The Perfumed Pride and Prejudice

Until I took on the mantle of a nurturing, supportive homemaker sixteen years ago in Nairobi I had generally preferred the company of women. I assumed in a warm, fuzzy, and uncritical way that they were, with a few exceptions, essentially far nicer, complete creatures than men. Not a point of view shared by the female members of my family who would end any argument by saying: "Well, of course they are nice to you. What do expect? You are a man."

I was blessed with a literate, musical, and deeply spiritual mother. I have two sisters and was sent to a co-educational boarding school at the age of eight. Girls and women had, with a few notable exceptions, long been my gender choice when it came to friends.

My wife and I had a bet that the first one to get a job back in Africa would take it and the other would follow. I lost and became the "trailing spouse". Devoid of adequate child rearing and parenting skills I was propelled, with our two young sons (then four and one), into a world of British expatriate mothers. Watching my interesting career in publishing and technical authoring disappear down the Zambezi on a raft of nappies towards the Victoria Falls I was ripe for enlightenment when it came to the world not only of children but of their mothers.

A few weeks after our arrival in Nairobi I was standing alone on the dirt road outside the gates of my son's new school. In unfamiliar territory I was trying to look encouraging, non-threatening, and asexual --difficult with a beard-- desperate to escape from loneliness and isolation, and for my boys to have access to playmates. After a time a short mother detached herself from a group of women and came across the road towards me. Hope bloomed. An invitation for a play date.

The woman looked me up and down and said in her broad Geordie accent: "my Brian's not afraid of a hard day's work," turned on her heels and rejoined her pride across the road leaving me utterly speechless. Driving home in our battered secondhand car I pulled over because my sobbing was making it impossible to drive.

This was not the welcome from women I foolishly imagined I would receive. True, I had one female friend, the wife of my wife's colleague, someone who was there in Nairobi for me from day one, helping me find a home, a school, who got me invited to events and who remains a friend to this day. But, there was a wider world out there of fellow domestic work mates I was eager to explore.

I had received some warning of what was to come before I left England but had not heeded it as at the time I was the primary breadwinner. My wife and I joined a baby-sitting circle in the cathedral city of Ely, where we lived. The organizer of this useful group said to me: "I won't have men baby-sitting children on their own. You just never know. Nothing personal." I was angry, I was an involved father then as much as I could be having the full-time job, and felt slighted, but then a deadline intervened and I thought nothing more about it.

But, here it was again, this bewildering expression of prejudice only this time it hit me in the midriff. What on earth could have prompted the harpy on the dirt road to confront me in such a hurtful way? Did I not have some credentials as a practical supporter of feminism? I had sacrificed my career for the benefit of our family; I was prepared to be the one person on the home front. Surely that meant something. Did this woman not realize that I was just like her, bringing up children under substantial emotional and other pressures, staying home while our spouses traveled, and that I needed all the support she did? Why then did this gang of women distrust me so profoundly throughout my time there, not invite me, a writer, to book clubs and include my children in play dates?

I was different, certainly, and unlike the woman's manly husband who spent his life in the army training Kenyans to kill other Africans I was involved in raising two children instead. I had to accept that this somehow made me less of a man in her eyes. But there was more. I was also trespassing, a man in a woman's world and I had been issued a snarling warning that I was not welcome.

Over time, I came to understand that some women hold deeply prejudiced beliefs when it comes to men (including their husbands) and particularly when it comes to mens' relationship with children. They believe they are better suited and more responsible than men-- who are not capable of caring, nurturing, and who lack the compassion, patience, and understanding necessary for home-making. They also mistrust men sexually. It was a strange realization that I had for all my adult life been judged to hold certain subtle and disturbing behavioral traits simply because I was a man. Many women do not trust their own husbands, let alone other men, enough to give them the opportunity to raise children and have non-sexual friendships with women. Mothers have told me indirectly usually, that men weren't interested in raising their children and by inference that was true of all men, unless there was something wrong with them, in which case they should not be allowed near children in the first place. In a similar prejudicial vein man used to believe that women were incapable of having successful careers in the armed forces or as CEOs of multi-national companies. It was believed that all women automatically all made excellent mothers who wanted nothing more from life than to stay at home and raise their children. And of course, there were no female sexual deviants. Prejudice, pure and simple.

As I sang lullabies to my sleepy little boys in the insect filled night, my wife somewhere out in the bush, I felt all the love, maternal vitality, and fierce protectiveness that any parent, man, or woman is capable of feeling. I had, even then, begun to overturn more conventional ideas about men and women, many of which I held myself. I came to discover that I was capable of being more as a father. Most importantly of all I understood that gender is not the key issue in successful child raising and running a domestic life. To do it well, with compassionate love, skill, and dedication child rearing and homemaking are not the inescapable, exclusive, genetic imperative of women. Personality type, despite gender, is the crucial component to doing the job well. Men make good mothers, just as mothers make good fathers, out in the world working in a career.

There were rare women indeed who trusted me, a man and therefore a potential pedophile, to bathe their children, and whom I trusted in return not to be female child abusers, to let our children sleep over when our spouses were traveling. Those few exceptional women who understood I was responsible enough to watch over their little darlings at the pool, or take them with my children on a day out. I still get an inordinate amount of pleasure when a mother trusts me enough to call and ask whether I would pick their child up from the rec. center, or asks whether I will be their emergency contact. The mother who took my son to the emergency room for treatment of a minor gash when I was out of touch made me feel as though I was part of a supportive group, and I was pleased to reciprocate. Perhaps these are small issues, taken for granted by most women, but for me they represent rare marks of approval and acceptance of what I do. Occasionally a woman will immediately appreciate my role. "I would like one of those," the woman dressed in business provocative said to me leaning across the dinner table as I explained what I did for a living.

