I left my job in May of 1997, the week our sons were born, and I haven't gone back. My wife, Karen, is a pharmacist at a hospital here in town. I'm home with Nate and Artie. I write these at the kitchen table while they nap, which is the only time I can finish a sentence, and I put them here because a man who talks to two-year-olds all day needs somewhere to put the rest of the words.

This isn't a funny page. Some of it is funny, because two-year-olds are, but I'm not doing a routine. I'm trying to write down what this is actually like, the parts nobody told me about. If you're a father home with your kids, or thinking about it, or married to one, I hope something here is useful. If you're a mother who's been doing this for years, I'm sure you'll find a lot of it obvious, and I'd be glad to hear from you anyway.

The essays:
The Only Dad at Story Time (June)
Laundry Math (July)
What the Mailman Knows (August)
Nap Time Is My Office (August)  ·  on page 2
Don't Call Me Mr. Mom (September)  ·  on page 2  

Toddler Time at our branch library is Tuesday mornings at 10:30. It runs thirty minutes, which is about four minutes longer than a two-year-old can sit. I've been going since February. In that time I have seen exactly one other father, and he was a grandfather, and he came twice.

I don't say that to complain. I say it because it's the first thing you notice and the first thing everybody else notices, so we may as well get it out of the way. When I come through the door with the double stroller, nine or ten mothers look up, register that I'm a man, and then do one of three things. Some smile at me very brightly, in an encouraging way, the way you'd smile at a dog that has learned to walk on its hind legs. Some go back to their kids. And about once a month, one asks me if I'm giving Mom a break today.

I am not giving Mom a break today. Mom has been at the hospital since a quarter to seven checking doses for the oncology floor. I'm the one who's here every Tuesday. I'm the one who knows where the tissues are kept.

Toddler Time is run by Miss Anita, who is about thirty and has a voice that can go from a whisper to a lion in one syllable. She has never once treated me as unusual, and I'm not sure she knows how much that's meant. She learned the boys' names the first week. Nate and Artie. Nathaniel and Arthur, when they're in trouble, which at two is often.

They are not the same at story time, or anywhere. Artie sits in the front row with his legs crossed and stares at Miss Anita like she's a television. Nate sits through the first song, then gets up, walks to the puppet rack, takes down the cow, and has a long private talk with it in the corner. For the first month I went and got him every time, and every time he screamed. Then Miss Anita told me some kids listen with their bodies, and to let him be. I let him be. At lunch, he tells me the whole story back, with the cow's opinions included.

The hard part isn't the looks. It's afterward. When Toddler Time ends, the mothers stand around for twenty minutes by the board books while the kids pull things off the low shelves, and they talk: about sleep, teething, pediatricians, whose husband is useless, who's starting preschool and where. I stand about six feet away holding two coats. Nobody is rude. There's just no place for me to stand.

I didn't think I would mind. At my old job I spent eight hours a day at a CAD station with headphones on, and I was perfectly happy. But it turns out there's a difference between choosing to be quiet and having nobody to talk to. By March I was so starved for grown-up conversation that I talked to the man at the gas station about the weather for ten minutes, and he had to ask me to step aside so the next person could pay.

In April a mother named Therese, whose daughter had bitten Artie the week before, came over to apologize. We got to talking about biting, and then about her husband, who travels for work and is gone four nights a week, and how she sometimes doesn't say a word to an adult from Monday to Thursday. I said I knew the feeling. She looked at me like that hadn't occurred to her. Then she said, "A few of us do a playgroup on Thursdays at my house. You should come." Then she stopped and said, "I should probably ask the others." I told her I understood. She called that night and said come.

I go now. It's three mothers and me, five kids, and a great deal of coffee. They've stopped watching their language around me, which I take as acceptance. Last week one of them described a fight she'd had with her husband about money, and they asked me what I thought, and I took the husband's side, and all three of them booed me. It was the best morning I'd had in months.

I'm still the only dad at Toddler Time. But I know where the tissues are, and I've stopped standing six feet away.

I was a mechanical draftsman for nine years, at a firm that designs conveyor systems for car plants, so I'm built to measure things. When I came home with the boys I started keeping a notebook. Some of it is useful. Most of it is just the habit of a man who used to get paid to write down dimensions. Here is what the notebook says about laundry.

A two-year-old changes clothes about two and a half times a day. I kept a tally for two weeks in May; the high was the Tuesday Artie found the ketchup. Two of them is five outfits. Add pajamas, the bibs they're too old for and wear anyway (spaghetti), crib sheets when the diapers lose, the burp cloths we haven't needed in a year and somehow still wash, Karen's two white lab coats, my jeans, our towels, their towels, the dish towels, and the bath mat Nate uses as a cape. It comes to eleven loads a week. Our washer is a top-loader we bought used in 1994, and each load runs fifty-two minutes, plus an hour in the dryer. That's about twenty hours a week of machinery, not counting folding.

