How Not to Ingratiate Yourself With a Female Service Member
Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 07:17PM ...or any other professional married woman whose husband stays home with the kids.
We just bought a new car. It's really a second car, because we're getting ready to move and the one-car lifestyle we've been enjoying will not work when Danielle goes back to sea.
Anyway. It was a fine experience. We went back to Mazda and I tortured them for a couple weeks, but in the end it was a pretty easy negotiation, and we got exactly what we wanted for the price we wanted at the rate we wanted it.
Nice.
Then Danielle had to sit down with the business manager and hear her pitch. And, finally, when everything was signed, when I was off playing with Sean, the manager (a great beast of a woman with terrifying hair) told Danielle she also lived in Newport.
"Is your son in pre-school?"
Danielle told her, no, but that I stayed home with him. Whereupon the woman said, "Oh, he's doing the Mr. Mom thing."
Danielle just looked at her. "No," she said, annoyed almost beyond reason at the utterance of that inane monicker.
"Oh," said the beast-woman, "Not a lot of cooking and cleaning getting done?"
She's lucky all the papers had been signed already, because Danielle would have walked out of there right then if they hadn't been.
Mr. Mom, astonishing stupidity in Daily Life 
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Reader Comments (2)
I'm always surprised at the vitriol against the Mr. Mom thing. The wife and I actually sat down and watched it a while back and laughed because it's taken to an extreme, but at the same time I think that John Hughes at least had an appreciation for the psychology of the situation (if only the 1983 version).
Me - I'm totally cool with it. Maybe because my background is in engineering and because I spent my Master's degree working on projects for GM (Michael Keaton's character seemed to do the same work at Ford, but close enough). Maybe because I think drying off the kid with a hand dryer would be a great solution if only I could figure out how to avoid diaper rash. The fact that I have the financial means so that I can comfortably be Mr. Mom after we transfer is a reward for working 2 summer jobs and hauling down scholarships to get myself through college and grad school debt-free. It's a reward for driving around a beat to death 13-yr old Buick while my co-workers drove BMWs. It's a reward for putting up with some of the less desirable aspects of marrying into the military life. If I can't find a job I can get really excited about the next place we end up I can enjoy hanging out with my kid for a few years. And that's awesome - no matter what popular culture calls it.
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