Not all mothers have been as bovine or vituperative as the woman at the school gate. They have either overcome their own prejudices, or simply been blessed with generous dispositions and had confidence in me. Two became staunch friends and long-term allies. Others have been quietly loyal, supportive, and helpful, sometimes having to overcome the resistance of their husbands.

Some months down the line during our four-year stint stay in Nairobi I gathered up enough confidence and began holding a monthly ladies lunch, when I would invite interesting and more sympathetic women to my home. True, I had the great advantage of employing a domestic staff, so the silverware, and freshly ironed linen were in better shape than when I moved to the Land of the Free and entered true domestic servitude. Having said that, I made a big effort, with flowers and a beautifully prepared light menu (I am a proficient cook and teacher) and the expectation of intelligent, exclusively female company. I wanted to make an impression, show them that I too, could run a household as successfully as they did, but most of all I wanted them for whom they were--interesting people in the same line of work as me.

D. was the mother of my youngest sons best friend. It was perfectly natural that I would invite her to lunch. She was a kindly, sympathetic embassy wife who over and above her sense of duty to the spouse of a government technical officer, recognized the importance of her son having an evenly matched, intelligent play mate. Initially, D. was not allowed by her husband to come to lunch. Being the wife of diplomat a compromise was negotiated between them. She could come for the soup, entrée and dessert, but had to leave before the coffee. I can only assume her husband imagined that coffee was the release code for an unbridled, profiterole fueled orgy between me and five other women. D. the utterly loyal wife left quietly as the rest of us moved from the dining room table to the comfy chairs and our sinful coffee in front of the cool season fire.

At such times, when my friends were more relaxed and open I learned something of their lives. The shared difficulties of raising children but more interestingly the behavior of their husbands whom they compared to me and my role. My heart frequently went out to those married to men whom I could only see as being brutish and I wondered how they endured living with someone so unattractive when they were quite the reverse. I learned that not all women are part of the monstrous regiment at the school gate, that they too are ostracized and not included if they happen to fall outside the conventions in some way.

I felt at times like "a spy in the house of the living." As an at-home-Dad I had come to share and understand some of the difficulties, frustrations, and need for self-sacrifice that traditionally have been the province of women when it comes to child rearing and running a home. It ceased to trouble me after a time that there were only a few women with mature enough husbands to accept that being a homemaker was a job, that I was their wives' colleague in effect. It is better to have a few true friends than many acquaintances even if accompanied by a greater sense of isolation and loneliness. But, in the end I have come to see this relative sense of isolation as a blessing and would far rather have a few staunch women friends, just as I do with men, than a plethora of the monstrous regiment with whom I have little in common and who distrust me and the way I live my life.

Fortunately in America, as in Kenya, I have a staunch and loyal friend. We go to lunch and a matinee at the movies once a week on Fridays. For a short time, we are grownups in a grown-up world. This was particularly valuable when the children were younger. Now we go simply because we enjoy movies - we have seen well over 150 - and for the simple pleasure of one another's company. But most importantly, it has always seemed to us; our weekly movie days offer a short period of escape from the ceaseless accumulation of day-to-day problems that only those who have truly been the stay-at-home spouse with children can ever really understand.

"Are you two having an affair?" My dear friend was asked. No, I thought after she told me, we are having a friendship, and far more valuable that is too.

Sexual issues are a real Gordian knot when it comes to being an at-home-dad. Building a friendship across the gender divide takes time and care and honesty, just as it does in any other place of work. Really it is no more as complex as the relationships my wife has with her male colleagues. It is the expectations of those outside where the problems lie, with their perceptions and beliefs. It is an impossible lesson to share with husbands. I can hardly tell them: "I like your wife, she is an intelligent, supportive, and interesting person, but to me she is simply not attractive in that way."

So I learned over the years to disregard those who were prejudiced against me and realized that my life and the task I had undertaken for the benefit of us all was one of importance, in which I took pride. I am greatly reassured when I look now at how our boys have grown and how they stand fairly alongside those children of mothers who think that what I do is somehow inherently wrong for reasons of religious or social prejudice. As my wife is fond of saying: "I couldn't do what I do without you doing what you do." And the same is true in reverse. She blessed me with the opportunity to bring up two healthy young men and support her career in which she contributes to the greater good in far more substantial ways than I could ever have done.

But the issues remain. Even today, in the land of Betty Friedman and Gloria Steinem, in this small community we call home where we have educated both our children prejudice remains. A mother from my son's grade who knows me, studiously ignored my smile of greeting in a shop where it would have been perfectly acceptable to at least say hello. Perhaps she simply did not like me, but as far as I know she would have no reason to do so. My wife said the woman simply didn't remember or perhaps didn't recognize me.

My campaign medals tell me something far more insidious was happening in that non exchange. After such an encounter I remind myself that I too, largely successfully, have undertaken a career that traditionally has been seen as the exclusive province of women. Despite my gender I have contributed fully to the raising of two healthy, intelligent, and independent young men while supporting the career of a talented spouse.

Not bad for a man, let alone for a woman.

James Oglethorpe © 2007 All Rights Reserved

james@binnaclepress.com