DATE: Friday, October 17, 1997              TAG: 9710170008

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 
SOURCE: Keith Monroe 

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

MR. MOM WANTS TO BE A HAUSFRAU WHEN HE GROWS UP

My wife and I are one of those dual-earner couples, and we get along fine. It's true that she earns a lot more than I do. But I can live with that.

She's also smarter, better looking and more likable than I am. I can live with that, too.

And she travels a lot for work, leaving me to play the Mr. Mom role. But I can even live with that. Or could, until her most recent junket. But now, I'm rethinking the division of labor.

Why? Because she finally got to go somewhere good.

The cynical aphorist La Rochefoucauld says it is not enough that we succeed, our friends must fail. By the same token, one spouse may be willing to put up with diapers, but only if the other is down a mine-shaft. Life's little pleasures must be equitably distributed.

It is worth noting that the women's movement didn't take off until women began to get the feeling that men were having too much fun at the office. When women were banging laundry on rocks in the river and men were getting mauled by savage beasts, you didn't hear a lot of demands for equality. When men were risking life and limb in steel mills that Andrew Carnegie described as ``hell with the lid screwed down'' and women were baking bread, women may have wanted the vote but not jobs at the blast furnace.

My position exactly. Equality is highly overrated unless you find yourself on the losing side of the equation.

I had no problem schlepping the kid to school so long as the frequent flyer was jetting into O'Hare in February and being blown sideways down State Street and into Lake Michigan.

I had no problem making sure the homework was done and the lunchbox packed so long as the executive in the family was enduring really miserable connections on puddle-jumping prop planes to scenic Dubuque during black fly season.

I didn't mind hitting the fast food window on the way home from work so long as my better half was eating really vile airport, airline and motel muck.

But on the latest trip the balance of terror has shifted decisively. And not in my favor.

While I've been commuting on the perpetually clogged and comically named expressway, while I've been trying to keep the kid's head above water in pre-algebra and biology, where I'm a bit shaky (Zero to the fourth power? Vacuoles? Ribosomes?), while I've been sitting through a succession of candidate forums, she's flown off for a week at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

This violates the unwritten bargain that she will at least pretend to be having no more fun than the daddy-nanny. In fact, it raises the suspicion that all those trips to Montana, California and New York haven't really been grim slogs through dreary budgets.

Instead, maybe they've been all-expense-paid vacations. Rather like government fact-finding trips that never concentrate on the sewer system of Zimbabwe when a study of the parks of Paris is available.

Call me paranoid, but I begin to think it's possible that while I was larding up at Ronald McDonald's place, her trip to the Culinary Institute of America included pleasure as well as business. While I was running the car pool, it's just possible she was grabbing a cab to Broadway shows. No fair!

And this jaunt to Europe is one straw too many. In a marriage, you have to overlook a lot. But it isn't easy to overlook an entire continent. As long as She Who Must Be Obeyed was flying to Minneapolis in winter, I was content. But bopping off to a European fete is hard to characterize as anything but easy duty.

She claims the Book Fair is grueling labor, of course. All those pages to turn. But I can't get a different image out of my head. I seem to see a business meeting on the upper deck of a ship cruising down the Rhine. The Fairgoers appear to be sipping Riesling and munching on schnitzel and spaetzle as the Lorelei go by.

Meanwhile, I am pulling hard time eating my Taco Bell off a TV tray and taking notes as Mark Earley and Bill Dolan debate penology, and my kid still wants Ribosomes explained. If I had a bra, I'd burn it.

I don't want equal pay for equal work. I don't want to be liberated. I don't want to crack a glass ceiling. I just want to go along. I want some of those little sausages and red kraut and spicy mustard and rabbit in red wine sauce. I want to say ``Ein Bier, bitte,'' and have my better half put it on the expense account.

I've had an epiphany. It turns out what I really want to be is a corporate spouse from the '50s. I want to be Donna Reed or Harriet Nelson. I'd even settle for Aunt Bea. It turns out, Mother Knew Best. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.

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