A baby on his hip, Michael Laffont kisses his wife as she leaves for the office in a crisp power suit. Then, to the horror of the hired help, he starts poking around the kitchen to get a head start on dinner.
Cooking with Stella, the new film co-written by siblings Deepa Mehta and Dilip Mehta, centres on the tensions that remain around the househusband. Michael (played by Don McKellar) is a self-described “diplomatic housewife.” He's put his career as a chef on hold for his wife, a diplomat who has relocated the family to New Delhi from Canada.
At the diplomatic compound, Michael jogs past other men as they go to work. At home, Stella, the family's Indian cook, gossips about the household going “topsy-turvy.”
“Madam going to office; sir only mothering,” she says.
The couple's fights are sharper. “Just because you don't have job satisfaction doesn't mean you have to be an asshole,” snaps Maya, Michael's wife. “You have job satisfaction because this asshole agreed not to,” he snaps back.
Fresh off the heels of an economic downturn that has hit men harder than women, househusband is a position in which men are increasingly finding themselves.
In January, a report from the Pew Research Centre found that women are outpacing men in education and earnings growth: In 2007, 22 per cent of husbands were out-earned by their wives, up from 4 per cent in 1970. The authors write that these changes are being accompanied by a slow reversal of gender roles, one experts say can cause friction in couples as they iron out domestic kinks and deal with the nuanced judgment of traditionally minded outsiders peering in on their lives.
Jode Roberts detected a “subtle jealousy” from several other fathers during the nine months he spent at home with his son Jasper in Toronto.
“I think there's resentment or sadness that they can't be hanging out with their kids, that they have to work each day while I get to spend the entire day hanging out with the kid.”
Mr. Roberts, 38, took parental leave because his wife, Carol, a self-employed contractor, wasn’t eligible for employment insurance-funded benefits. Leaving his job at an environmental law organization, Mr. Roberts was soon in charge of “everything except for breastfeeding.” He even attended a mommies’ group. (He was the only guy there.)
“I actually aspire to be a househusband. Truth be told, if I could drop my job and just hang out at home all the time, I probably would,” Mr. Roberts said.
He acknowledges there was some “tension” with his wife, mostly because “she’s squirrelled away in the basement trying to tend to her work while I’m having fun playing upstairs with the boy.”
For Jeff and Alyson Pain of Calgary, most of the relationship strain grew around domestic control.
Having spent many years away, training and competing in skeleton, Mr. Pain is now home with sons Kyle, 8, and Thomas, 6, after racing in this year’s Winter Olympics –his third and last.
On her blog, Ms. Pain, a team and relationships coach, writes of their domestic and financial transition as “a holy crap gap,” one the couple is trying to bridge with a co-written book, The Business of Marriage and Medals, published last week.
While his wife sees clients, Mr. Pain, 39, takes the boys to the bus stop in the morning and to tae kwon do and the skate park after school. He also cooks dinners and does laundry.
“It’s harder for me to let go,” said Ms. Pain of the routines she is used to performing.
More than children, house chores are often the source of discord among “reverse traditional” families, said Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco-based author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.
“It is the case that the homes of many stay-at-home dads are messier than the homes of many stay-at-homes moms,” said Mr. Smith, adding it’s because “men don’t feel judged by their houses.”
