Don’t Call Me Mr. Mom
Rebranding the Stay-At-Home-Dad
By Thomas Litchford
“Mr. Mom,” the John Hughes-penned comedy starring Michael Keaton and Terri Garr, is more than a quarter-century old. And yet, the title still clings to stay-at-home-dads like a tattoo someone gave us when we were drunk. I can imagine the full-time father of 1983 walking out of the movie theater with his kids after a Saturday matinee and hearing, “Hey! Mr. Mom!” from a complete stranger for the first time and thinking, “Thanks a lot, Michael Keaton. I’m going to have to put up with this for the rest of my life.”
And so it happened that one year ago, this column ran with the title “Mr. Mom: Coping With Deployment as a Dad.” Readers hated it. What is it about this label that’s so persistent? And why does it have such a power to enflame? Why can’t we come up with anything better? I recently sat down to watch the film in search of answers to these questions.
To be fair, I was in a foul mood, and I was primed not to like this movie. But the film exceeded my expectations of badness by far. It opens with the sort of bad jazz that alerts today’s Hollywood-savvy audiences that they are about to see a picture the studio has given up on: the producers didn’t want to waste any money on a good soundtrack. (By way of contrast, think of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a John Hughes flick from 1986 that has a killer soundtrack.)
Jack (played by Michael Keaton) loses his job with a car manufacturer and then makes a bet for $100 with his wife Caroline (Terri Garr) that he will find work before she can. Caroline wins.
The “comedy” quickly approaches the absurd: Jack dumps several cups of laundry detergent, bleach, and fabric softener into the washer all at once; the vacuum cleaner is named Jaws; etc. The climactic epiphany takes place in a dream, followed by a montage where we see Jack embrace his new role. Never fear: balance is restored to the universe when Caroline quits her new job in response to her boss’s rampant sexual harassment, and Jack gets his old job back.
The film does manage to capture some of the sexual anxiety men feel about staying home with their children – an anxiety that is perhaps even more acute in men whose wives serve in the military. This accounts for the staying power of the nickname. We’re still not comfortable in the role of the primary parent.
Rather than deal with this anxiety, the film simply replaces it with the status quo. And that’s why we need a new nickname: Mr. Mom is based on the idea that a man in the home is an absurd notion. But for an at-home dad like me – who chooses to stay home and has done so for two years and has not had any desire to go back to the “nine-to-five” life – it’s not absurd at all; it’s reality.
Unfortunately, most of the existing alternative labels are pretty stodgy. Stay-at-home-dad and househusband just lack the catchiness of Mr. Mom. Women have given up on the old labels, too. Housewives and homemakers have become domestic goddesses and super moms (housewives are desperate, now, remember?).
The United Kingdom has adopted “domestic god” for their dads, and I’ve seen a handful of references to “super dads” over here, but there’s no consensus. Lately, I’ve been telling people I’m a full-time dad or a professional daddy. They’re not super-clever as labels go, but people understand what I mean. And I don’t feel like I’m apologizing for something like I do when I say, “I’m just a stay-at-home-dad.”
If any readers out there have better ideas, I’d love to hear them. You can email them to me at thomas.litchford@gmail.com.