As any long-time follower of my writing knows, I have been trying to monetize dadhood for a while now. Why have five children if you can’t write about them? Or rather, as the bills pile up, how can one not write about them? I have written about being a pot-smoking dad (which I’m not), about why children don’t need classical music lessons (which got me more hate mail than you can imagine), about why we had a fifth, about forty thoughts on a fourth daughter (which I heard got translated into Uzbek, or something like that), and much more. What I don’t think I have written about, explicitly, is being a stay-at-home dad.
Why have five children if you can’t write about them? Or rather, as the bills pile up, how can one not write about them?
To be clear, I was never a full-time stay-at-home dad, except for a month here or there; the norm, after the birth of each child, was for me to go back to work, after a little while, for 20-30 hours a week. So I did a lot more childcare than the average dad, but less than somebody who had sole care of the baby while a partner worked 40 hours a week. But hey, I certainly could have weighed in; I had enough cred. The reason I didn’t is because it never seemed that remarkable to me. I figured lots of dad were doing it, and some were doing much more.
I think I was wrong. Because I still see articles like this one, in The Atlantic, making the case for stay-at-home, full-time dadding as if it’s a pretty rare thing. Which is must be, elseThe Atlantic wouldn’t publish pieces about it. This particular piece, by one Shannon Carpenter, is quite good. Here is a bit of it:
Over time, I raised three kids while my wife advanced in the advertising world. She negotiated contracts; I negotiated naptime. She worked hard to bring in new clients; I worked hard to raise our children. The division of labor has benefited our individual strengths: We both agree that I’m more patient while she is more business-savvy.
Yet, after all this time, many people still can’t compute that I’m my kids’ primary caregiver. Several years ago, as I was fetching my youngest child from preschool, a kid asked the teacher why my son was always picked up by his father; the teacher explained that I was a “daddy-mommy.” As I wrote this article, I learned that I’d missed the sign-up for the same child’s parent-teacher conference because I never got the email. My wife did, even though she barely interacts with the school.
I wish I could be surprised that this kind of confusion hasn’t gone away. I live just outside Kansas City, Missouri, in a rather progressive part of the Midwest where people tend to accept those who buck traditionally gendered roles. In 2021, the proportion of American fathers who were stay-at-home parents was 7 percent, up from 5 percent in 2020; dads account for 18 percent of all stay-at-home parents. Still, I’ve come to believe that a gradual increase in the number of stay-at-home dads alone won’t alter people’s perceptions. Two problems also need solving: policies that discourage men from being involved parents, and a cultural misunderstanding about men doing care work.
I want to say amen to all of that, and to suggest that you read this gent’s piece. Really, I have only one thing to add, which is that he overlooks a third barrier to the normalization of stay-at-home dadding: the refusal of men who could take paternity leave to do so. I don’t know one man who took the unpaid leave guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, and I know very few men who took advantage of more generous, paid leaves guaranteed by their employers (I am thinking of men I know who are white-shoe lawyers, surgeons, professors, etc.). Reasons for not taking leave—which they gave me when I pressed them, which I did, sometimes obnoxiously—ranged from the sad “My boss would never understand” to the sadder, if candid, “My wife is better at this stuff anyway.”
I don’t know one man who took the unpaid leave guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, and I know very few men who took advantage of more generous, paid leaves guaranteed by their employers…
But really, as terrible as it is that the US doesn’t make it easier for parents to take time off to be with their children, we still have to work to get to a place where men who can take time off have the courage to do so, and the interest. Right now, most don’t.
Am I missing something? Drop me a line at mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail.com.
A new podcast!
To quote the publicity material:
LBI Presents is a new podcast from the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. It’s hosted by author and journalist Mark Oppenheimer. Mark chats with key experts as we dive into LBI’s vast archive & explore the remarkable lives and histories of German-speaking Jews . . . beyond the stories you already know.
If you use Apple Podcasts, here it is.
(The Leo Baeck Institute, New York | Berlin is a research library and archive focused on the history of German-speaking Jews.)
