Ever wonder what laid-off male lawyers with working wives are up to these days? Alexandria Symonds gives us a hint in her delicious essay, "Ward Cleaver Makes a Playdate," in the New York Observer. Her focus isn't on the lawyer set per se, but I can easily see how laid-off lawyers would fit the pattern.

She calls them "The Problem That Has No Job: a kind of upside-down Mad Men meets Mr. Mom where wives and girlfriends are out all day making money while the city's unemployed guys mop floors, cook dinner, and experience all the attendant ennui."

A manager turned stay-at-home hubby tells Symonds that he now identifies with his own stay-at-home mom: "She would watch TV ...  sort of get into a rut, get very depressed," he remembers. "I found myself getting into a rut, too. The only thing that saved me from getting into a worse rut is the fact that I consumingly hate morning television."

So how are these former high-achievers killing time until their wives come home? They're surfing the Net, of course: "Unemployed men seem to devour blogs in much the same way as '50s housewives devoured Redbook and Ladies' Home Journal."  (I can only hope that the lawyers are clicking onto The Careerist too.)

Some find refuge in cleaning. A 28-year-old lawyer who was out of work for six months tells Symonds: "I'm a compulsive cleaner anyway ... and when I was home all day, that's basically what I did. If someone called me and said, 'What are you doing right now?' I would be like, 'Oh, I have so many chores to do today.' You make something out of nothing."

And like a lot of well-educated women turned housewives, they're asking themselves: "Why did I spend 22 years getting A's and studying?. . . I have $450,000 in education and fancy everything, and I'm sitting around all day and watching 2.5 movies a day?"

But what's different about stay-at-home dads versus stay-at-home moms is that some men regard child care as something exotic, a "pleasant novelty"--which I can only assume means that they didn't do much of it before.  One doctor, described as being "between jobs," tells Symonds that taking care of his son has been a "lovely summer holiday."

Though they might be busy shopping for the perfect melon at Whole Foods or schlepping their kids to Kumon, they also manage to carve out a bit of me-time: "Nearly all the unemployed men we talked to made sure to emphasize their regular workouts." Buffed lawyers--well, why not?

A distinctly male touch, writes Symonds, is that they watch a lot of sports. "World Cup pretty much dominated my life for about a month," says one. "So there was someplace to go every day in the middle of the afternoon, and I pretty much hit half the bars/restaurants on the Lower East Side during that period."

Bar hopping during midday? Really. I can only assume he has no kids or, if he does, there's a babysitter on call. Personally, I don't know any moms who would go to a bar at that hour--though it's not that bad an idea.

But the big question is: What should these laid-off guys do in the long run--especially if it seems increasingly unlikely they'll get their old jobs back? It's a particularly relevant questions for lawyers who have been sitting around for over a year. Not to be insensitive, but will Big Law ever welcome them back?

They might consider one of the more "feminine" professions as an alternative. "Men could wake up and retrain themselves-they could become teachers and nurses," Slate editor Emily Bazelon tells Symonds. "And this whole notion we have that once a profession turns pink, it can never turn back, I mean, that's a choice that people make. Nowhere is it written in stone that, like, men shalt not be nurses in large numbers."

Symonds adds there's also a teacher shortage in math, science, and reading, and that men might fill the gap. "Maybe men need to work like women," she says.

Do you think laid-off male lawyers would take a traditionally female job? Will some of those laid-off lawyers stay home permanently?

Related article: Power-Lawyer Mom, Stay-At-Home Dad

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