Sexy and I know it

I recently read an article on how sexy stay-at-home dads are.

And he’s right, we are sexy.

But I found myself at odds with some of the points in the article.

(Before I start, I really shouldn’t identify myself as a stay-at-home dad.  My wife and I tag-team parent.  We both work 40 hours a week, bring home a steady income, miss family events for work, and all that stuff, but just do so on opposite schedules.  It so happens that my job involves lots of nights and weekends, so when we talk about stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, we’re talking pretty strictly about moms and dads who are home during traditional working hours, between 9 and 5, and that, more often than not, is when you’ll find me with my daughter.  I don’t consider myself the primary caregiver, because I don’t think of either of us as primary.  We raise her together.  But for the purposes of this post, I identify with many of the qualities cited in the stay-at-home dad.  Like sexy.  Especially sexy.)

And the article gets some things right, like that images and ideas of masculinity are rapidly changing.  Going to the gym, getting those perfect abs, having the coolest clothes, the nicest car, the biggest wallet, it might be that guys have miscalculated what in fact “sexy” really is.

Except for this guy.  This guy is sexy. 
Even my wife thinks so, and I really can't argue.

But the article’s author tries, as other similar articles on fatherhood I’ve read recently, to link the Rise of Dads with the recession, pointing out again and again that most of the jobs lost since 2008 have belonged to men.  So, you have point 1: Men being laid off; and you have point 2: More dads staying home and taking on childcare responsibility; and, most importantly, point 3: You can give it a clever man, like “mancession.”  Conclusion: Recession is causing men to be more responsible dads.

Pardon my French, but that’s crap.

As I have tried to explain elsewhere on this blog, there is a world of difference between a guy who has participated in the biological act to beget a child (kudos, by the way), and a Dad.

Having an unemployed father sitting around the house more often is as likely to turn him into a Dad as having lots of books sitting on a shelf is to make your kid smart.  Context is everything. You buy your kids lots of books, but never read to him.  Your argument is invalid. Put a stroller in front of a Dad Lite, and he’s still a Dad Lite.  Put a stroller in front of a Homebrew Dad, and observe him in his natural habitat.

"You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good."

Without a doubt, more guys are out of work, and more guys are choosing to work from home or stay home with the kids, which, for a Homebrew Dad, might be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal economic situation.  But that doesn’t mean that being out of work equates to being a better Dad.  Interrelation does not equal causation.

No, the rise of my archetypal Homebrew Dad predates the recession by quite a bit.  It has many causes and many antecedents, but some of the ones that I’ve identified revolve around revolutions in childrearing that differ drastically from the way we Homebrew Dads were raised, and the rise of other seemingly unrelated movements, like homebrewing, Slow Food, organic foods, and the environmental movement, all of which share the common threads of challenging the previous generation’s way of doing things while consciously trying to do the right thing of the next generation, principles that helped pave the way to a different approach to fatherhood.

As fathers, we tend to reflect oour own fathers.  For some of us, we choose a straight mirror image; whether that is for good or ill depends on the kind of father you had.  Some, myself included, see our fathers and strive to be more of a curved mirror, reflecting back the same, but opposite of how we were raised, an inverted image of the old Dad Lite.

So, guys, if you’re still on the fence about this whole Homebrew Dad thing, if you think you can stick to the old Dad Lite social roles, buy yourself a nice sports car, and hit the gym rather than the playground, go ahead.  I’m long past the point where I’d even entertain the idea that I’m sexy to anybody, but for some reason, my fantastic wife has stuck with my old, cranky, graying, balding, stinky self for all these years, and it just might be because, at least to her, this Homebrew Dad is one sexy beast.

And that’s good enough for me.