Welcome to the Bloviation!

Nothing strokes a fledgling writer’s ego like being told he is a good writer.

So, blame my friend Melissa for this blog.

Let me explain. One day, avoiding work, I found online what felt like the fifty-seven millionth article about the “mommy wars,” that media-fueled creation that describes the push and pull between working and stay-at-home mothers. (As if working stay-at-home mother is a contradiction.) The article was your standard stuff about the guilt mothers feel about going back to work and how hard it is to manage families and jobs.

As I usually do when I see this sort of thing, I posted it with a lament that no one ever talks about stay-at-work dads. I can appreciate what these women go through, since I feel an immense amount of guilt when I don’t get to spend as much time with Josie as I would like to in the name of helping support my family financially. It’s a choice I have to make in conjunction with my wife. But as enlightened as we think we are these days, it’s taken as gospel that women have this guilt (which make sense) but men, well, don’t.

This annoys me, as most of my friends, even when the mother stays at home, are highly engaged fathers. Essentially, my lament was yet another “what’s up with this?”
My friend Melissa suggested that, since I was a good writer, that I write something about it. Saying something like that is like an Adam Eaton fastball grooved right over the middle of the plate that even a Washington National could crush.

So: here it is. I will now be adding my voice to the blogosphere. (I hate that term, by the way. It sounds like something a disgraced Illinois governor might participate in.) They say that if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters, one of them will write the works of Shakespeare. Well, I will not claim to write Shakespeare. But maybe we’ll now be one monkey closer to someone who will.

I want to look at the media and the world around me, and not so much defend fathers, but re-examine in my own mind and in an open forum why the world is ignorant to fathers these two-income, day-care, nurturing-father days. In my dad’s generation, fathers worked and mothers changed diapers. That’s not the case as much anymore, but advertising, movies, television, books, magazines, and the mass media take it as a given that mothers raise the kids in spite of fathers, rather than in concert with them.

I don’t want to get political or vituperative, and I am not in any way going to denigrate mothers. I was raised by a number of wonderful women, and my daughters have been raised in part by the most wonderful mother I know. I just want to try and see if I can understand why a mother’s choices are given so much attention while a father’s choices are assumed to be proscribed.

And if you don’t like what I say, respond. Or blame Melissa.