Briefly, I was a disillusioned dad...it’s hard to admit this, but I actually wanted to be a mom...sort of. Ok… I didn’t want to BE a mom, but I wanted that easy way that moms slip into conversation about nothing - diapers, diets, sleep habits… you know. So I tried talking to moms like that at my daughter’s swimming lessons - and it didn’t work so well for me.
I’m a teacher, so I’ve been able to go to the 3:30 swim lessons from the beginning. Typically, I’ve been the only dad there. When the kids turned three and we were asked to not join them in the pool, I found myself standing on an observation deck with the moms, anxiously watching our kids brave four feet of water. Due to our shared emotional experience, I began to feel like one of the crowd. After a couple of lessons, though, when I tried to strike up those easy conversations, my attempts were met with perfunctory responses - and deep concentration on their children’s progress. Time after time, the conversation went something like this:
Me - “It looks like your daughter has gotten over her tears from last week...(pause, waiting for response)...that’s great, she is really taking to the pool...(pause)...We have a one year old, who isn’t nearly as interested in the water as his sister, she’s the blonde one right there...so we’ll probably have to push him a bit like you did with your daughter… it looks like it all worked out for the best in your case, though...”
The Mother - “Yeah.”
Inevitably, as the conversation died a painful death, I would drift away and a real mother would approach and suddenly the two would be talking, laughing, sharing their deepest child-rearing secrets, and generally having a great time.
After initially feeling like a freshman in high school who can’t bust into the upperclassman’s conversations, I realized that something was going on. I asked my wife, Tonya, about it. Her response? “Stay at home dads have it rough - it’s always a little awkward.” I related the story to women that I work with, and every one of them said the same thing, “It’s easy to talk to other women, but I’d never do that with a man.” So what was a she-dad to do? Not much, I realized, unless I wanted to force myself into conversations where I wasn’t wanted and seem really creepy.
For a few months, that was it. I wasn’t pleased with my conclusion, but at least I’d figured it out. Then, I realized there was a little more to the story; it wasn’t as neat an ending as I had assumed.
In May that year, Tonya delivered our third child early. While five weeks premature is hardly a blip on medicine’s statistical radar screen, our little guy wasn’t happy being a statistic. His lungs were premature, resulting in respiratory distress syndrome, and he aspirated a large amount of amniotic fluid, resulting in pneumonia. He was taken by helicopter to Dartmouth-#########’s Newborn Intensive Care Unit, where he spent almost three weeks.
For that period of time, our lives stopped. We froze. We could do nothing but sit next to his bed and stare at him, tiny and naked under a warmer, and watch his numbers: His breathing rate, his heart rate, his blood/oxygen levels, his blood pressure. My mother came and took care of our two other children while my wife and I watched, too frightened to do anything but hope that he would be ok. We were afraid to share our own fears because we didn’t want to scare each other. We just watched him try to breathe as we held our breath.
Tonya’s friends swung into action. They called her, they came and sat with her, they set up a meal chain that supplied food to our kids while we were gone. They understood her fear and her pain and they knew what to do. My friends, on the other hand, did nothing. They did absolutely nothing. No one called; no one drove to the hospital.
For that short while, I really longed for the overt emotional expression that women seemed to be so comfortable with. I remembered the swimming pool; perhaps it wasn’t that women don’t want to talk to men, maybe men are just so bad at it that most women have given up on them.
In the ensuing weeks, however, I realized that what I had mistaken for emotional reticence was actually emotional subtlety. Slowly, things began to happen. The receptionist at the Intensive Care Unit called me over to inform me that a friend had called. He’d gotten my wife and I a gift certificate at a steak house near the hospital so we could go to dinner. Then, a male student of mine secretly found a female co-worker and gave her a card to give to me. He asked her not to tell anyone. In the card, he cracked a couple of jokes at my expense and wished me well. Then, about three days after we returned home, my neighbor called. He had some trees that he’d cut down in his back yard and wondered if I’d help move them after the kids were in bed. I went over. We dragged the big logs around for about an hour, then he said, “I got some beers, want one?” We sat on the back steps of his garage talking about everything that had happened, swatted mosquitoes and drank beer. It was nice.
At the end of it all, my son came home, gained weight and became a beautiful baby. Slowly, we regained balance and normalcy returned. I went back to work and began telling our story time and time again.
At about the 100th retelling, it hit me. Tonya had gotten a lot of support, but she had to talk, on demand, to every visitor and every concerned phone call. Twenty times a day, she was exploring her emotions and re-living our experience even as we were living it. I, on the other hand, was pretty much left alone. I was never bothered when I didn’t feel like talking. In trade, I had no one to talk to when I needed it.
I did get some support, though. I got made fun of, a bit of a workout, a few beers and a great steak. I hated to admit it, but if any of my friends were having a tough time, that’s exactly what I’d recommend for them.
Maybe I had been too hard on my friends, maybe I’m not as sensitive as I thought, and maybe, just maybe, I’m just your average Dad after all.
