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When he chose to be his toddler’s primary caregiver, he thought he was enlisting in the fight for parental equality. Then he came face to face with an enemy far tougher—and way cuter—than anticipated.

I couldn’t wait to be home with Laila. She’d just turned one. My wife was returning to work after mat leave, and I was set to take her place as the at-home parent. I loved the idea and couldn’t stop daydreaming about it, eager to trade the 9-to-5 grind for a new life of freedom and possibility. We would spend sunny mornings at the park, or visit the giraffes at the zoo. We would bake cookies and read books. We would ride buses and bikes and take day trips to the mountains. We would do whatever we liked, when we liked, how we liked.

In short, we would give ’er. Live to the fullest. Carpe diem. All that stuff. Laila was bursting with curiosity, with words, with life, and I was going to be involved in her many discoveries in a new way.

That’s more or less how it went at first. Every morning, I’d make us breakfast. Then we’d go on some outing together. I accidentally locked us out of the house on one of my first days as a stay-at-home dad, and it became one of our best adventures. Carless, we went downtown by foot and C-Train. We shared muffins at Bumpy’s Cafe. We explored the city together, drinking in the spring sunshine with Laila perched on my shoulders. “I’ll take you to the courthouse to ride the elevators when you’re older,” I said. People in suits filed past us on their way to jobs and meetings and presentations. I had no desire to be part of that world. I’m so glad I’m not you, I thought.

Before I became a stay-at-home dad, I prepared myself for a fight. I’d heard horror stories about dads being asked to leave playgroups (because they weren’t women), being ostracized at the playground (because they weren’t women) and being asked why they’re “babysitting” their kids on a weekday (asked, of course, because they weren’t women). Online, I read fiery blog posts by stay-at-home dads who seethed whenever somebody used the term “Mr. Mom.” It seemed many people couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of a caregiving father. Moms mothered, raising kids, while dads went to work and made money. The inverse messed with people’s heads. From all of this I gathered that stay-at-home dads are a marginalized lot, and I braced for my own persecution, imagining how I would verbally rip into anyone who suggested a father shouldn’t be an at-home parent.

That fight never came. Instead of scorn, I encountered the opposite. When I told people that I was staying home with Laila, they’d start beaming and say something along the lines of “That’s so great!” (Which was disappointing, in a way, after getting so worked up about all those sexist jerks out there.) At our local playgroup, far from being asked to leave, I joined a contingent of male regulars (one of the dads now runs the group, in fact). I had it completely backwards. Stay-at-home dads weren’t pariahs; they were domestic heroes, forsaking careers and money for their children. How courageous! How noble! How progressive! A friend of mine likes to joke that women never gave him more attention than when he was a stay-at-home dad. That sounds about right. I’d enlisted in the fight for parental equality, but I arrived on the battlefield too late, at least in my part of the world. The war had already been won.

Meanwhile, while I was wasting energy preparing to fight the dad-haters, I failed to recognize the real villain in the stay-at-home scenario: Laila. The lady, as we called her. The one for whom we’d sacrificed so much (sleep, sex, money and time). She’d let on like we were going to go explore the world while her Mama was at work, but she didn’t tell me that we had only a two- or three-hour window in which to go out. She didn’t tell me that the winter days were going to be long and boring. She didn’t tell me that she would sometimes spend entire days whining, inconsolable and insufferable, and that she would ask for the same songs a billion times.

Other things Laila didn’t tell me: That by staying home with her, I was really trading one slog for another.

Also, that she was going to drive me absolutely nuts.

Some parents manage to hold everything loosely. When their kid rolls around in the dirt, they don’t fret about mud stains, but laugh and say, “Oh, silly Oscar!” When he pushes over a glass of milk, or pulls the laptop off the counter, or plucks a plate out of the dishwasher and shatters it on the floor, said parents direct their efforts toward cleaning the mess while giving a gentle explanation of why that behaviour is inappropriate. All told, they keep their cool, offering nurturing responses. “Kids will be kids,” they say.

This is what my wife Colleen is like. This is not what I am like. At some point in life I unknowingly adopted the severity of my German ancestors, and under my tyranny, cups have to stay upright, food has to go straight into the mouth and messes aren’t amusing or cute, but utter failures. If I was reading the newspaper and Laila started dropping gobs of Cream of Wheat onto her lap (which she did, on purpose, just to tick me off), I’d freak out, thereby giving her the response she was after. I would angrily quote the wise words of my dear Opapa: “There is rules.” It had no effect, other than making her lips curl upward in a self-satisfied grin.

Bizarrely, I became obsessed with cleanliness and order. It was totally out of character, as I’d always been the messy one in our marriage, leaving clothes on the floor and heaps of dirty dishes on the counter. No longer. I was a househusband now. I meant to do the job well, and I didn’t want to spend all of Laila’s nap time doing work around the house. I had to keep on top of cleaning throughout the day.

Domestic duties became a refuge, a needed time of solitude. Instead of reading Goodnight Moon yet again (arguably the dullest book ever written), I switched on the radio, savouring the cadences of adult conversation as I scrubbed peanut butter off of plates.

Laila would want me to read her a book or play with blocks. I refused. Go play in the living room, I said. Go nurture your own self.

