Mr. Mom.

As I was cleaning one of our bathrooms this morning while waiting for a load of laundry to finish drying, I found myself thinking of the movie Mr. Mom starring Michael Keaton. In the movie, Keaton's character loses his job and his wife is able to find a job before he does, so she goes off to work while he stays home and fills the role of homemaker and primary childcare provider. The comedy comes in as we see both his wife's struggles to adjust to corporate life and his blunderings as he learns to raise his children and take care of the home (he's hilariously clueless).

Although his wife makes the transition pretty quickly, Michael Keaton's character does alright for a while but then sinks into depression, wearing the same flannel shirt everyday, never shaving, and watching soap operas while his kids run rabidly through the house, destroying everything. By the end of the movie, he snaps out of his funk and becomes a great stay-at-home-dad teaching us all a lesson in learing to excel and find joy in whatever role we play (Believe me, I'm not doing the movie justice. If you haven't seen it, rent it. It's great).

Even though I haven't lost my job (sorry if I scared anyone) and we have no children, I found myself relating to the movie's character. I wake up for a few moments when my wife says goodbye to me in the early morning on her way to work and then I go back to sleep for an hour or two. Then I get up and spend a couple hours doing maintenance cleaning around the apartment (bathrooms, vacuuming, dishes) as well as project cleaning (wading through mountains of papers and junk that we have unnecessarily acquired throughout the years). I run some errands to the bank, library, and store, then head home to change into my work clothes and then head off to work. Some days I get to see my wife for five minutes when she gets home before I have to leave for work, and some days I don't see her until I get home at midnight, and by then she's already asleep, so I typically see her for about five minutes a day. Not exaggerating.

For a while after my wife changed jobs and her work schedule became the opposite of mine, I went a bit into the doldrums that I described Keaton's character being in. Although I never watched soap operas and I don't play coupon poker with the neighborhood housewives and I did change my clothes on a regular basis, I mostly sat around and watched television or DVDs until it was time to shower and go to work in the afternoon. No vacuuming was done, no dishes were washed or put away and I almost never even opened the blinds to let light in (it's harder to see the filth when there's no light).

In the last few days, however, I've been making an effort to be more up and doing. And what a difference it makes! No, life isn't perfect and that mountain of papers and junk still awaits me (horrors!), but our apartment has a better atmosphere and I feel like I'm accomplishing something on a daily basis (unfortunately, that's a feeling I don't experience at work).

As I mentioned before, I've only just started this making this change, so we'll see if it takes, but I'm hopeful. Maybe someday the junk will be gone and I'll only have to do the periodic maintenance cleaning and we'll have our second bedroom back as an office/computer room instead of a garbage dump.

Maybe then I'll have time to get back to my soap operas.