An Unscripted Role Reversal

SAN FRANCISCO —  (Mary Curtius)

Inadvertently, my husband and I have stumbled into one of those ‘90s arrangements. Ori, once a reporter for Israel’s leading newspaper, now stays home, dividing his day between parenting and part-time work. I work full time in a downtown office. He is the primary caregiver for our nearly 5-year-old daughter, Noa. I am the chief breadwinner.

Five days a week, Noa watches Daddy kiss Mommy goodbye, and Mommy heads out of the door to go to work. Our daughter points to the downtown skyline of San Francisco and says brightly, “That’s your office, Mom!”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, and no matter what upbeat magazines or those optimistic books on reordering your priorities say, this takes some getting used to. There is no road map for making such a nontraditional arrangement work. But through a lot of trial and error, many tears and not a few skirmishes, we’ve developed some rules we try to follow that seem to help make this work.

First, and most important, keep a sense of humor. Second, be forgiving. Third, simplify. Fourth, maintain constant, detailed communication. (We find that the speed-dial function on a telephone is a must-have, for frequent consultations.)

*

(Ori Nir)

Noa’s friends know me as the funny daddy who plays monster hide-and-seek with them when they come to Noa’s house for afternoon play dates. I’m the one who helps Noa wiggle into her pastel leotard and takes her to gymnastic class Monday afternoons. I sit on the bench with the moms, praising each child’s performance. No doubt, in a couple of years I’ll be a soccer dad.

Sometimes I wonder what the Palestinians who saw me dodging rocks and inhaling tear gas, slipping through army roadblocks and covering terrorist attacks when I was an Israeli reporter in the West Bank would think of me now.

It still hurts when colleagues e-mail me from Israel, asking why I don’t write anymore. They don’t see the travel, technology and feature stories I write that get buried in Ha’aretz’s soft sections.

But the truth is, after a decade of front-line reporting, I feel more of a rush watching Noa determinedly conquering the monkey bars than I did when I scooped my competition on some nuance of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. There is a richness in actually living my life that was missing when I devoted my time to writing about other people’s.

*

(Mary Curtius)

When we met in 1986, in the West Bank, Ori and I were equally consumed by our professions. I was a Middle East correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, based in Jerusalem, and Ori was the West Bank correspondent for Ha’aretz. We shared workaholism, a slightly skewed sense of humor, a passion for journalism and a fascination with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Early on in the relationship, we decided to work out the details of our lives around the fundamental principle that we would be together. For a decade now, we have bounced from one side of the globe to the other, moving in and out of jobs as we tried to balance sometimes-painful trade-offs.

The equation became all the more complex when bouncy, smiling Noa arrived in 1992. Before she was born, Ori followed me to Washington, D.C., where I became a diplomatic correspondent. After she was born, I followed him to Jerusalem, where he covered the birth of Palestinian self-government.

And when Noa was 3, Ori agreed to walk away from his high-profile job and follow me to San Francisco, to a feature-writing job that would bring me geographically close to my family for the first time in 12 years and give me more time for mothering. But it meant giving up his decade-long career with Ha’aretz and entering the uncertain world of freelancing, guest lecturing and house husbandry.

*

(Ori Nir)

Taking care of Noa is not the hard part. That’s the joy. Instead of working six days a week, from early in the morning until midnight, as I regularly did in Israel, I take a break each workday from 3:15 p.m., when I pick Noa up at preschool, until after she goes to bed at 8:30 p.m.

Walking hand-in-hand with Noa from school gives me time to listen to her talk about her day, about the lizard lady who visited and let her pet a snake, and about the boy who upset her by calling her stupid.

I’ve gotten to know her teachers, her friends and the mothers of her classmates. I’ve adjusted to being the only father on field trips, the only male officer in the parents association.

I even managed to laugh it off when one mother referred to me as the “house hubby,” although it brought home how odd my situation seems to most people, even in a city that prides itself on its progressiveness.

The hard part is working from home. Freelancing from a home office, I’ve found that the border that existed between work and home has simply dissolved. It is harder to stay focused, to get organized, to prioritize work and to complete tasks. And, as my ever-expanding waistline demonstrates, it is nearly impossible to stay away from the refrigerator.

The days are never long enough. After dropping Noa off, I sit down to write a list of story ideas. But then I remember that I need to do the grocery shopping, straighten the living room, thaw the chicken breasts for dinner. I set off to do one task, get distracted en route and find myself emptying the kitchen garbage pail instead of calling a source.

Often I compensate by doing my professional work late at night, after Noa has been tucked into bed and the house falls silent. I rarely go to bed before midnight.

*

(Mary Curtius)

The hardest part is keeping my expectations in check. Now I know how men felt when they would go off to the office, come home at the end of the day to a chaotic household and ask their wives, “But what did you DO all day?”

I walk through the door and find dinner almost ready to serve. But my eye wanders to the jumble of toys scattered across the living room floor, the heap of dirty laundry, Noa’s face smeared with jam and the paint stains on her clothes.

Maybe secretly, I search for these flaws as a sort of reassurance that, after all, Ori can’t run the house the way I would run it if I were home.

At first, we talked wistfully of how we would like to switch roles. But that simply isn’t possible, and we have come to see the advantages of this situation. Unlike millions of other children with two working parents, Noa is able to come home in the afternoon and spend precious hours with her father. They draw together, tell stories, make up inside jokes, tickle each other until they collapse, breathless, on the floor.

Each of us has experienced professional benefits as well. For the first time in years, we have the luxury of spending days, even weeks, researching and writing feature stories. Deadlines are more elastic, and our writing has become more creative, less utilitarian.

And our relationship, once based largely on a shared passion for work, has broadened and deepened. Each of us is more involved in building a family life, more committed to spending time with each other and with Noa.

*

(Ori Nir)

I won’t say it wasn’t hard when the winter floods hit and I became a single parent for days at a time, while Mary cruised out into the countryside in a four-wheel-drive Jeep to cover the devastation. She wears the beeper now and carries the cell phone.

For a long time, when Noa drew pictures of Mommy and Daddy, her mommy figure loomed large over a puny-looking daddy. These images bothered me. I wondered whether it reflected some intuitive sense she had that Mom had assumed the dominant role in the family. But as we have grown more comfortable with our nontraditional life, Noa’s drawings have changed. Mom and Dad now are equal in size. I like to think that means she’s coming to see us the way we’ve come to see ourselves.

I can’t say I would feel as good about this arrangement if I thought it was permanent. Both of us look at this as a temporary trade-off, before the next move. Keeping two careers alive and our family healthy, we have learned, requires flexibility, a willingness to seize opportunities as they arise, and a readiness to live life in the short and medium term.

Mary Curtius is a Times staff writer. Ori Nir is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.