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Thursday, 29 September 2005

Bob Hodgson

I am a 47 year old male and with my wife (47) we have raised four children. We have lived in four states and overseas. Since we were married, (25 years) my wife and I have worked long and hard at communicating with each other. Apart from not letting the kids put one over on us we felt that if we could get this right, the communication, we would be doing well. It has not been an easy journey and is not one that we have got right. We still miss, fail to let each other know what is going on for us, and keep things from each other.

To the point, I am beginning to realise (I know I may be a bit slow) that this has not necessarily been our fault completely. Try as we might, the demands of work, parental and friends opinions, church, and our own internal sense of what is right have come between us and good choices. I have at times been absent from the home for periods of up to a year with work commitments, with my wife holding the family together by herself. She found that difficult at times with real-estate and banks needing the permission of her husband to sign things off etc. Things have changed, but later on in our married life, I took up the reigns of looking after the family and home while she took up an 18 month learning opportunity. Apart from the inevitable disasters on the home front with an inexperienced dad at the fore (I could write a book), it was humbling and at times humiliating to be a stay at home father. I found my self socially isolated and lonely. Normal social occasions that are available for mums, such as tennis mornings, church get togethers, and craft mornings were not available to me. I was asked not to come or was still as isolated as before, with the mums at one end of the room and I stuck at the other. Many people had significant problems with me being a stay at home dad. Basket ball or squash mornings didn’t have childcare available for the men’s comps. The local mums would stay away because they were afraid of gossip etc. Many times I have had to change nappies in various places when there was a family room available but others strongly indicated that this was not the place for a guy. Other times I have had to stand outside women’s toilets and ask a female to take my young daughter into the toilet because I would not let her go in alone. Worse still I have been refused many times and had to cope with the subsequent mess and stares (what a lousy father). Taking her into the gent’s toilet was problematic to say the least. I used to ambush my wife as she came in through the door and regale her with what I had and the kids had done that day, just to get some conversation.

It would have been the worst 18 months of my life, and I was really grateful when my wife and I went back to a sharing role. The great thing about all this is that I have a great relationship with all my kids and I don’t think that this would have come about but for the time I spent at home with them and the skills that I learnt from that experience. This all comes back to communicating, despite our best efforts at times it has been difficult to move past social mores and public opinion. We are still tied to specific gender roles and it is difficult to get past them. Things have changed, family rooms are more accessible and public opinion has moved on. However there is still significant inertia even from ‘enlightened’ families like ours. We both still revert to our parents roles and we still fail to communicate, and we still get it all wrong, but it isn’t all our fault.

Thanks for the opportunity to write and I hope that this tirade helps in some small way.