I Can Be A Dumbass For My Wife, My Superhero

What does it look like to have gender equality at home? In celebration of International Women's Day, we roped in modern dads to share the ways they are pulling their weight in domestic matters, and why it's important to them.

When I was a kid, my mother cultivated a reputation that at our house there were tons of snacks. Our house was the snack house. You could eat any snacks you wanted. We had chips, chocolate, sodas, ice cream, whatever. And if you came to my house to play, you could eat whatever you wanted. Small towns in England always have village schools close enough that you could walk, and I used to walk home for lunch because we were poor and needed to save money.

My mom used to make me crisp sandwiches. That’s two slices of white bread, buttered, and layered with salt and vinegar crisps. It has a market value of approximately 12 pence. It has a nutritional value of absolutely nothing. But we always had snacks for strangers. Why?

I realised why about six to nine months of my daughter Zoe’s life in the swimming pool every afternoon watching and applauding kids swimming to the bottom to retrieve small toys. If you’re wondering, it’s never impressive. The pool itself is about knee height. If you slipped you’d hit the bottom by accident. And retrieving small toys is… I mean it’s what we ask dogs to do.

But I stand there with Zoe every day saying: “YO, DID THAT SERIOUSLY JUST HAPPEN? BECAUSE I’M NOT KIDDING BUT THAT WAS UNBELIEVABLE. WHAT??” Because I’m trying to make them like me, so that even if Zoe takes after me and she sucks, the kids, neglected by their own parents, will still want to be around me and just by repeated proximity and association they’ll start to think if I’m cool, then my daughter must be cool too, and the result will be that she will have friends.

I spent years looking forward to having kids so that I could be my dad. And when they finally came along, I realised that with my wife’s career and her ambition, what we need isn’t my dad - it’s my mum.

It makes sense because on one hand, my wife has a good job in banking and she is great at it; on the other, she is decidedly not cool. Adults love her. She’s very nice and sweet and genuinely interested in their boring stories. But she is not cool. She can’t help our kids the way I can.

My wife, my superhero

My wife is a modern-day superhero. A dispassionate executor who goes from obstacle to obstacle, task to task like a Terminator and just does what she needs to do to provide for her family. She went from giving birth, to breastfeeding, to pumping, and back to the office... easily, by the way. And not easily like the task of doing so was easy, but easily in that it was for her because her Kryptonian cellular composition is fueled by our human sun. When traffic is bad, she flies to the office. True story.

I guess there’s always the issue of whether or not this flipping of traditional gender norms has been difficult. Truthfully, it has felt emasculating at times. As my children have gotten older and are now going to school and need me less, I immediately went back to meaningful work. Even though it is less writing movies anymore (as you can see from reading this column that I wrote) and more writing about the experience of raising my kids, it’s not all the way back to work yet. But I’m working on it.

Any discomfort I feel is internal; I don’t really care what anyone else thinks.

My family needs what it needs and my responsibility is to them, not to a bunch of people who have written zero collective works on parenting.

I've been preparing my entire life for this

I actually enjoy changing diapers. I feel like that is a real bonding exercise. And I don’t mind getting poop on me. If it’s my kid’s poop. I like bathing my kids. I take pride in preparing their food. It’s a low bar but anything more nutritious than a crisp sandwich (what we ate in my home as kids) makes me feel proud and they’re set up, at least nutritionally, better than I was. I like playing with them. I have a base level of athleticism for a reason. I like reading to them. I take it super seriously. I’m a writer, so I understand how to pitch the drama. And I’ve lived in all those different places my dad made us move to, each with different cultures and accents: I’ve been preparing my entire life for this.

Yeah, when I was a kid without my dad we would’ve been living on the street. But without my mum my life would have sucked too. I wouldn’t have had any friends or literacy. And my dad’s life would’ve been worse as well. He came home to dinner and pleasantness every night. His clothes had to be cleaned and ironed if he was to go out and make that money. He needed someone to be a sounding board, to listen to his complaints about work, to keep him sane.

He needed someone to make him laugh, to be silly, or to be dumb with him, so that the time he spent not working was worth the time that he was.

And I can do that. I am a dumbass. I was a dumbass for my kids. I can definitely be a dumbass for my wife. She’s my hero. And that’s where I fit with her.

James Thoo is a husband and father of two girls. He has been a screenwriter by profession for almost 20 years, working in London, Los Angeles, Malaysia, and now Singapore.