My Daddy Works in His Underwear

‘ As I stepped outside today to fetch the mail – no shoes, no shirt, Stella slippin’ out the door just as it opened – I thought for a moment about the lifestyle working from a home office has allowed me to lead.

I walked to the curb in the summer heat and browsed through the mail; no checks, no bills – a wash for any entrepreneur. The sun was warming my back, cooled all morning by the largesse of the AC in my home office. It felt damn good.

I paused. This is one heluva life we’ve carved out here – myself and 20 million other American home-based entrepreneurs. It’s 95% a lifestyle play, 5% because I’m a cheap S.O.B. who wouldn’t want to absorb the overhead of moving my home-based enterprise into some corporate digs.

And why should I anyway? What can I accomplish in a corporate trap that I cannot do in my home office?
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Millions of American men are joining the ranks of the work-at-home dad — if only temporarily.

One of those was Josh Lubin, a Web advertising executive in Atlanta. After the birth of his child, Josh spent some time at home on paternity leave. Read about his experiences below or by clicking here….

ATLANTA, Georgia — Going back to work after my wife had our first child was an emotional roller coaster.
The author says that being “Mr. Mom” is appealing, but putting the idea into practice is harder than it looks.
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When I turned 40 four years and 37 days ago, I was mourning the lessons of time.

One of my closest friends — a man 20 years my senior — had just died. And I was growing older.

Two events – though unrelated – combined to leave a lasting impression. In their wake, I felt as if I was a patron of the Macabre Café. “Can I have the Midlife Crisis, please, with a side of demise.”

I hadn’t thought much of my birthday at the time; always an optimist, I’d felt “midlife” wouldn’t come for me until 45, the half-way mark of my two eldest grandparents at the time of their passing. But Alan was a special friend, and his death let the midlife beast creep into my thoughts.
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This week was chock full of news related to Dad in his home - and home office…

- Mark Trainer had a piece in his Fathers & Druthers blog for The Washington Post on how Dads Are Still Saddled With Detached Image. The article explores the relevance of Father’s Day in the modern era when dads stay — or work — at home. But I got neither a Wii nor the new Death Cab for Cutie CD. But I did get the chance to sleep in, which for this over-worked work-at-home dad is pretty important indeed.

- An element common to at-home workers is the balance we seek. Cindy LaFerle had a piece “In the middle of this road we call Life” , her new recurring column for the Michigan’s Women’s Forum. Learn more at Cindy’s site, Cindy LaFerle’s Home Office. A new addition to the home office blogosphee is SOHOBlog.org, a site ostensibly created to “guide home officers on the right path through a business maze to achieve a unique corporate identity.” I couldn’t find a person associated with the blog (”Admin” doesn’t count), and most of the pictures plainly were of corporate offices — or very well-endowed home offices.

- In a follow-up to last week’s Work-at-Home Father’s Day, here’s Entrepreneur.com’s take on Father Knows Business. “Move over, mom,” they write. “These entrepreneurial dads prove they know a thing or two about babies–and business.” According to the stats, “home-based dads become more common. The U.S. Census Bureau reported an estimated 159,000 stay-at-home dads in 2007, up from 143,000 in 2006.” Said one dad, “I think what you’re seeing is a fatherhood movement that’s mostly based in guys’ hearts, who want to be closer to their kids than their own father was with them.”

Have a great week, Dad…

When Mark Dobosz considers why he works from home, he need only look in the eyes of his three children.

And he needn’t go far to do it. As a teleworking dad since 2003, Dobosz has had his children close at hand each work day. And with that in mind, the vice president of development for SCORE (the Service Corps Of Retired Executives) and executive director of the SCORE Foundation penned the winning entry for this year’s Work @ Home Father’s Day “Why I Work From Home” Essay.

And though a teleworker, Dobosz travels extensively. Yet the quote of W.S. Gilbert, the English essayist, poet and creator of 14 comic operas (as part of the duo Gilbert & Sullivan), as residing in Dobosz’s email signature, sums up what’s really important: “It isn’t so much what’s on the table that matters as what’s on the chairs.”

With that, the following is this year’s winner from the Work @ Home Father’s Day “Why I Work From Home” Essay Contest…

“An old proverb says, ‘When baking bread, you should bake bread.’ A telecommuting father proverb would probably say, ‘When you are working from home, you should enjoy the pleasure of having your work and family together in your care.’

“Working from home and telecommuting as a father has probably been one of the most liberating of all activities ever created for the male species. While the machismo perspective would be to reflect that a Dad can now do ‘everything,’ the more realistic enlightenment from working at home is that you don’t have to do everything. In fact working at home and telecommuting bring you more in touch and ‘doing the things’ which are really most important in life - family, providing for a family, your friends and believe it or not – yourself.

“Being a work@home Dad and telecommuting Father has taught me the gift of simplicity. Having my work and family intertwined allows me more effectively to live and focus on the simple – to recognize my own nobility of purpose.

“Being a work@home Dad has taught me to appreciate the proverb, ‘When baking bread, you should bake bread.’

“Better yesterdays are impossible to create. Definite tomorrows are only realized when they become today. The only certainty is found in this instance, this experience, this current reality. I am so grateful to be a work @ home Dad.”

