Married to Mr. Mom

I know two wonderful men who would like to settle down. One would like to start a family, the other would like to give his teenager a sibling or two.

They are both smart, genuine, funny, sexy, engaging, fit, spiritual, educated, talented, interesting and health conscious. They also happen to be hot. Women notice them, flirt with them, come on to them wherever they go. One’s 30, the other 45. They would make beautiful babies.

So, what’s the problem? Well, there really isn’t a problem, unless, of course, there is for you. See, both of them are poor by Marin County (and Bay Area) standards, and both want to be Mr. Moms.

I need to clarify poor. Poor around these parts is not really poor, after all. They’re both employed and make a decent living, enough to afford (rented) housing, a car, necessities, fun and travel. It’s just that neither of them makes enough to buy the American Dream: the 2,500-plus-square-foot house with a Lexus and Porsche SUV parked outside, kids on the Squaw ski team, summers in Paris, winters in Aspen, spring break in Costa Rica and dinners at Boulevard and the French Laundry (if all that’s your version of a dream and not some bourgeois nightmare).

And neither has the desire to have that or to hustle to make an income to support that (not that they’re against making money. It’s just not the be all and end all).

But mostly they imagine the joys of staying home — the way some 159,000 men already do, according to the U.S. census — cleaning, watching after the kids and then cooking a fabulous meal to share with their sweetie when she comes home after a day at the office (or in the field, or at the lab, or in the courtroom). A way of living that I and many of my girlfriends knew.

Being a mom and housewife is not something I dreamed about. I always imagined I would get married and eventually have kids. Having grown up in a feminist world, though, I knew I was going to have a career and was pretty focused on making that happen.

How much money a man made never seemed to enter into my love equation, much to my mother’s chagrin (“Honey,” she still counsels me during our weekly phone chats, “it’s just as easy to fall in love with a wealthy man as it is with a poor man.”)

I was in my 20s when I met Rob, and when we talked about marrying and having a family, we made a decision that, hardship or not — and, living in Mill Valley, it often was one — one of us should be home with our son. Since Rob made more than I did, we let that be the deciding factor. But I always had a part-time job in addition to my full-time one: Mothering. I also did all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, errands, homework, overseeing the day-to-day maintenance as well as volunteering at Trent’s schools. My big luxury was a weekly two-hour hike with my girlfriends that sometimes spilled over into a coffee date, too. I was not a classic Marin Matron, spending my days lunching with the ladies, organizing galas and shopping the boutiques. I was more a 1950s-like homemaker. That seemed to work fine during Trent’s childhood, but when all hell broke loose in the marriage, an ugly bitterness appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

“Why don’t you go off to work every day, and I can stay home with Trent and take two-hour hikes?” Rob said angrily, pointing his finger at me as we sat in couples counseling.

I was stunned. I started to hyperventilate. Where in the world did this come from? Not only would we be poorer if I were the breadwinner, but … I didn’t want to do it! And it wasn’t just that I would miss my so-called freedom — I actually thought that all his lunch hours, business trips and even commute time offered him more flexibility, more alone time, than I had. Staying at home can be a very isolated world at times. Plus if I wanted a break, I had to either take it during Trent’s limited school hours or pay for a baby sitter, a luxury we couldn’t afford.

No, the main reason I feared him being Mr. Mom is that I didn’t trust that he would take care of things. (Translation: Take care of things the way I did.)

I know a few women who are the breadwinners in their families. Although I acknowledge that it wasn’t a life I would choose, I admire them for their choices. It’s been only recently that I learned that so many of them — now divorced — were biding their time, getting angrier and angrier that they were cranking out the paycheck while their hubbies were off having “all the fun.”

Missed piano recitals, school plays, Little League games, field trips. Working moms — and dads — don’t often have the flexibility to take time off during the day to take part in many activities in their children’s lives. Rob never seemed to be ruffled by that — I think he might have even been thankful — but for the full-time working moms I know, it was a different story.

Beyond that, the men never seemed to handle the kids and the house the way the women wanted them to, causing arguments that inevitably were never resolved.

“Of course you’re going to get resentful after a while,” says Anna, a CFO who brought the big bucks home while her former husband watched their kids — or, as she says, watched TV with the kids.
“But then couldn’t all men feel the same way about their stay-at-home wives, who have the choice of working or not? Wouldn’t it work both ways?” I ask, squirming, thinking back to the way Rob looked in the counseling office. He looked ... resentful.

Doesn’t a man have the right to stay home, too, to raise his kids? Wouldn’t that benefit his family — and society?

Even if a man doesn’t want to stay at home, his income can be an issue with women. Gary, a successful business owner I know, says his former wife as well as almost all the women he’s had relationships with since, left him for men who made more money than he does. It doesn’t make me feel too good about my gender, but I know there are many women who look at a man’s worth — and the lifestyle it can get them — and little beyond that. And there’s a new generation of women who look at their harried supermoms who did it all — career, marriage, motherhood — and say, “Screw that. I want to be married and stay home.” And that will take a hubby with bucks, especially in Marin.

Which leads me back to my “poor” Mr. Mom wannabes. For the 45-year-old who already has a child, it’s just a “that’s life” sadness that he may never have another child or find a woman who’d delight in coming home from work to him, his luminous smile and an immaculate house (that she would have to buy, of course). For the 30-year-old, however, the sadness is much greater.

How nice if couples could decide what their partnership will look like with enough honesty that resentments didn’t factor in, and neither was tweaked by who made the money and who stayed home. And how nice if, when they shared that decision with others, they could be greeted with, “Congratulations. What a great choice.”