In the mid-1990s, there was a mystery man in my life. He called me at the office at irregular intervals -- sometimes weeks apart, sometimes months -- to talk about his days and his state of mind.
His days, as it happened, were taken up with full-time fatherhood -- diaper changing, housework, food preparation, chauffeuring and playing. His state of mind was almost always cheery and upbeat, with an occasional hint of ambivalence, uncertainty, loneliness or exhaustion.
And always, he'd begin the conversation in the same way: "This is X, the stay-at-home dad." (X, of course, is not his real pretend initial.)
X and his wife had two young children, and she was pregnant with a third. His wife, he said, had a high-powered job making more money than he'd been earning. She was on the fast track, which meant long hours at the office and travel out of town.
So, to maximize her advancement and the family's financial security, the couple had agreed that he would quit his job to stay home with the kids, at least until the youngest was in school.
What prompted his initial call was an article I'd written about fathers who were taking on more child-rearing responsibilities.
The men in the story were young, for the most part, and considered fatherhood as much a part of their identity as work. They also tended to have high-tech or academic jobs with a fair amount of flexibility, and their wives' careers made shared child-rearing a necessity.
The article noted that while stay-at-home dads did, indeed, exist, their numbers remained few and far between. X was one of the few and was feeling kind of out there on his own, so he decided to call and tell me what it was like.
We struck up a phone relationship that went on for several years. He never told me his real name or where he lived -- unimportant in any case -- but whenever he had a few moments of down time and something worth reporting, he'd check in to keep me up to date.
Sometimes he called when the kids were napping, or from a cell phone on a park bench while he watched them play. After the baby was born, he called to express his elation. And when his wife went back to work after a brief maternity leave, he called to admit a few pangs of envy.
When the oldest child entered kindergarten, he called with mixed feelings of anxiety and relief. And after the family moved to another city for his wife's promotion, he called to talk about his sense of all-things-possible, with twinges of dislocation and trepidation.
To tell you the truth, I don't remember much more about our conversations, probably because they were mostly about the minutiae of day-to-day parenting. Individually, those experiences don't always make a deep impression. But collectively, they are so much more than the sum of their parts.
Over time, the calls dwindled, then stopped. I'd forgotten all about him until a few weeks ago.
What brought him to mind was the reviews of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children." In it, the author talks to high-achieving women in their 40s who never had children and now regret it.
Thanks in large part to X's willingness to hold down the homefront, his wife doesn't fit that description. But the book got me wondering if there is any parallel among the opposite sex.
Do successful men who never had children -- however few of them there may be -- regret it to the same degree as the women in this book? Or, in the mirror image, do the handful of men such as X, who quit their jobs to stay home with kids, now find it too late to pick up where they left off, and if so, do they regret that?
Absent a conversation with X, I have to believe that he doesn't regret much. His kids would all be in school now, so he's probably re-entered the job market in some fashion, although maybe not in the way he'd imagined in his single life. And assuming he and his wife are still together, I'm guessing that whatever accommodations he made seem worth it to him now.
I'm also guessing that despite my urging, he never wrote that memoir of his experiences as a stay-at-home dad. But if I'm wrong, and he's reading this, I hope he'll send me a copy, because given his anonymity, I'd never know.
Sally Kalson's e-mail is: skalson@post-gazette.com
E-mail this story 
