I don’t stay at home; it’s true.

I’m not raising children; right.

How do I have the audacity to claim the title of House Husband? Do I dare poke fun at those that call themselves house spouses? Well, yes, kind of. Only because I firmly believe that if I can’t poke fun at myself then I shouldn’t publish anything, and I believe I have taken on the role of house spouse as much as any baby-touting better-half.

Over the past five and a half years of marriage, our job situations have, well, fluctuated. Across the timeline of our marriage, the weight of “nights away” and “hours worked” and “multiple jobs” has shifted back and forth. The realization came that this weight had shifted away from me when I was only working one job at 40 hours a week. This was the least I had worked in the lifetime of our marriage. At the same moment, Marie was working five part-time jobs. It was time to ramp up the expectations I had for myself and our homestead by taking on another job: house husband.

I’m no stranger to bivocationality. Not only do I have personal experience in the field, but this seems to be an epidemic of my generation. This hipster phenomena has seen a lot of young people going to college for something about which they are passionate, then graduate to work full-time in retail or food service or hospitality in order to support their passion as part-time or free-lance or volunteer work.

As I stepped into my new role, I realized something that I didn’t expect: this new job was my passion. I like running a tight ship, I like keeping the dust off our mantle, I like organizing and decorating and innovating and improvising. It’s not that Marie doesn’t help clean; she just doesn’t like it enough to write about it on the internet. This job for me is fun, it’s gratifying, and I’ll work full-time to support it.

That’s why I am the audaciously self-appointed House Husband of our little homestead, and those are the credentials I use to write as one.