apparently

When you sit down at the end of the year and attempt to tote up the accomplishments, the stay at home parent has an invisible list. What the children do isn't the parent's accomplishment. The fact that children grow and increase in wisdom and experience isn't the parent's accomplishment, and in fact occurs for most children no matter what environment they are growing in. I personally find our family to be a bit more flexible and calm having a person just watching out for the kids, able to incorporate sicknesses or school closings without too much angst. But "a bit more flexible and calm" isn't an accomplishment.

The kids and I spend hours in conversations that range from momma crane nursing the baby crane to airport luggage games to why we aren't going to eat ice cream right now to where big sister is at school, touching on innumerable details: why DC has black squirrels, why we sometimes do and sometimes do not pick up trash in the street, why we always try to pick up toys when we finish with them, why it is getting dark so early, why the clouds go by so quickly on a blustery winter morning, conversations that include all of human existence given enough time (can you tell my youngest is three this week). It takes a lot of slow thought to answer the questions in a way that is understandable, that answers the original question, that shares my love of how the world works, that refers to similar recent conversations, and that is opened ended enough to continue the conversation and teach the back-and-forth dance of human conversation. Too much orbital mechanics and that chance is lost. Too much thinking about a blog entry during the child's talking, and that chance is lost. But keep the balance (work on the blog entries while the baby crane is having another piece of tinker-toy added with 100% of the child's attention; use globes and repetition to get the point of orbits across; enjoy the moments (already fading before my eyes) of cuddly lap time; find the way to calmly prevent hitting or retaliatory toy theft at a playdate, without tipping the pre-schooler into abject sadness and powerlessness over the situation, helping the right words to be found, said, and affect the playing. Do this close, precise, error-prone work and it does seem that something happens. Am I claiming credit for the amusing joke my son told to our visitor this morning? No, I was as delighted and surprised by that as the guest was (ok, probably more delighted). But is it fair to say that in these conversations nothing is accomplished? That does not feel like the correct answer.

I don't think there is anything wrong with day care; I wish the people in day care received something like 100% of the money and respect that they deserve rather than 25% or whatever it is (and I do mean the current people working in day care doing the work that they already deserve respect for). I think providing abundant excellent day care would be the smartest thing we could put our money towards as a society.

However, I'd still want to be with my kids myself mostly. I remember as a child feeling a certain ineffable comfort in my mother's presence. I seem to find a similar comfort when my daughter runs into my arms after a day in second grade and when I pick up my son from the few mornings of pre-school he enjoys so thoroughly that he immediately falls asleep after. In all my jobs in my life, I have only benefited from rolling my sleeves up and doing work myself, no matter what the work was. That wisdom I want to be visible to my offspring, visible in such a common and invisible part of their lives that I don't have to teach it, it's transmitted the same way that culture has been transmitted for the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been transmitted culture, in the same way that our nervous systems expect to receive culture: up close and personal from the old generations to the new. I'll allow some modern neurology experiments to operate on my kids (TV, ubiquitous plastic, artificial lights, giant houses with beds in different rooms), but I can't bring myself to leave apart from me these people that are at once of me and are not me, with so much less experience and power than I have.

This issue has come up because I had a relative recently tell me that I had accomplished nothing in the last year. This comment was made in the context of my spending my time, effort and attention as a stay at home parent. The thoughtless dismissal of the labor involved hurt me, but it wasn't the sort of insult that makes you question if you are doing the right thing. It was the sort of insult that makes you aware of how difficult it is to explain what goes on when you read Mummies in the Morning 10 times in a two week period, or how baby squirrels verses momma squirrels has been a running theme while walking outside recently (the younger child calling most of the squirrels babies and the older child more accurately calling them all mommies or daddies, deferring to the younger's language if not his facts). Even the importance of providing food that will be criticized or ignored and then eaten is either just seen or not seen. One could write an essay or make a movie about high cuisine in a great feast (Babette's Feast or Like Water for Chocolate). The heights of cooking are transcendent. But most of life is reheated beets, black beans for which there weren't even an onion to sauté, fresh rice and a few left over pieces of pizza. It's just sitting around, sharing our good things and our bad things from the day, enjoying this life (thank heaven for sour cream) despite the chaos and confusion. No thing was accomplished.

* PS Standard disclaimer about how lucky I am to be able to do this. It is a profound blessing for a man to live at a time when this choice is even available.