At Home Daddy Blues

Dear Suz,
I haven't seen any questions on your site that pertain to this so I am going to bite the bullet and submit a question. I am a work at home dad. My wife and I have a wonderful relationship and I get to spend all day every day with my 3 small children. I am a freelance writer and make quite a good living from my living room. My problem is that when my wife and I go out to dinner with her business associates I invariably get either the sneer and a comment about being Mr. Mom, or ignored as if I couldn't possibly have anything to contribute to the conversation since I am a house husband. I am not insecure about this but I wonder if stay at home mothers experience this same thing or is the derision reserved for stay at home dads?
Signed: The daddy who is home with his kids.

Dear Daddy,
First off congratulations on both having an arrangement that works for your family, and for having a successful work from home career. Your children are very blessed to have their daddy there every day. As for your problem when in social situations with your wife's colleagues, I believe that many of those people would love to be able to stay at home with their children and are unable to. They also don't realize just how hard a stay at home or work at home parent really works. Being a writer I am sure you have knowledge on many subjects and should feel free to interject your opinions into conversation with these people. Many of them may not know anything about you other than that you are a stay at home dad, getting to know them better will probably help with the scorn or derision that you feel.

Many stay at home parents of both genders experience this problem, when a woman who works from home gets together with other women many times she feels left out of conversation and other women tend to ignore her opinions or point of view because after all she spends her day with small children, what could she possibly know about office politics? However I am thinking that because it is much more rare for a dad to be a work from home parent that the men are probably more misunderstood and underestimated by others.