In households all around Australia last weekend, fathers cared for their children, washed dishes, tended to backyard injuries, hung out the laundry and cooked dinner for their tribe.
For most of us, this is mere routine, the humdrum normalness that propels us through the weeks with such rhythm that before you know it, it’s May and you’re saying to co-workers and family “Can you believe it’s already May? How can it possibly be May? Australia Day seems like it was just last week!”
But for a small group seemingly tethered to the 1950s, May 1-3 was “Tough Mother” weekend. Here’s how the organisers describe it:
“Join with other brothers on a boys’ weekend with a difference … For just one weekend this year, swap golf, footy and hardware for housework, home detention and the unpredictable universe of domestic bliss. And in the process discover the relationship and parenting positives that come with understanding a job that needs to be fully experienced to be fully understood. Think you’re up for it?”
Yeah, I reckon I’m up for it. You know why? Because I do it every week and just call it “life”.
The “swap golf with housework for a weekend” line is particularly amusing. Golf clubs around Australia are struggling with dwindling membership numbers like never before because people like me get to their thirties, reproduce, and find they would rather spend increasingly precious (and at times rare) days off with the little people they have created than on the golf course with their mates.
A generation ago, that didn’t happen as systematically. Things have changed.
Those behind “Tough Mother” are so focused on campaigning for the world to change that they haven’t looked around and noticed that it already has in a significant way.
A good friend of mine works two days a week and is the primary carer of his two sons. Another’s wife is overseas celebrating a milestone birthday and he’s looking after his four-year-old alone for a fortnight while still working.
None of that is remarkable, it’s just life in 2015. The role of primary parent is no longer firmly cast in gender terms and most jobs and duties are juggled and shared. If the types of people who come up with ideas like “Tough Mother” want to engage constructively with Australian families, they need to understand and acknowledge that.
The notion that most dads are absent Monday to Friday earning money and then absent at the weekends pursuing their own interests belongs in the same era as thinking all families have a mum, a dad, a quarter-acre block and a Holden Commodore.
It’s the same thinking that spawns adverts and TV shows where dads are lamented by their kids and endured by their ever-patient wives and where products from nappies to cleaning products to kids’ manicure kits are marketed as being “so easy even a dad can do it”.
My eyes are wide open to the challenges women, especially mums, still face in the modern world and the continued change that’s necessary to achieve even something resembling equality.
But insulting a nation of hard-working, active dads who sacrifice plenty for their family 365 days a year is not the way to go about it. At worst, it ensures the opposite.
Were I to challenge full-time parents to try the reverse of “Tough Mother” and spend three days in the shoes of the hour-commuting, lunch-skipping, deadline-meeting, boss-pleasing, promotion-chasing, child-missing, working-at-the-dining-table-after-dinner world that I and countless other working parents inhabit (with the undertone that I seriously doubt the stay-at-homers would be up to the challenge) there would be widespread outrage, and rightly so.
Because it’s not a competition.
Whether we work for money or are a slave to our children, most of us are just doing the best we can, trying to provide our kids with what they need, trying to fit in some quality family time during increasingly busy days and weeks to enjoy the life we all work so hard to create.
And working fathers, like never before, are diving into that challenge of maximising the breadwinner bit without missing a minute more than is necessary of being present as a dad.
If Alice Morell and her mates want to change the landscape of Australian family life in 2015, the first thing they need to do is wake up to what it actually looks like for most of us.