Folding is where the math stops making sense. You would think small clothes would make for small work. They don't. Small clothes are just more clothes. A toddler T-shirt takes exactly as long to fold as mine does, and longer if the sleeves come out inside out, which they always do, because a two-year-old removes a shirt by pulling it over his head from the back like a man escaping a sack. A pair of toddler socks is about the size of a Post-it note. I have bought three six-packs since spring. The dryer has a shelf of orphans above it now, like a lost-and-found at a very small school.

But that isn't what I mean by laundry math. What I mean is that laundry is the only job in this house that ever gets finished.

Think about the rest of it. The dishes I wash after breakfast are dirty again at lunch. The floor I sweep at nine has Cheerios on it by ten after. Nobody stays fed, or clean, or rested, or happy, for more than a couple of hours at a stretch, and that's not a complaint, it's just what two-year-olds are: bottomless. You can spend all day on them and at bedtime there's nothing you can point to and say, there, that's done.

A load of laundry, though. A load of laundry goes in dirty, comes out clean, gets folded into squares and put in a drawer, and the drawer closes. It's done. It stays done for at least an hour, sometimes until the next morning. I stand there with my hand on the drawer, and I feel the way I used to feel when I signed off on a drawing at work and sent it down to the shop: there, that's right, that's finished, someone else can take it from here.

I never told Karen this. She figured it out anyway. One night in June she came home and found me sitting on the edge of our bed with a stack of folded towels in my lap, not doing anything, just sitting. I'd been there a while. She didn't ask. She sat down next to me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a minute she took half the towels and carried them to the closet, and I carried the other half. It's the kind of thing you'd never put in a wedding vow, and it's the kind of thing that's the whole marriage.

Eleven loads a week. Twenty hours of machinery. One drawer, closed. I'll take it.

Our mail carrier is named Tony. He's been on our route for eleven years, comes up our street at about twenty to twelve, and is, not counting Karen and the boys, the adult I talk to most on any given weekday. Some weeks he's the only one.

The boys know when he's coming before I do. At about half past eleven they drag the footstool to the front window and stand on it, both of them, which the footstool was not designed for, and they wait. When the truck turns the corner they start yelling "TONY! TONY!" loud enough that he can hear it through the glass two houses down. When he gets to our box he turns and waves, and they wave back with their whole arms, and then they climb down and go on with their lives. It's the high point of the morning. I'm not exaggerating; I've watched what else is available.

The first month I was home, Tony thought I'd been laid off. He didn't say so. He said, "Tough out there?" in the kind voice men use with each other for that, and I explained. He thought about it, and then said his wife stayed home with their three, back in the seventies, and he used to wonder what she did all day, and then he had them by himself for a week one time when she had her gallbladder out, and he never wondered again. After that we were friends.

A mailman knows things. He doesn't tell, which is how you know he's a good one, but he knows. He knows which houses are empty from eight to six, which is almost all of ours, and which ones aren't: the retired couple on the corner, the man three doors down who works nights at the plant and sleeps till two, and us. He knows who gets catalogs, who gets letters, who gets the envelopes with the window that mean a bill, and who gets the ones with red ink that mean the bill is late. He knew my grandfather had died in March before I told him, because of the cards. He handed them to me himself instead of putting them in the box, and said he was sorry, and I hadn't said a word.

He knows about money, too, I'd guess. We went from two paychecks to one in 1997, and the mail changed. Fewer catalogs, because we stopped ordering. More coupons, because I started clipping them. A letter from the credit union about refinancing that I opened at the box and read standing in the driveway. He's seen all of it go through his hands. He has never said a word, and I've never felt judged.

Tony took a week of vacation the first week of August, and a substitute did the route, a young woman who came at a completely different time and did not wave. The boys stood on the footstool from eleven-thirty until I took them down for lunch at quarter past twelve, every day for five days. Nate cried on Wednesday. Artie asked "Tony?" at bedtime. I explained vacations as best I could to two people who think Wednesday is a kind of sandwich.

On the Monday he came back, Tony walked up the driveway instead of using the box, which he never does, and handed each of them a rubber band. Just a rubber band each, the thick red kind the post office uses. You would have thought he'd handed them a pony. Artie still sleeps with his.

What does the mailman know? He knows we're home. He's one of the very few people who see that, day after day, and who think of it as a house where someone lives and not one that empties out at eight. That matters more than I can explain. When you spend all day with people who can't yet tell you what the day was like, it helps to have one grown man at the end of the driveway who could.

Continued on page 2: Nap Time Is My Office, and Don't Call Me Mr. Mom.

Somebody else's notebook: Karen found The Working Mom's Notebook, by an accountant who works full time with two kids, and printed out her Morning Chart, which is now taped to our refrigerator even though our mornings look nothing like hers. It's the other side of the same coin, and it's good to read how the system works when both parents are out the door by a quarter past seven.