Words of thanksgiving from Mr. Lincoln
On Thanksgiving morning—American Thanksgiving morning; as every year some Canadian friend of mine gets confused and wonders what holiday we’re celebrating in November (they have a Thanksgiving in October, which they don’t seem to much care about)—I took the two youngest children to synagogue for Thursday morning minyan. Thursday morning is a good time to go, because portions of the Torah are read on Monday and Thursday mornings (as well as the more widely known Saturday morning), but only if they have 10 adults. Being an adult, I count, so it’s an especial mitzvah just to show up.
Anyway, as the service was drawing to a close, our wonderful rabbi, Eric Woodward, said, “Let me offer a few words of Torah”—and he then proceeded to offer a few words of what we might call American Torah, the Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, attributed to Lincoln but likely written by his secretary of state, William Seward. As our rabbi pointed out, 1863 was a tough time, not unlike today’s tough time, for Americans and for anyone who cares about peace. And he suggested that the words have resonance today. And he then read the Thanksgiving Proclamation offered just a few weeks after Gettysburg. Here it is, with apologies that it’s a few days late. The syntax is a bit tough on modern eyes and ears, but bear with it, because it’s worth it, a reminder that even in dark times we should give thanks:
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
Recommendation #1
I am not big on recommending other newsletters, because to be honest I don’t read a lot of other newsletters. But I do read Dan Friedman’s “Voice of Reason,” and last week he said some very smart stuff, like this:
I can’t be at the march in D.C. today because I’m still infectious from Covid, but I wish I was there because I wanted to show up for the Jews, Israel, and the Peace Bloc. I wanted to literally stand for the things that serious people can agree on:
1. Right of Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state
Right of Palestinians to have a democratic state west of Jordan
Condemnation of Hamas’ slaughter, rape and desecration of civilians, especially on October 7
Need for the immediate return of all the hostages: young, elderly, infirm: all kidnapped in a war crime
Rights of all people to worship and love as they choose
Condemnation of the antisemitic violence, rhetoric, and vandalism seen at rallies and in attacks across the world
Condemnation of any Islamophobia from whatever community on whatever platform.
Rec #2
A very different newsletter, but one no less worthwhile, which I have just discovered is by Jeff Maurer, who has been a writer for John Oliver’s show. I’ll cut to the chase and say this particular post made me laugh as hard as anything in 2023. If it doesn’t make you laugh, we have different senses of humor. Which is okay. But I gotta say: he nailed my sense of humor dead-on. I particularly love how he made me laugh about something not at all funny: the war in Israel.
Unsubscribed!
I unsubscribed from the list of the Straus Family Historical Society, which keeps humble folk like me in touch with other descendants of the august German-Jewish Strauses, cousins + nieces + nephews of Isidor Straus, of Macy’s fame, who went down on the Titanic with his wife, Ida. I kept waiting for some of the money to devolve to me, but I got lots of emails, no surprise inheritance.
What I’m reading . . .
I’m reading Will Hermes’s biography of Lou Reed, whose music I like but don’t adore, and whom I have never cared that much about. The book is just riveting, and as somebody working on a biography, I am taking all kinds of lessons from it. I love a good rock-star bio or memoir. Favorites include Springsteen, Keith Richards, Bob Mould, and Jim DeRogatis’s bio of Lester Bangs (not himself a rock star, but kind of a rock star, right?). I once got halfway through Wolfman Jack’s memoir before getting very painfully dumped, and I have never been able to finish it. But it too was great.
Back to Lou Reed. One of the great things about the bio are all the famous or almost-famous or famous-but-forgotten people who pop up, sending me down Wikipedia rabbit-holes (some are now so obscure they don’t have Wiki pages). I am thinking of people like Barbara Rubin, 1960s filmmaker and scene-maker who was close to Warhol, Ginsberg, and Dylan and ended up a Breslover Hasid in the south of France. You can’t make this stuff up. Or Tom Wilson, a black man who graduated from Harvard in 1954—where he was chair of the Young Republicans!—and went on to produce Dylan and Frank Zappa. Want to know more about him? Turns out he is dead, left behind no papers, but is the subject of a documentary being made my Marshall Crenshaw. Because of course he is.
Having offered peak insanity for this week, I’ll bid you farewell. Til next time.