After the dishes were done, it was a different story. I was all hers. We walked to the zoo. We went up the Calgary Tower, where Laila fearlessly ate snacks on the glass-floored observation deck. We walked the paths of the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary. We went to malls. At Chinook Centre, I paid the $3 so we could ride the merry-go-round in the food court, a move that baffled friends (also parents of young kids) who said they would NEVER pay for such a thing. I didn’t care. When the ride started moving, Laila’s smile was so big, her blue eyes so full of joy, that I paid for another ride on our next visit, too. Waste of money? Maybe. But my lady was worth it.

I don’t know when I started yelling at Laila, exactly, but at some point I ended up pitching frozen food across the kitchen (at walls and windows, not at her) and shouting profanities, a scenario that hadn’t entered my daydreams at all.

Winter was like a slow suffocation. It was an endless, tedious, mind-numbingly dull expanse of nothing much. Colleen usually had the car. We got out once in a while, but mostly we spent long mornings at home, which inevitably turned into war. Our condo was too tiny for Laila to run anywhere, so she would scamper around in a halting, zig-zagging pattern, never able to take more than a few strides in one direction, constantly squeezed between the bookcase and the bikes hanging on the wall. The walls were forever closing in on us, and the small space amplified her shrieks of frustration when she struggled to stack blocks or pick a certain toy off the floor. She was frustrated with herself and I didn’t show as much empathy as I should have. I responded to her tantrums in kind, shouting something like: STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!

Mercifully, we had a break from each other each week thanks to a kid-swapping arrangement with friends. On Wednesdays, I dropped off Laila for the day, and Tuesdays I would babysit Amelia, who is a few months younger than my daughter. Tuesdays were tough at first. We’d go to playgroup, a necessary outing for all of us, but everything would unravel on the walk home, as the two kids howled in the stroller. I’d loudly sing a kids’ song I learned from my grandmother, about a little horse galloping over sticks and stones. Hopp, hopp, hopp! Pferdchen lauf gallop! If I sang it loud enough, the girls stopped howling.

My first day babysitting was a complete disaster. I hadn’t planned what we’d have for lunch, and as I heated water on the stove, Laila summoned her inner Bertuzzi, wrapping her hands around Amelia’s neck and driving her into the cupboards. It came out of nowhere and I lost it: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING LAILA? Now both girls were having meltdowns. Amelia had fire hoses for tear ducts, squirting out giant teardrops that rolled off her cheeks and splashed on the floor. As the girls wailed in unison, looking to me for consolation, I thought: These ladies are going to ruin me. I knew how to deal with Laila (sort of), but didn’t know how I would comfort someone else’s kid.

Let’s all have a big hug, I said. Let’s calm down. Let’s try this again. I wrapped my arms around the girls, and they stopped crying. We ate peas and peanut-buttered toast that day. From then on, that’s what we had for lunch, every Tuesday. I wasn’t out to prove my originality. I was out to survive.

The life of freedom that I naively imagined was a hoax. At one point in the middle of February, I opened the front door and stepped outside wearing my running garb and a thin blue tuque. It was my first time out of the house in two or three days. I was going for a jog. But once the door closed behind me, I just stood on the front step in the biting wind, seemingly unable to move, as if I was still inside the house looking out.

After watching me stand there for a while, Colleen opened the door and said, “You look like you have agoraphobia.”

It felt that way. The world was a hostile place, and I no longer fit. Friends were getting PhDs, graduating from law school and landing exciting new jobs. Me, I watched Dora the Explorer and cooked up Kraft Dinner. I got sucked into what Colleen calls “the shame spiral,” lamenting my lack of creativity, education and ambition. I had little energy for writing and felt empty. To cope, I compulsively checked e-mail and Twitter on my iPod every few minutes, waiting for some unknown bit of news that would infuse my life with excitement. It never came.

I had chosen to stay home with Laila so I could be actively involved in her life. Two days after she was born, I wrote in my journal: “My hope is that I’ll always be able to be present to her, to love her and listen to her, to be attentive to her life and help her discover the mystery of who she is.” But even though I was physically present with Laila, in a thousand little ways I was constantly absent, trying to get away.

When Colleen came home from work, I snuck upstairs and aimlessly killed time online. If she and Laila came upstairs, I’d go downstairs and wash dishes. When they came down again, I’d go back up to the computer. Like magnets repelling each other.

I need to get out of here.

Months pass. I’m working full time again, freelancing from our basement, which I’ve set up as an office. Upstairs, Colleen is breastfeeding our new son, Sam, and I can hear Laila whacking at the floor with some toy. I’m buried in deadlines and could easily work all afternoon. But I can’t. Not today. I’ve got a date with my lady. We’re going to the Calgary International Children’s Festival to see a puppetry version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, one of her favourite books.

It will be Laila’s first time at the theatre. I can’t wait.

We leave the house in the usual hurry. It’s raining, and hard. We ride the bus downtown and after we get off, I carry her with one arm and hold the umbrella with my other hand as she points at and names everything she sees.

“Blue hat!”

“Two cranes!”

“Lots of people walking!”

At the theatre, I explain to Laila that when the little caterpillar comes out, we need to be very quiet. Then the lights dim, and we are told this is a “no shush-ing show.” The music starts and kids’ voices are everywhere as the caterpillar glows green and red on the stage. Suddenly my face is wet with tears. Laila isn’t heavy enough to weigh down her seat, so I reach over and hold it down to keep her from getting folded in half. She is distracted, looking around and missing most of what’s happening on stage, but she’s happy. So am I.

Originally published in Swerve magazine on June.17.11.