Stay-at-home dads? I changed nappies until my wife caught me leaning over our baby wearing an old WW1 gas mask
Throughout most of the 25 years when we had growing boys about the house, I was the sole breadwinner and my wife the stay-at-home mum.
I would arrive home each evening after an exhausting day at the office, spent travelling up and down in the lift for visits to the coffee machine, thinking deep thoughts, enduring gruellingly extended pub lunches and rearranging unanswered letters on my desk after my richly earned afternoon nap.
At home to greet me would be a wife who had done absolutely nothing all day.
Nothing, that is, unless you count getting the boys up in the morning, helping them dress, giving them breakfast, packing their lunch-boxes, driving them to and from school, Hoovering, dusting, washing, drying, ironing, shopping, washing up, walking the dog, breaking up fights, taking the boys to football practice, tending cut knees and elbows, drying tears, weeding the garden, negotiating with the bank manager, attending parents’ evenings, making appointments with dentists and school outfitters, renewing the MOT, organising our social life, helping the boys with their homework, feeding them, bathing them, putting them to bed and preparing her husband’s supper.
We had a similar division of labour when it came to decision-making (and if you’ve heard this one before, I can only plead that it’s no less true for having been repeated in a thousand saloon bars).
I would decide all the important matters: Unilateral nuclear disarmament, right or wrong? Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? Abortion — a woman’s right to choose or a foetus’s right to life? Man-made global warming — fact or fantasy? Why is Monty Python no longer funny, while P G Wodehouse remains hilarious (except when he’s adapted for telly)? That sort of thing.
She, meanwhile, would look after the little things: Where should we live? Where should the boys go to school? Would it, or would it not, be a good idea to pay the gas bill before they cut us off, you insufferable man? If my suspicion is right, there are still vast numbers of marriages just like ours, even in this politically correct age.
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This was the news from the Office for National Statistics that the number of stay-at-home fathers reached a record high of 227,000 last year, making up ten per cent of parents who care for their children while their partners go out to work.
The figures, for September to November, are 19,000 up on the same period in 2011, the highest increase since records were first kept in 1993.
Stay-at-home mum: Yesterday's paper brought yet more evidence that the domestic arrangements Tom Utley enjoyed for so long are slipping relentlessly out of fashionTrue, the total includes fathers who were landed with full-time responsibility for child-rearing through no choice of their own, having lost their jobs in the recession. Of these, however, many with higher-earning partners are said to have taken to the new arrangement, giving up the hunt for paid work after deciding that it made no financial sense to go back to paying for childcare.
They join the many tens of thousands of dads who opted for the life of a house-husband of their own free will, seemingly relishing the prospect of taking charge of all that dusting and cooking, nappy-changing and tear-drying.
Like the upsurge in single parenthood — embraced by many as a deliberate choice, not just an unfortunate consequence of bereavement, divorce or forgetting to take the Pill — a discernible trend is developing to challenge centuries-old ideas about the natural order of family life.
Now I’m going to cause huge offence to countless stay-at-home fathers (among them, I’ve not the slightest doubt, some of the best parents in the land, and as manly as they come) by saying I’m still Neanderthal enough in my outlook to find their arrangement distinctly odd. I hasten to admit I find almost everything about modern sexual politics pretty unnatural.
Take the remarkable number of women employed as sports presenters on the TV (how many women in real life have the slightest interest in sport? About one for every 20 men, I should think).
Tough times: The total number of stay-at-home fathers includes many who were landed with full-time responsibility for child-rearing through no choice of their own, having lost their jobs in the recessionOr what about the idea that it’s perfectly fine for an adopted child to have two gay dads or mums, but deeply wrong for a brown child to be placed with white parents?
Indeed, it may well be that I’m the unnatural one in clinging to my antediluvian belief that there are fundamental differences between men and women — and one of them is that men are hard-wired to earn the family bread, while women are clearly much better designed, physically and mentally, for child-rearing.
Of course, there are many exceptions. Some women make lousy mothers, while legions of men are hopeless providers.
All I can say with certainty is that our four sons would have had a hopeless start in life if their father had stayed at home to look after them while their mother had gone out to work.
In our earliest days of parenthood, I would occasionally succumb to the moral pressure of the times to do my bit as a New Man. I would even change the odd nappy. That was until my wife caught me leaning over our terrified baby, wearing the World War I gas mask that someone had given us as a novelty anniversary present.
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Whether because of my chromosomes or merely my cultural conditioning, I also felt thoroughly uncomfortable when I was required to push a baby buggy in public.
You know how men, when they’re asked to look after a woman’s handbag, tend to hold it awkwardly at arm’s length, as if it contains volatile explosives? Well, I was like that with the buggy, standing beside it and pushing it with one hand, to signal to passers-by: ‘I know! Isn’t it ridiculous! Me, a man, pushing a baby buggy! Whatever next?’
Later on, there was a period when our poverty forced my wife to take a job as a bus driver, and I had to assume at least a few of her duties at home. These were not happy times.
When I was in charge of supper, we lived on a monotonous diet of spaghetti bolognese or beans on toast — the only two items in my culinary repertoire. Once, I tried to expand my range with a recipe I found for goulash. I’ll never forget the comment of our youngest: ‘Dad, why is everything you cook always orange?’
Until my wife could sort things out at the weekend, the whole house would take on the appearance of the student flat in the television sitcom The Young Ones, with dirty plates on the sofa, oily bikes under repair in the kitchen, the beds unmade and the carpets encrusted with mud.
How we all missed a woman’s homemaking touch . . . But that’s quite enough sexism for one column.
Let me try to mend my fences with Britain’s growing and valiant army of house-husbands by making a gender-neutral point.
Throughout my boys’ childhood, I wrote again and again about one of the worst injustices in our tax system. It was simply wrong, I argued, that mothers who derived all their income from their husbands should be denied the personal tax allowances given to everyone who is paid by an employer.
The theory behind these allowances is that every adult is entitled to keep enough to cover the bare essentials of life, before being called upon by the Exchequer to contribute to the public purse.
So why should stay-at-home mothers, who do one of the toughest and most socially valuable jobs in the country (see above), be the exception?
Neanderthal though I am, let me add today that I feel quite as strongly about transferable tax allowances for stay-at-home dads.
Since the election, David Cameron appears to have forgotten his pledge to recognise full-time mothers in the tax system. With his love of right-on minorities, perhaps he’ll now act.
