Dave Neiwert has a nice post up today about the masculine rewards of being a Stay-At-Home Dad (SAHD, as the kids in the know say). He writes:
You see, for the past six years, while I’ve been editing my blog and writing my books, my primary job description has been stay-at-home father for my daughter, Fiona. She turned six earlier this summer and will start first grade this fall, so I’ve gotten a real job again and have spent much of the summer ruminating on what it’s all meant.
And I have to tell you: it’s been without question the most satisfying and rewarding thing I’ve done in my life. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, it will be with the knowledge I really did accomplish something worthwhile, and nothing — certainly not sneers from the haplessly ignorant — can take that away. The idea that it is not a masculine thing to do just seems absurd and incomprehensible to me.
Perhaps more to the point, it’s only confirmed my belief that it’s an experience more men need. It’s important not just for making men better fathers, but I think also for making women better mothers — and most of all, for giving child-rearing the cherished and significant place it should have in broader society.
I’m not a SAHD, but I feel hardcore enough as a dad to feel vindicated by Neiwert’s piece.
One note of dissent, though, regarding these comments from Neiwert:
People who talk about masculinity — especially conservatives, who seem to obsess about it, but in a peculiarly juvenile way — have always seemed a little weird to me. It’s like the cliche retort the wealthy like to use: “If you have to ask how much it is, you can’t afford it.” Masculinity is one of those things where if you have to talk about it, you’re never going to get it. And the harder you try, the less a man you become.
…Being a real man, the way I was taught by other men — in that silent way that cannot be communicated in mere words — meant being a whole man. … So I grew up masculine because I knew in my bones what I was, first of all. I never thought much about it because maleness lies in the doing and the being, not the thinking.
You can guess, perhaps, why, as the author of blog dedicated to thinking and talking about masculinity, I object to the notion that "maleness lies in the doing and the being, not the thinking." This seems like a re-iteration, basically, of the traditional concept of stoic masculinity that so much stands in the way of more men doing the rewarding, important, meaningful, emotionally attuned work that Neiwert and other real men are doing as involved, committed fathers.
Or, to approach it from another angle, I’m sure Neiwert is right that those of us who talk a lot about masculinity have some pretty serious insecurities about it, but one wonders what Neiwert thinks us insecures should do — not talk about it? Writers are useful, in part, precisely because we do engage with our insecurities, and he’s fooling himself if he thinks it’s only conservatives who have some deep-seated and self-destructive insecurities about their masculinity.
The truth is that most of Neiwert’s post belies this macho rhetoric. e sounds like a pretty expressive guy, actually, but that he falls into the Marlboro Man cliches so easily is unfortunate, and also indicative, I think, of how deep some of these tropes go.
