She Works, He Doesn't

The shift is showing up more frequently in pop culture, too. "Friends" fans spent much of this season watching Monica support her unemployed husband, Chandler. (To recycle an old Thursday-night catchphrase: "Not that there's anything wrong with that.") Eddie Murphy hits theaters this week in "Daddy Day Care," in which he plays a laid-off dad whose wife becomes the primary breadwinner. In bookstores, Alpha Earners are at the heart of Allison Pearson's novel "I Don't Know How She Does It" and "The Bitch in the House," a collection of feminist essays. "There are few things that make a man less attractive to women than financial instability," writes one contributor. "We can deal with men in therapy, we can deal with men crying, but I don't think gender equality will ever reach the point where we can deal with men broke."

Fathers who voluntarily choose the househusband role are challenging that sensibility. Last month three Chicago men gathered for breakfast at a suburban strip mall. Each has a wife with a lucrative job--two in finance, one in market research--and each man had achieved enough workplace success that he felt able to ease off the throttle. Ron Susser, 43, was chief financial officer for a consulting firm; today he practices the 4 O'Clock Shuffle, his name for his frantic afternoon cleaning binge. "When my wife comes home, she expects the pantry to be stocked, the house to be in order and dinner cooked--I consider that my job," Susser says. David Burns, 49, was a computer consultant; today he's a Brownie leader. Scott Keeve, 52, oversaw 150 employees for a food distributor. When the nanny told his two kids she'd quit if they didn't behave, Keeve took the job himself. Like so many women before them, these guys are learning to adapt to a job without paychecks, business lunches or "attaboys." You get the sense that if the Lifetime cable channel installed cameras in their homes, there's a ready-made reality show to be found in their bouts of ambivalence.

For Bill Laut, a former real-estate appraiser, those moments come frequently. While his wife, Sheila, racks up frequent-flier miles as a business-development executive, Bill hauls their 6-year-old triplets to the grocery store, where strangers gawk. "Your poor wife," they say, to which Laut has a standard reply: "I look around very dramatically and then ask them, 'Do you see her here?' " When his kids were younger, he'd be watching football with --friends, and talk would inevitably turn to work. "I changed 27 diapers today," Bill would interject, only to be heckled: "Get a job!" "At parties I feel like an outcast," Bill says. "I tell people what I do and some of them are thinking, 'What a freeloader.' Everyone pats you on the back, but I wonder, are they patronizing me or being sincere?"

But on good days, many househusband-by-choice families are so jubilant about their lifestyle they sound like the "after" example in an ad for antidepressants. Dan and Lynn Murray were both Chicago lawyers when Lynn became pregnant with their triplets. Assessing their lives, they decided Lynn was happier in the office. "I'm sort of a type-A personality who likes to control my environment, and there's more of that at work than at home," she says. Today Dan cares for their five children; Lynn hopes he never returns to work. Brian and Maria Sullivan of Highland Park, Ill., saw their income drop 40 percent when Brian quit his sales job to care for their two kids, now 5 and 3 (Maria's a VP with a big computer company). Brian had resisted quitting, but now he sees the upside. "How many dads get to potty-train their kids?" he says. When they're teenagers, Brian would like to spend some afternoons on the golf course. "That's fine as long as he's chaperoning every field trip and is there at every sports practice," Maria says.

Many such couples have simply decided that no matter how much lip service companies pay to "family friendly" policies, it's simply not possible to integrate two fast-track careers and kids without huge sacrifices. So they do a cold-eyed calculation, measuring the size and upside potential of each parent's paycheck, and opting to keep whoever's is larger. For the highest-achieving women, the trend is striking. Last fall Fortune reported that more than one third of its "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" have a stay-at-home man (it dubbed them "trophy husbands"). But this trend reaches women far below the executive-vice-president rank. Patty Lewis, 42, is a video producer and meeting planner in east Dallas; her husband, Spencer Prokop, 45, is an actor. When son Chase arrived, her income was steadier, so Prokop stayed home. Dad feels isolated, and he's given up on lugging Chase along to occasional auditions. "This notion that I would have this time to work on myself--well, that goes right out the window," says Prokop, who misses the luxury of uninterrupted bathroom time. After Lewis's 12-hour workdays, she's often too beat for spousal conversation. Sometimes Prokop thinks he's nagging his wife the same way his stay-at-home mom nagged his father. While they've no regrets that Chase enjoyed a full-time dad for 3i years, Prokop is ready for a change. Their son started day care two weeks ago.

The wives of these househusbands have one universal regret: they spend --too little time with their children. Of course, two-career couples with kids in day care express similar sentiments. Still, becoming the family's only revenue stream can add a dose of anxiety, even to a job you love. "I feel an intense pressure being the sole wage earner," says Sally Williams, 28, a Philadelphia lawyer with a 4-year-old daughter and a stay-at-home husband. "The house, the car--everything is riding on my shoulders." Some Alpha Earners say colleagues assume that their husbands are deadbeats who can't hold jobs. They also complain about the other extreme: how the novelty of Dad's dialing back can lead people to lavish him with too much praise. Says Beth Burkstrand-Reid, a lawyer in Washington, D.C.: "I'm doing a good job of supporting the family, [but] no one is giving me a pat on the back."