Todd's Cavalcade of Whimsy

Read Part 1 here

I had come home from the first day of my second week of being a “manny,” which as US Weekly tells us, is the only appropriate term for what someone like me was doing. (P.S.: US Weekly didn’t tell you I’ll punch you in the neck if you actually use the ridiculous word “manny” in my presence.) I was at the door of my neighbor, beaten and broken. She would know. She would help. Because she was the mother of a six-year-old and a three-year-old.

“Help me,” I muttered. “For crimony’s sake. Just what am I supposed to do with this three-year-old child all…day…long?”

Like the great mother she is, she invited me in and gently spoke the two greatest words someone in my situation could have heard: “Play Park.”

Those words were both a life saver and an eye opener. An open field of toys and activities for a child to discover was brilliant. But the fact that I was a man stepping into a world of mothers was like the president of the chess club sharing the locker room with the football team. Or some analogy involving testosterone and ovaries.

The mother of the child I was taking care of had signed up for a local church’s open play on Tuesdays and Fridays. It was a large open area stocked with peddle cars, slides, toys, costumes, crafts, and so many brightly colored objects it looked like a rainbow had projectile vomited. After signing in, my little buddy Jack jumped at the chance to drive around the police car peddle car and I took a seat.

I looked around. And then it struck me: I was the only male over the age of four in the building. Some of the women eyed me curiously. Most of them ignored me completely, caught up in their Starbucks Frappuchino-fuled discussions about shopping and why their husbands were defective in some way. And the ones that did tentatively approach me to ask which child was mine were completely freaked out by my response of, “Oh, I don’t have any children.”

But the more Play Parks I visited, the more I would bump into the random dad/male that was there with a child. And something odd happened every time. The men went from zero to “I didn’t need to know that much about you, stranger” in a ludicrously minuscule amount of time.

One actual conversation:
Guy: “Hi! Which one are you with?”

Me: “With Jack over there. I’m helping take care of him while his mom recovers from surgery. Which one are you with?”

Guy: “I’m with that one over there on the trike.”

Me: “Oh that’s cool. Do you have any other kids?”

Guy: “Nope…this is our only one. For years my wife and I tried to have kids but we couldn’t get pregnant and I thought maybe it was a problem with me so I went to have my sperm count tested and it came back fine so my wife went in to make sure she could produce viable eggs and after several treatments to enable her fallopian tubes and uterus to accommodate a fertilized egg we were able to figure out when she was ovulating so that we could schedule times for me to try to impregnate her and after many months of trying we were finally able to conceive and then after we had our first child the doctor said that due to my wife’s unusually small birth canal and increasing age that it may be dangerous to have another.”

Me: “Um…wow….Ok. Just the one kid then.”

But I don’t blame these men. I think the myriad conversations I had like this were due to two factors. One, the men that came to daytime Play Parks were used to conversations with women, and two, the excitement of seeing another man there. Someone to finally identify with.

I don’t say this lightly, but those men I met had to be some of the strongest men I have ever met. It’s not just the Herculean task of raising a small child, which is mind-bendingly difficult for anyone to do correctly. But it’s also the looks, whispers, attitudes, and humiliating assumptions that they deal with every single day to be a man taking care of children.

Hmmm. It seems I’ve ended this on a rather dour and serious note. In order to insert some amount of humor and lightness to what’s supposed to be a light-heartedly funny look into the “male in a female world” scenario, I’ll ask you all to participate in what probably is the manliest activity I can think of:

Let us all, together, insert our own fart sound effect here.