And we’re grateful for your entry, Mark. For your efforts, you will receive a collection of home office supplies - and our thanks…

This column was written in 2001

It’s been 12 years since I started working from home, and almost a decade since we introduced our first of three kids to this gig.

One thing I’ve learned is that everyday has the potential to be Father’s Day – if you expand your mind and more broadly define what Father’s Day means to you.

It can be a child’s milestones – his first steps, words, or mischievous deeds. It can be the pinches of a sandwich shared with a child too young to bite off her own. It can mean taking in Disney’s The Lion King during the lunch break — every lunch break, for weeks on end, until the child bores of the movie, or cutting loose to shoot some hoops or play horsey on the bed.

Oh, sure, with the mind-numbing chords of Teletubbies fading into the ubiquitous banter of Barney in the background, we sometimes can feel we’re no less than help hired to watch the kids while the spouse works or plays during the day.
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My day started this past Thursday with carpool at 7 am. It was followed shortly by another carpool at 730 am. I then saw that I was to walk Bailee, a neighbor’s dog, at 11 am. From then on, my morning and early afternoon were my own — until I had to drive carpools again at 215 and 4 pm.

Oh, and Robbie was headed to Sebring for the day to visit family.

I knew this to be true because Outlook said it was.

Interesting thing about this “work day.” Outlook had no mention of any “work” at all. Just a clutch of events that had everything to do with being a work-at-home dad.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t be busy. My white board was filled deadlines, and a half-dozen open Word docs revealed a fairly filled day ahead. And that doesn’t mean I wasn’t organized and my time wasn’t well managed. I was on top of it. It’s just that “it” had little to do with work.

But I thought when I gave up my corporate job almost 20 years ago I’d also given up the commute. Apparently not. Then again, being a work-at-home dad — or parent — means juggling business and family, finding compatibility between the two when you can.

Technology makes much of this possible — and makes me more reliable as an at-home parent. When I used paper-based scheduling and calendaring, I’d regularly miss appointments because I’d simply forget them. Even with Act!, and now Outlook, if I don’t schedule Bailee’s 11 am walk, she’ll go the day without a traipse around the block, leaving me to fib to her owners that, “Why, yes indeed, I did walk Bailee. I have NO idea why she pee’d for you for five minutes…”

And I always include a reminder 15 minutes before the scheduled event — even if that event is a walk with a dog.

Some out there are grinding their teeth right now, fuming that a neighbor would impose on me — someone who’s every bit the professional of my counterpart downtown, only one who works in the suburbs — such inane chores as a dog walk. Or that I’m driving four separate carpools. I don’t really have a problem with people who ask the occasional favor — whether Bailee’s humans or my kids’ mother. We impose on others. And no one’s habitual about their imposition.

Moreover, my kids have never seen daycare, early drop-off or late-stay/after-care. So I’m OK with all this. Besides, if I have to spend time in the carloop, I’ll being my BlackBerry or laptop and get some work done.

So one recent Thursday I had a very busy day indeed. I know I did, because Outlook told me so. It just didn’t make much mention of actual work needing doing. But such is the life of a work-at-home parent. We define “work” a bit differently in these parts…

I never was a big follower of John Ritter’s work. I grew up with Three’s Company, but didn’t really hear much from Ritter after the show ended. That includes not having watched 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter, in which Ritter was cast as the married father of three kids.Then Ritter died unexpectedly in 2003. I found myself deeply saddened. Why? I wasn’t sure…

I was making dinner this week, and the show was on in the background. Then Zack, 14, blurted out, “this is the episode where the dad dies.” For some reason, I stopped, transfixed, and made my way to the sofa. For the next hour of back-to-back episodes I sat there, choked up, wiping away tears — for Ritter’s passing, and depth of emotion the cast portrayed, and the snapshot of life lessons that the crew wrote on the too-short deadline that tragic circumstances tend to require.

There were discussions of faith (or lack thereof) and fairness (or lack thereof) and coming to terms with those last conversations and words you wish you’d said — or not said. The themes were universal.

My gaze grew stronger as elements of his life and work came clear. Paul Hennessy, Ritter’s character, was the father of three kids; the wife (actress Katey Sagal) was a nurse. He was a newspaper columnist. And he worked from home.

Wow. That’s cut from my own cloth.

Then one of his colleagues made a comment at a family gathering following his funeral that really hit me. “With three kids, Paul never knew how he could work from home. He only knew why.”

Anyone see that train coming?
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We know what you’re thinking.

You see some guy working from home, walking to the mailbox in the early morning sun, cup of joe in one hand, portable phone perched in his shorts pocket. Your mind gets to thinking about his evil ways. He’s a corporate drop-out, you smirk with disdain, someone who couldn’t hack it in the “real” world.

So he shoves his wife off to work every morning to slave at her day job, so he can sit home and pretend to ply some trade – all the while catching reruns of Law & Order, and snatching up his spouse’s net at week’s end.

We’ve all suffered the snickers. We’ve been the bane of parents-in-law for half a generation now. Even my daughter has publicly misconstrued my career. When Miss Sheila asked a class full of 5-year-olds what their parents did for a living, Nicole responded, “My mommy is a nurse, and my daddy works in his underwear.” Egad!

You think being a man who works at home is all hack reruns and slack schedules? Walk a mile in our flip-flops.
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