What's "fair" anyway?

I applied to join a stay at home dad's group today.

I joined PEPS when my son was born, and met with a group of other new moms while I was on maternity leave. Most of the moms in the group worked, but over the next few months several of the moms in the group quit their jobs because they decided they would rather be at home with their kids.  Others of the moms work part time and were able to fit playgroup in on a day off. No one has ever made me feel bad for continuing to work, but I haven't regularly met with the group for playgroup since my son was about 6 months old although I do still keep in touch with the moms and consider some of them good friends.

I read a bunch of parenting blogs, including daddy bloggers like daily yak, rebeldad, metrodad, zeroboss, etc. And through rebeldad, I found out about http://www.seattledads.org (which I promptly forwarded along to a couple of women I work with whose husbands stay home with the kids).

The point of this post (and I do have one, I swear) is that I applied to join the Seattle Dad's yahoogroup just now, asking if they allow moms and explaining who I was (in less than 200 chars since that's what yahoogroups gives me). I work in an environment with 95% men -- and honestly, tend to get along better with men anyway -- so I figured that it might be worth a shot (if they let me in) to see if I gel with any of the dads and make a new friend. I consider it a freak accident that I do get along well with a few of the women in my moms group, for the last 10 years all of my good friends have been guys.

I've heard anecdotally of moms groups that don't allow dads (I'd like to think my group would be open to it, but since it's never come up I don't know how the rest of the group would react to that idea). Perhaps the problem won't be the dads, but rather their wives who aren't comfortable with the idea of their husbands fraternizing with women (understandable but disappointing if so). I've certainly seen that at work, where it's difficult for me to get to a "sees each other outside of work" level of friendship with a coworker if he's married or in a serious relationship, whereas I have no such problems with women at work. (Granted that may not be the only issue at play).

I have always felt bad for dads when I hear about how isolated they feel due to their smaller numbers and the cold shoulder they get from some SAHMs. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Comments

[Rebel Dad]

Let me know how this works out, please. I'm on the record as a supporter of letting anyone into the dads club. (Lord know how ticked I get when I'm left out of the mom loop.)

[Russ]

We have had a few moms ask to join our playgroup over the years. The dads were a bit surprised, but we discussed it and nobody objected. We're all parents after all.