The Domestic
Parenting dads along with parenting the actual children is still a plight for many women, says Sophie White, who feels it’s time to give dads a baptism of fire
Crispy duck
“He must think we birthed some magical unicorn babies who came complete with self-cutting nails”
Irecently went away for a week’s work and noticed an unpleasant trend. People were fascinated as to how Himself would manage to care for his own children in my absence. Would I be leaving detailed instructions? Would he be able for school lunches and doing the homework? And apparently, most crucially, if the volume of questioning on the matter is anything to go by, how would he get on with bedtime?
Bonkers stuff. And these interrogations weren’t coming from elderly relatives, but largely my own generation. It makes sense, I guess, in that the ‘bumbling dad’ trope is still a staple of ad campaigns, and any dad who seems to take more than a passing interest in his loin-fruit is lauded as if he has cured cancer, rather than doing something that is simply the baseline of what is required of any parent.
When a mother ducks out of work for some parenting-related duty, it probably isn’t paranoid to think there are a few sighs and eyerolls left in her wake. Whereas a rush of ‘Isn’t he great?’ and ‘Isn’t he incredible?’ abound when a dad leaves the office to attend a school sports day or bring a sick child to the GP. Enraging.
The ‘Isn’t he great?’ narrative completely lets them off the parenting hook. Now, I’m not boasting that Himself has achieved some advanced level of perfect fathering, and we live in a blissful utopia of shared housework and co-parenting. He has never once, for example, in six years, cut the nails of any of our children. He must think we birthed some magical unicorn babies who came complete with convenient self-cutting nails.
He’s crap at other stuff too, and so am I. But the crucial difference is that I haven’t had to parent him through parenthood like so many women seem to have to, even now in 2020.
I’ve never had to leave him instructions on how to operate the children he co-produced and lives with. If you have a co-parent who doesn’t know, or claims not to know, how to do bedtime, as several women confided in me, when I said I was going away, I suggest you book yourself a trip as soon as possible.
The only way to school them on the bedtime routine is the same way we mothers learned: a baptism of fire. We didn’t have the luxury of detailed instructions, we just knew that for our own sanity, we needed to power these kids down at night, and if you want something badly enough, eventually, come hell or high water, you will make that thing happen.
For us, division of non-child-related chores can be trickier — we’re both inclined to micro manage the kitchen, but can, at least, both agree on this quick Chinese-style duck dinner.