I'm not Mr. Mom anymore.
It was, without question, the best job I ever had. I did it for ten years, until the youngest of my three daughters was heading into first grade. A big part of it was learning to cook for my family, a task I had to learn, but something I now do for fun. So how did I get there?
We quit government service back in the nineties when we had only two daughters, both born during our time at the embassy in Mexico City. They were about a year and two-and-a-half years old when we decided we didn't want to raise them in the Foreign Service—if we had, we would have spent a year back in DC, then, then at least two years at the embassy in Managua, where they most likely would have started school. We already had our onward assignments there, and the welcome cable said all sorts of things about how many hours a day we'd have electrical power, how often we'd be able to get things like bread and milk... It didn't sound like a great environment to raise a couple of kids.
So we decided to leave government service and move back to the States to raise the girls in a more stable environment. We landed in Texas, where Kathleen was hired by a small, private university. The plan was to get settled, then I'd find a job in my field, we'd put the girls in daycare, and we'd get to the business of living our lives.
Kathleen started work and I went about getting our household set up. After having a job where the government took care of pretty much everything except shopping for food, making the meals and sleeping in the beds, it was quite a change. We decided we'd have out big meal at midday and that Kathleen would come home for that. I could cook some basic stuff—spaghetti, roast chicken, various breakfasts—but I'd never done that for more than just two people, at least not with any regularity.
As near as anyone can recall, I made the chicken the day Kathleen started her new job, and had it on the table with mashed potatoes and a vegetable when she came home around noon. We all ate, she headed back to work, I cleared the table and did the dishes. Then I sat down in the living room, pretty much exhausted. It seemed like I'd been sprinting, on a dead-run that started around seven that morning. But I did it! The family was fed!
Then it struck me: I have to do this again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that...
But it turned out that I kinda liked it. Kathleen had
The Joy of Cooking and I got a copy of
The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. I made my first meat loaf. I looked for a stroganoff recipe that didn't use tomato sauce. I started doing the grocery shopping, based on what I was planning to cook that week. I realized we could have pretty much anything we wanted for dinner as long as I was willing to learn how to cook it.
I also realized that I was really enjoying being a dad.
That probably sounds silly—after all, my older daughter was 2½ years old, so it's not like this was some kind of new experience. But actually, it was. When we worked for the government, the nanny took care of the girls all week long. I'd kiss them goodbye in the morning and hold them on my lap to read a book or watch TV in the evening. No nanny on the weekends, but Kathleen was a pretty engaged mother, so my parenting experience was a lot like a stone skipping off the surface of water. The water was there, but I never really got down into it.
That changed dramatically in Texas. I was with the girls all day, every day. I dressed them, I fed them, I changed diapers, I picked up after them, I took them shopping with me and to the park to play. And I liked it. Heck, they were even more fun than cats! And it turned out you could actually toilet train them!
But there was this plan: me finding a job, the girls into daycare. Suddenly that didn't sound so good any more. But I needed to talk about it with Kathleen.
Kathleen's favorite meal is lasagna.We always have it on her birthday and on Mothers' Day, and sometimes we just have it to have it. But at that point I'd never made a lasagna, and in looking at the recipe in the
Better Homes cookbook, it seemed a bit more daunting than a meat loaf. But I did it up, along with garlic bread and a fresh salad. After dinner, when she was well-fed and happy, I said something like, "So about me looking for a job..."
She said she needed to look at the numbers—that would be a significant difference in income from what we'd planned, but like me, she liked the idea of us raising our girls instead of someone else. By the time we had the girls tucked in bed she said, "I think we can do it." My career as Mr. Mom—and the full-time cook—began the next day.
That was something like 50 pounds ago. I figured out how to make all kinds of different meals—actually planned them out a month in advance for a while, until I got better at improvising—and I don't think I ever enjoyed learning and doing something so much in my life.
What I plan to do here is something a lot of folks have told me for a lot of years that I should do: Share some of my recipes and my experiences in the kitchen. In the old days it was, "You should write a book." More recently that gave way to, "You should start a blog."
I've done blogging before—as a ghostwriter in my professional life, and in irregular and sporadic bursts elsewhere on Blogger. I hope to do this one a little more regularly. There's rarely a week when I'm not trying some new recipe or inventing one of my own, so it seems likely that I'll have enough material to get that done. One way or another, I guess we'll see!
