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SAHDs are hard to pigeonhole

For those of you not keeping score at home, I've been working part-time on the weekends back at my old museum job because they tend to be busy at the holidays.

That's right, before this particular gig I've had many incarnations. I'm like Lord Vishnu with many avatars. Maybe sometime we'll go into my unique insights about the educational system as a standardized test scorer where I helped decide whether your 8th or 12th grader would graduate. I'm guessing very few of you know that my resume includes the staging of a play I've directed at a Tony Award-winning theater. Or that I used to be a pole vaulter--now there was something my mom probably worried about with justification!

I've been thinking a lot lately about roles. Not so much gender roles, more like phases of life and how we define ourselves...or are defined by others. Kelly and I discuss frequently how traditional our nontraditional relationship is. If you take "unmarried" and "stay at home dad" out of the labels and just say "committed relationship where one parent works and one parent is at home with the children" our family looks...boring.

You see a lot of data on Stay At Home Dads and we're sort of growing but still off the radar. One of my little curious questions in the back of my head is how I get counted in the unemployment numbers. I'm both in and out of the workforce. Simultaneously looking and not looking for work. There's the problem with statistics--and SAHD--right there. It's not like we're easily defined. If somehow a job magically came along and paid me more than Kelly and switched the benefit to me working and her staying home--we'd be all over that. I'm not a SAHD because it's what the cool kids are doing. But I'm also not a SAHD because I have to be or fate has somehow "stuck" me with this dynamic.

This is my last two days at the museum coming up. It's been fine. I come home missing my kids. The money in pocket is good, but you also can't put a value on the simple act of being able to go to the grocery as a family to get what you need. Solo shopping is perhaps not worth the cost of employment. Certainly not bike rides as a family over the summer. Our weekly trips to the farmers market. Time to train for races. Those are more valuable.

No, this role is perhaps my best and favorite. Not only because it works for us, but for what it gives us.