I am on the Board of our local co-op Playschool. Last night and the night before we held our Orientation meetings. Attending the meetings were mamas and daddies with a few grandmas sprinkled in. At the beginning of our meeting we are supposed to go around, introduce ourselves and indicate our child’s name and class day, then tell the group something special we can bring to the Co-op – a talent, ability, or hobby we share. Well both nights when we went around with this the daddies there didn’t say shit besides their name and their child’s. If their partners were there they would literally POINT to the wife with this panicky fear in their eye, as if they had taken a vow of assy silence. The couple of daddies whose partners weren’t there said stuff like, “Hi, I’m Chris, and my wife is Marta. I don’t have ANY talents but my wife has TONS” and everyone would chuckle like, “Ha ha ha, of course we don’t expect anything from you when it comes to your child’s school development. You’re ‘just a dad!'”
Every time I see this I am so irritated. And it keeps rearing its head. There is a socially-supported idea that dads don’t know what goes on with the kids’ day, dads are out of touch, dads are out of their element in the touchy-queery world of singing songs and dancing with their children, etc. This attitude can have huge repurcussions because (among other things) it stunts some dads from finding their way. For example: I have seen an alarming number of dads do the “helpless” parenting when it comes to their child’s bad behavior. The “helpless” parenting often morphs to the “authoritarian douche” parenting (a phrase a friend of mine coined so well), all of which is often a rather loud signal to Mama to come bail them out. Rinse and repeat; kids grow up knowing dad is a child inside, Mama grows up resentful, Dad doesn’t enjoy his own children nearly as much as he could.
It isn’t just the daddies’ passiveness that bugs me. Mamas play into it too, big time. I have seen Mamas try to “help” dads just because of the fact they are dads (this pisses my husband off, so don’t ever do it to him). One time at Playschool a couple biddies hovered around my husband, holding our then two-week old son. He had to look dead in their eye and say “I’m cool. This is my baby.” and make a karate chop motion to get them to back off.
I guess really, when it comes down to it, we are still saying children and their business is somehow demeaning, somehow something only second-class or auxillary persons attend to.