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TEN TIPS on HOW TO BECOME A (BAD) (MEDIUM) GOOD DAD
By Jonathan Freedman
Basel, Switzerland
I’M UP IN MY ATTIC office just getting down to business, when my nostrils start to itch and twitch. Something’s burning! I rush downstairs to the kitchen. My daughter Genevieve is cooking pancakes on the stove. She’s barefoot and light as an elf. And in her little hand is a meat cleaver. She’s using it to flip the pancakes.
“Stop!” I shout, gingerly removing it from her grip. “Why are you using the chopper?”
“The spatula was dirty. Mommy said to use it.”
“Mommy made a mistake.” I wave the cleaver in the air. “Do you know what’d happen if you dropped this on your bare foot? You’d chop off a toe!”
She breaks into tears, runs into the living room and curls up in a ball on Fat Boy.
My panic turns to anger so quickly that I realize it’s not the meat cleaver. My life is chopped into segments of time.
Repentant, I bring the pancake to Genevieve, with downcast eyes. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“I don’t want the pancake.”
“Please try it.”
“I tried it and I don’t want it!” she moans, her dark eyes moist. “Couldn’t you just say, ‘Wear shoes,’ instead of yelling at me?”
My son, Lincoln, wanders in and stands by me, his head level with my waist.
“You have three choices,” he says, gravely, all seven years of life experience concentrated in his brown eyes. ”You can be a good dad, a medium dad, or a bad dad.” He pauses to let this sink in, and then says, ”You’re heading to be a bad dad.”
“What could I do to be a good dad?”
“You can’t be a good dad until you’re a medium dad first.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Don’t be so strict. And don’t yell.”
“How long do I have to be medium before I can be good?”
“A week,” he replies, an impossibly long time for a first grader.
“Have I ever been a good dad?”
He screws up his face, pondering.
“Yes, one morning you were nice and relaxed.”
“When was that?” I ask, fishing for compliments. Yesterday, a week ago?
“When I was four.”
Ouch!
***
LET ME BACKTRACK a bit. I’m an American expatriate living in Switzerland. In another lifetime, or so it seemed, I was a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist based in San Diego, California.
Then newspaper business tanked, the housing bubble popped, the stock market crashed, and my wife came home with big news. “I got a job offer in Basel.”
“Ah, basil!” The smell of pesto wafted through my mind.
“Not the herb. The city on the Rhine River.”
It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.
She tests experimental drugs to treat kids with cancer.
I look after our own two kids: Genevieve, 9; and Lincoln, 7. In Swiss German, they call a stay-at-home dad like me a “hausmann.” There are other pejorative words for guys like us: wimps, wusses…
But I take my role seriously. Well, not too seriously.
When I enrolled my children in the International School of Basel, I was invited to a coffee klatch by the class mothers.
I was the only male. I come from Chromosome XY and women are XX, so perhaps this explains my sense of unease.
What am I doing here? Do they think I’m less of a man because my wife is the breadwinner?
As they clink their spoons and sip their coffee, I feel like somebody’s stuffed ice down my pants.
I’m seeing my future through crystal balls.
***
AFTER SCHOOL, the kids are hungry as bears.
“I want chicken nuggets!” yaps Lincoln.
“You had them last night,” I say, wearily. “How about fish sticks?”
“I hate fish. I want Mama!”
“Mama is at work.”
“Why don’t you work, Daddy?”
“What do you think I’m doing now?”
“Yelling.”
I lower my voice. “I’m looking after you, that’s my job here in Switzerland.”
“Why don’t you earn money?”
What should I answer? Because American newspapers are dying like flies, because…
Genevieve must sense my discomfort; she speaks up in a Big Sister voice.
“Daddy is a hausmann,” she interjects, haughtily, in my defense. “And he’s writing ‘Confessions of a Hausmann.’”
“Is it going to make you rich, Daddy?” asks Lincoln, the young capitalist in the family.
“I have to finish the book first. After you have your snack, I’ll go to my office and work.”
‘It’s not an office,” he corrects me. “It’s the attic.”
“Okay, the attic!”
“Have you confessed about yelling at us?”
“Enough! You’re going to have cereal,” I say, plopping Special K with freeze-dried strawberries on the table. It’s covered with a blue provençal tablecloth, and you can barely see the pattern of olives and sunflowers beneath the scum of milk and cereal and crumbs.
“I had cereal for breakfast and lunch.”
True, I have to admit it. Lincoln’s lunch box is lying open on the counter, and I see globs of cereal stuck to the plastic container. So much for giving my children a balanced diet. However, in my defense he had Special K for breakfast and Sugar Smacks for lunch. Some defense!
I do a U-turn and shove the cereal box back in the cupboard.
“Well what else do you want? Pizza?”
“I hate cheese!” cries Lincoln.
He’s the only American kid I know who doesn’t like pizza.
“You haven’t tasted pizza since you were two years old,” pipes in Genevieve, who is two years older than her brother, and lords it over him. She has a long memory and a prejudice against people who don’t like cheese.
“Campbell’s Chicken Soup,” Lincoln asks, finally.
We shipped three cans from the States, but when they ran out I couldn’t find Campbell’s soup in Switzerland.
“I can make you Knorr chicken broth with chopped vegetables and roast chicken and spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti ain’t noodles.”
“Not ain’t. Isn’t,” I correct him, ungrammatically.
Genevieve rolls her eyes, with a superior look. “Spaghetti is a long kind of noodle!”
“I’ll cut them into itty bitty pieces.”
“Okay.”
So I fix him Hausmann’s brand chicken soup, and he slurps it up, spilling broth and chicken and noodles on the floor…
And when my wife comes home from work the children have been fed. She sweeps them up in her arms, and they cling to her. Safe and happy in her embrace. There’s no substitute for a mother’s love.
Am I jealous?
Not a bit. I’m off duty, and she can put them to bed.
I climb back up to the attic and stare blearily at the computer monitor. Time to resume writing my blog, “The Confessions of a Hausmann.”
“Dear Fellow Hausmen,” I type. “What kind of father are you — good, medium or bad?”
I take a sip of wine and write a bold headline:
“HAUSMANN’S 10 TIPS TO BECOME A GOOD DAD.”
I always wanted to be a fiction writer.
***
comments? tips? email me at:
confessionsofhausmann@tumblr.com
