Parenting advice - Stay home

For a variety of reasons I ended up being a somewhat stay at home dad, not the least of which reason was that is was part of my parole agreement.

Staying at home with children is not nearly as much fun as generations of women make it out to be. All those stories I had heard about drunken afternoons with the kids blindly watching hours of Disney movies on the flat screen would never come to fruition. Almost every stay at home mother I met prior to becoming a stay at home father would brag about the free time, the dance lessons (with some sardonic winking thrown in for good measure) the hours of tennis lessons (again with the sardonic winking) and a reminder that every afternoon, you could sit the kids down to endless hours of video movies while you “got your drink on.”

I would almost always ask these stay at home moms, “really, that is what life is like for a stay at home mother?”

Every single one of them would nod and say, “yes, absolutely. If you stay at home and raise your children, you will see for yourself. You will have more free time than you could ever imagine. Almost every afternoon we all get together and play bridge and drink margaritas.”

I think the word I am looking for right here is hoodwinked.

See, I signed up for the whole stay at home gig thinking of those afternoons of drunken excess, and all those hours of winking at tennis lessons or something like that, or just learning to sardonically wink, heck even accomplishing that would be a big step up for me. In the matter of what seemed like hours I had over a dozen of my very own children, some of them springing miraculously from my very own loins, some from a woman I knew named Becky.

Becky hated kids just a little less than I did, so she kept her day job working undercover with the Federal Government. I stayed home, purchased cases of fine whiskey online and every Disney DVD I could find. That first day with me alone with 7 of the children, we all had blueberry pancakes for breakfast, cleaned up the house, went for a nice long walk to the beach, came home and drew pictures of secret agent mommy, had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, tried to catch a bird in a shoe box, finger painted for 12 minutes, went to the park and played an especially brutal game of soccer, came home in time to cook dinner and never got around to watching any of those movies or drinking any of that fine whiskey.

The next day I think Becky gave birth to twins and we all went bike riding. Days like those passed into months, then years. We played, we cooked, we built forts and airplanes, planted gardens and swam like dolphins. Decades passed. The Disney movies got watched at some point, the Whiskey never did get opened, sadly.

My daughter Shlumpy asked me this morning why I was not a doctor and I told her that I was thrown out of medical school. Then she asked why I did not go to another medical school. I said I was busy raising the schmucks. She asked what a schmuck was and I explained that she and her brothers and assorted sisters were.

“So, what you’re saying is, if not for us kids, you’d be a doctor?”

“No, I was thrown out of medical school. What I’m saying is, if not for you kids, I’d have a fully funded 401K.”

“I sense a little bitterness in your lack of long term financial planning.”

“Not at all. You know, I think it’s true, when people are old and dying they never wish that they spent more time at the office.”

“No, are you saying they wished they’d spent more time with their kids?”

“Oh, I would have said reapplying to medical school, but spending time with kids, sure, that’s a good answer.”

“So, when you are dying, you will be saying, thank god I got to spend all that time playing and painting and bike riding and swimming and dancing with those wonderful and creative kids?”

“No, I think I’m going to be saying, try to remember the license plate number of the car that just hit me, try to remember the license plate number of the car….”