Tribute to a modern, hands-on dad

(cindy chartrand)

I call him Mr. Mom and to reinforce the endearment, last month on Mother's Day I sent him a card. Why not? He quit his job to stay home with his baby. Maternity leave had run out. Then his leave. And Megan was just five months old.

She'd been accepted to day care, 8 to 5, five days a week, right in his building. How convenient was this? It would be good for Megan to interact with other babies. Daytime with friends, nights and weekends with Mom and Dad. It would be perfect.

But when the time came to sign on the dotted line, he couldn't. Work would always be work, he said. It wouldn't change. The meetings. The long lunches. The nights out.

But Megan? She was changing every day.

And so, with his wife's support - his job paid more than hers and financially it didn't make sense - he left. And financially, it has been hard. But he wanted to stay home because when would he see his daughter? Not at night when he came home from work, because she would be asleep then. And maybe not in the morning, either, because she might be asleep when he left.

So he traded in his neatly pressed pants for jeans and his leather briefcase for a cloth diaper bag, a "manbag," he calls it, because it's navy and more Lands' End than Posh Tots. And he spends his days, for now at least, in play groups and playgrounds instead of in an air-conditioned office.

Full time motherhood is making a different man of my son. He's lost some weight because there are no more business lunches. No parties and openings and fancy dinners. It's food on the run between Megan's naps and bottles and play dates.

He's lost the lines in his forehead, too, because he isn't frowning these days. He isn't worried about something that needs to be done. Nothing needs to be done except to take care of Megan. He sings to her and reads to her and takes her for long walks and brings her to the Children's Museum and to a gym class every Friday.

He smiles now, all the time, and it's the easy, open smile he had as a boy.

He's also lost that end-of-the-day weariness, though you'd think he would slump more at the end of day after lifting and chasing and carrying around a child.

But it doesn't work this way. Megan, like all children, has made my son less burdened, even with all the things he lugs everywhere for her - bottles and diapers and bibs and food in tiny pre-measured containers. A change of clothes and toys and a plastic cover for the carriage in case it rains, and a hat with a tie in case, even in the middle of a heat wave, it gets cold.

He and Megan visited last week for two days. They rode the subway, then the train from New York. I picked them up and there they were, the pair of them, my son pushing his daughter in her colossal carriage/car seat, pulling a big, black suitcase, carrying an overstuffed backpack and, of course, his chock-full of bottles "manbag." (Why don't you carry just one bottle and wash it out?" I asked, and he said that they use only sterilized bottles.)

And incredibly, despite the weight and bulk of all these things, he was smiling and bounding along.

He's going back to work in September, reluctantly, although he says that work will be a vacation compared with taking care of a child. But he'll miss taking care of Megan. If he could, if the bills didn't need to be paid, he'd remain home.

I watch him feed her and change her and play with her and love her. And I watch her cry for him every time he leaves the room.

My Mr. Mom, my grown-up boy, is really Mr. Dad, a modern father, not just head over heels in love with his little girl, but hands-on, too: there for her every day, all day, 24/7.

Beverly Beckham can be reached at bevbeckham@aol.com.