From a quarter to one until about ten to three, five days a week, I have an office. It's the kitchen table. The hours are not guaranteed.

Getting there takes work. Lunch at noon, which is mostly about getting food from the plate into the boys instead of onto the floor, the dog we don't have, or the window. Then a diaper each, a book each (Artie wants the same truck book every day, Nate wants a new one every day, and I have learned not to argue with either policy), then into the cribs, which are in the same room, three feet apart. Then I go out and close the door most of the way and stand in the hall and listen.

Artie goes down like a stone. He's out in four minutes and stays out, arms over his head like he's surrendering. Nate is the problem. Nate talks. He lies on his back and tells the ceiling about his morning, quietly, in a language that's about half English, for anywhere from ten minutes to forty. I can hear him on the monitor. "Tony. Truck. Tony truck. Big dog. No, Artie. NO, Artie." If Artie wakes up during Nate's speech, the office is closed for the day. That happens maybe once a week. You learn to plan for it, the way you plan for a snow day.

Once the monitor goes quiet, I pour a cup of coffee, the third of the day, reheated, and I sit down.

Karen and I have one rule about nap time, and it was her idea: no housework. The dishes and the laundry and the floor can happen while the boys are awake and following me around, and they do. Nap time is for things that need two hands and a whole thought. So here's what happens at the kitchen table.

The bills. We went to one income in 1997, and Karen makes more than I did, but not twice as much, and there are four of us. I do the budget on graph paper, the way I would lay out a part, every line lettered. We sold the second car. We haven't been on a vacation that wasn't to somebody's parents' house. I clip coupons now, and I'm good at it. Last month I saved forty-one dollars at the grocery store, and I told Karen that night like it was a promotion. She said it was. That's the thing about her.

The phone. I call the pediatrician's nurse line, the insurance company, the furnace man, in the voice of a man who might be calling from an office. Karen calls me at one-thirty from the pharmacy, on her break, and we talk for eight or nine minutes about nothing much, and it is the best part of my day and maybe of hers.

These essays. I never wrote anything longer than a memo before 1999. I started in February, mostly to have something that was mine, and it turned out that I had more to say than I thought, and nobody to say it to between seven and six.

And drawing. This summer I started drawing the boys' beds. They're going to need to come out of the cribs this winter, since Nate has figured out how to climb, and we can't afford two good toddler beds, so I'm going to build them. I did the plans by hand, at this table, with a T-square and a scale and a pencil, the way I learned in school before everything went to CAD. Front, side and top views, every joint detailed, a bill of materials. It took me three weeks of nap times. It's the first drawing I've done since I left work, and when I finished the last dimension I sat back and looked at it, and I'll admit it, I was proud. Not of the beds. They're just beds. Of the drawing. I'm still good at something people used to pay me for.

Around ten to three, the monitor crackles, and it's always Nate, and it's always the same word: "Daddy?" Not crying. Just checking. I put the pencil down, and the office closes, and the other job, the real one, starts back up.

I want to say first that I know people mean it kindly. Nine times out of ten, when someone calls me Mr. Mom, it's a friendly thing, the way you'd call a tall man Shorty. It's a joke, and it's meant to include me. I've laughed along plenty of times. I'm going to try to explain why I've stopped.

The name comes from a movie, which most people my age saw in 1983. Michael Keaton plays a man from the Detroit area who loses his job at a car company, and his wife goes to work while he stays home with the kids. I saw it in high school and thought it was funny, and I'd probably still think so. But the joke of the whole movie is that a grown man can't run a house. The kids, the groceries, the appliances: all of it is too much for him, and the laughs come from watching him lose to it. By the end he's learned, more or less.

So when somebody calls me Mr. Mom, what they're saying, without meaning to, is that this is a mom's job and I'm filling in, and they expect me to be bad at it, and it'd be funny if I were. And the thing is, I'm not filling in. And I'm not bad at it. Two years and four months in, I'm not even new.

The other one is "babysitting." Out at the grocery store on a weekday morning, somebody will see me with the two of them in the cart and say, "Babysitting today?" I've learned to say, "No, I'm their father," nicely, and most people get it, and some don't. You don't babysit your own kids. Nobody has ever asked Karen if she was babysitting.

I'll be honest about the parts that do sting. At the Christmas party last year, a few of the guys from my old office kept calling me Mr. Mom all night, and I took it, and on the way home Karen asked why I was so quiet. Those are men I worked next to for nine years. I knew what they were really asking, which is whether I'd given something up. And the answer is that I did. I gave up a paycheck with my name on it, and a desk, and being good at something other people could see. I don't regret it. But it's not nothing, and when it's turned into a joke, it gets harder to say so.

My father was the hardest. He worked thirty-four years at the plant here in Lansing, and he raised me the way his father raised him, which is to say he went to work and came home and was a good man, and my mother did the rest. When I told him in 1997 what we'd decided, he didn't say anything. He didn't say much of anything about it for a year and a half. I knew what he thought, or I thought I did.

In May we had the boys' second birthday at our house, both sets of grandparents and a sheet cake from the grocery store with two trucks on it. In the middle of it, both boys needed changing at the same time, as they do. I took them into their room, and my father followed me in, I don't know why, maybe to get away from the noise. He stood in the doorway and watched me change both of them, one after the other, with Nate trying to roll off the table and Artie trying to help, and get them both back into their pants, and turn around, in about four minutes.

He said, "You're good at that."

That's all. Then he went back out to the cake. But I've been his son for thirty-three years, and I know what that cost him to say, and what it meant. It's the most he's said to me about anything I've done since Little League.

So that's why. Not because I'm touchy, though maybe I am. Because I'm proud of this, the same way I was proud of a good drawing, and Mr. Mom is a name for a man who's in over his head. Call me Bruce. Call me their father. The boys call me Daddy. Nate has lately started calling me Bruce, too, because he hears Karen do it, and we're working on that, but I have to say, coming from him, I don't mind it.