And if so, when do I get all my retroactive paid vacation and Christmas office parties? Oh, and Post-It notes. I could really use a big drawer-full of free Post-It notes for all those little mommy (I mean PARENTAL) love notes in preschool lunches and reminders to order a Costco cake for the birthday party, send seven birthday gifts to other people's kids, pick up soy butter and little containers of applesauce (red NOT blue or orange) from the grocery store and copy playdates from email correspondence to the family calendar, call my mother/mother-in-law and all those little but imperative things mothers do. Errr, I mean, fathers.
Dads of today, columnist Lenore Skenazy writes, are picking up on the tenets of modern motherhood. In fact, she says, trophy husbands have replaced trophy wives by opting to spend more time with their offspring and putting the business of driving to soccer practice and searching the house, car and seven errand stops for a lost woobie ahead of the income-earning kinds of business. The big golden, gleaming trophy's no longer the Harry Winston tennis bracelet, Jag in the driveway or private lessons with an Olympian kayaker. Instead, its the privilege of being with and there for your kids.
I guess if I'm following these new guidelines, I have a trophy hubs of my own. After some grueling and marriage-altering months when my husband worked 70+ hours a week, we made a choice that he'd take a pay cut to reduce his hours so he could be home more and I could have a reasonable chance at avoiding institutionalization. Our budget's tight but Thursdays are now Men Only days and I can always count on my husband to be our family's parent of the day at preschool. He's also a faithful laundry-doer (even if I have to remind him that sheets need to be changed at least monthly) and dishes-doer (even if he actively avoids the sippy cup valves). While the "dads are the new moms" is catchy, I just think of us as having as equitable a partnership as we can. But I might just change my tune if he remembered to buy a card for his own sister's birthday and stopped dressing the boy in those goofy mismatched outfits.
