Over the 15 years that my husband and I have been parents, there have been several points when he’s claimed he was doing a full half of the parenting. It has never once been true.
He used to argue my standards were unnecessarily high…
Then the pandemic struck. I didn’t have the energy to make up the difference, and we started to see how little parenting my husband had actually been doing while -thinking- he was parenting.
Teeth went secretly unbrushed. Kids were constantly hungry. The little one went feral.
What we saw is that my husband’s idea of parenting was sufficient for short stretches, even days, but it wasn’t truly meeting all the kids’ needs.
I’m highly skeptical when I see a man claiming his wife/parenting-partner just has unreasonably, unnecessarily high standards.
I’m sure there are a wonderful dads out there who really meet all their kids needs — the simple needs as well as the more complex, subtle emotional ones. But given the structural issues of sexism and misogyny in our society, they’re going to be the rarity.
Women parents get held to a higher, more exacting standard by all the people around them, often including their own feminist mothers, than dads do. That sinks in, subtly but deeply. And it leads to a lot of smart, well-meaning men just not realizing they’re doing a half-ass job.
The final result for my husband and me when we finally were on the same page about how unevenly the parenting was split between us is that he now handles most of the straightforwardly obvious parenting things — like handling emails for kid birthday parties.
At this point, it’s true that I’m much more adept at handling the more subtle, complex emotional issues such as convincing a troubled teen that they do have a meaningful future to look forward to. I’m better because I was working harder at learning how to do it for many years.
It’s too late for my husband to truly catch up on the skills I’d been developing and practicing right next to him for a decade and a half. But he keeps trying, because that’s what you do as a parent — you keep trying. And he helps me shoulder the burden by doing the parts he can.
Sometimes these days, this means it might look at first glance like my husband is doing more of the parenting than me. But when there’s a real disaster? I’m always on call, and that’s exhausting. So, it’s closer to fair than we used to get.