men holding screaming babies. That baby was going to be screaming no matter who held it or who did ANYTHING; screaming is just what was happening. And people mostly left me alone if I was holding the screaming baby. But various humans -- mostly elderly ladies, but not entirely -- used to give Sam all sorts of useless advice when colic hit the child in public. Sam's a mild-mannered sort of man, but boy, did he used to get colicky himself in such situations.
In Sam's case, he's not just male, which reads as "incompetent to care for child" in the deep minds of lots of people, he's also, though the father of the child, and the co-parent of the child, and in full control of any and all situations he might find himself in (well, except maybe that one in which the child fell in the water whilst they were fishing...), someone who appears to be the child's grandfather, so all sorts of humans used to feel like they needed to intervene, as apparently in their deep minds "older" doubled the incompetency factor of "male."
But it doesn't happen so much anymore, out on the street in public.
We still have to explain ourselves sometimes, though. As far as I can tell, all of the child's buddies are managed by moms, and the moms, when calling up to make arrangements, insist on talking to me, who am at work professing to students, instead of Sam, who has answered the phone, and already put in his years of professing to students, and now doesn't do it anymore.
So then, eventually, I call them back in the evening and am all cheery and polite, and then I hand them back over to Sam, cause I'm not going to be in on the after-school activities.
Yesterday one of the moms stopped me after mass -- it took me a minute to figure out who she was talking to, cause she was calling me "Mrs. ______," which name I don't use, though I consider it honorable, but then I remembered it was me, and she wanted to set up a work date for her child and mine, as they have some sort of project which my child didn't write down, so we didn't know about, since my child has that paying-attention problem, and I had to tell her she'd be dealing with Sam, and I tell you, you should have seen the look on her face. Clearly I've been doing badly by the child. Well, hell, I took him to mass. Off my back, please.
(Always at that point, once I've told people I kept my own name, and I'm a working mom, I refrain from saying what I do. Cause often, when I tell people I'm a professor of medieval literature, you can see their brains shut down from the overload. Though some people then look at the child and say, "Ah." Yep. That explains it. Well, half of it. There's the professor of Victorian literature, too. He was in on this.)
Anyway, Derrida is dead, and Christopher Reeve is dead, and Melissa Etheridge had to cancel her tour so she can go recover from breast cancer, and I'm going off to work. But Being Daddy is back.
And Sam is working, too.
They probably don't bother him as much as they used to, now that The Girl is three. I noticed that Sam was left alone the older the child got. At first, he was harassed constantly. The child had colic, which didn't help things at all at all. Absolute strangers think nothing of giving advice to men holding screaming babies. That baby was going to be screaming no matter who held it or who did ANYTHING; screaming is just what was happening. And people mostly left me alone if I was holding the screaming baby. But various humans -- mostly elderly ladies, but not entirely -- used to give Sam all sorts of useless advice when colic hit the child in public. Sam's a mild-mannered sort of man, but boy, did he used to get colicky himself in such situations.
In Sam's case, he's not just male, which reads as "incompetent to care for child" in the deep minds of lots of people, he's also, though the father of the child, and the co-parent of the child, and in full control of any and all situations he might find himself in (well, except maybe that one in which the child fell in the water whilst they were fishing...), someone who appears to be the child's grandfather, so all sorts of humans used to feel like they needed to intervene, as apparently in their deep minds "older" doubled the incompetency factor of "male."
But it doesn't happen so much anymore, out on the street in public.
We still have to explain ourselves sometimes, though. As far as I can tell, all of the child's buddies are managed by moms, and the moms, when calling up to make arrangements, insist on talking to me, who am at work professing to students, instead of Sam, who has answered the phone, and already put in his years of professing to students, and now doesn't do it anymore.
So then, eventually, I call them back in the evening and am all cheery and polite, and then I hand them back over to Sam, cause I'm not going to be in on the after-school activities.
Yesterday one of the moms stopped me after mass -- it took me a minute to figure out who she was talking to, cause she was calling me "Mrs. ______," which name I don't use, though I consider it honorable, but then I remembered it was me, and she wanted to set up a work date for her child and mine, as they have some sort of project which my child didn't write down, so we didn't know about, since my child has that paying-attention problem, and I had to tell her she'd be dealing with Sam, and I tell you, you should have seen the look on her face. Clearly I've been doing badly by the child. Well, hell, I took him to mass. Off my back, please.
(Always at that point, once I've told people I kept my own name, and I'm a working mom, I refrain from saying what I do. Cause often, when I tell people I'm a professor of medieval literature, you can see their brains shut down from the overload. Though some people then look at the child and say, "Ah." Yep. That explains it. Well, half of it. There's the professor of Victorian literature, too. He was in on this.)
Anyway, Derrida is dead, and Christopher Reeve is dead, and Melissa Etheridge had to cancel her tour so she can go recover from breast cancer, and I'm going off to work. But Being Daddy is back.
And Sam is working, too.
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