My Daddy Works in His Underwear

I recently received a demo of the Motormouse. The pint-sized Porsche car is a 2.5 GHz wireless mouse that uses a simple USB input to rev up navigation. The utility of this gadget got me thinking about that place where fun and functionality converge in the home office.

To hear the IRS tell it, the tax-deductible home office must be a place of business. It has to be used “regularly and exclusively” for business purposes, and cannot double as a playroom, guestroom or music studio after hours (unless, of course, your business is music). Does that mean your PC or Mac cannot store a music library or play iTunes? Or you cannot practice music over lunch (if your business is NOT music)?

Lines definitely are blurred.

Tell that to the people at Motormouse. More than some kitschy toy, the Motormouse ($49.95; http://www.motormouse.us.com) fits neatly beneath one’s palm, making it responsive to use. It’s “superbly crafted” (it says so in the press materials) and is available in black, red or silver. The tires are rubber; the scroll wheel is the spare. The trunk even opens to stash two AAA batteries and the USB receiver.

The media kit also says it’s perfect for the décor of almost any car enthusiast or gadget lover. Or home officer?

Truth be told, I use a Wave keyboard with an integrated touch-pad pointing device (a.k.a. mouse). So the Motormouse’s functionality in my home office was rather limited. My son surfs like any teenager. That, coupled with his penchant for Porsches, has made the Motormouse a fixture in his bedroom.

But the question of the gadget in the home office helps define – and blur – the space.

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As a work-at-home dad, I once was innocently tagged by my daughter as that dad who “works in his underwear.” Such is my home office lament.

So imagine the surprise when this mom read the subtext of what her child drew about what Mommy does for a living…

Suffice it to say, Mommy felt the need to clear the air…

Dear Mrs. Jones,

I wish to clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an exotic dancer. I work at Home Depot and I told my daughter how hectic it was last week before the blizzard hit. I told her we sold out every single shovel we had, and then I found one more in the back room, and that several people were fighting over who would get it. Her picture doesn’t show me dancing around a pole. It’s supposed to depict me selling the last snow shovel we had at Home Depot.

From now on I will remember to check her homework more thoroughly before she turns it in.

Sincerely, Mrs. Smith

Now, I’ve become quite suspicious of stuff being passed as “truth” on the Internet. But fact or fiction, this is plain funny.

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 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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The Washington Post published “Odd Man Out: A Stay-at-Home Dad Wonders What Comes Next.” The article explored writer Mark Trainer’s adventures in home-based non-employment. He’d left his day job to raise his kids — while his wife continued working her day job.

Both were real jobs, as any stay-at-home mom would insist. And both apparently were happy in the arrangement. But when a guy does it, he’s looked on with disdain like some loathesome drop-out looking for the path of least resistance, the easy way out.

Even Trainer’s dentist couldn’t hide his disapproval, “inscrutable behind his sanitary mask,” Trainer wrote. As he left the office, the dentist said, “Good luck with the job search.”

Work-at-home is not a euphemism for “consultant.” Stay-at-home is not synonymous with drop-out. Sure, some get pink-slipped and are merely at waypoints in their professional careers. The endgame is another brass nameplate on the desk, a return to the corporate office. Some would be thrilled to ditch those $10-for-1,000 business cards they not-so-gleefully carry with them as they go to Starbucks and chamber meetings and business networking sessions in hopes of finding The Next Gig.

But some — like me and Trainer and millions of other dads and childless men –  work or stay home because we want to, because we seek balance, enjoyment, satisfaction or the compatibility that can only come from being there. Fully there — for the kids, the family, the self.

Said Trainer: “If you left a perfectly good job to look after your kid, all the business-speak in the world isn’t going to disguise the fact that you made your priorities pretty clear when you left.” And apparently, companies are looking for that decision, that dedication, that focus-upon-return that corporate lifers may not possess.

As for me, I don’t really care what corporate execs and head-hunters may think about home officers and stay-at-homers. With one kid each in high, middle and elementary school, the endgame for me is already here.

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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May Day! May Day!!

January day, actually, when I first went home to work. It was 1989 when I became a home officer. It was an October day in 1991 when I became a work-at-home dad.

Things have never been the same since.

With three kids, a dog and the associated chaos that comes in tow, I’ve learned a few things about working from home.

I hope to share them here.

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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