Huh. I guess I DID have a dream feminist partnership after all. Go fig.

 It’s hard OF COURSE or appreciate how good you have it when you actually have it good, you know?

I have spent literal YEARS complaining on this blog about the slog of motherhood and unfair gendered expectations for parents and women’s second-shift housework, etc etc etc. (I wish I labeled my posts because then I could easily see JUST HOW OFTEN I talk about these these), but it turns out? I HAD NO IDEA that I was living the egalitarian dream.

BEN DID SO MUCH AROUND THE HOUSE when he worked from home, and his flexibility was THE KEY to all of our success, in some ways.

He still does A TON of house/kid/life stuff, but not having him around during the day really illustrates all the things he used to do.

And I am talking about little things like unloading the dishwasher in the morning and filling the kids’ water bottles, switching laundry throughout the day, folding and putting away laundry at least half-time. He also did a bunch of bigger things like picking up prescriptions from the HMO pharmacy, hitting our favorite wine/cheese/coffee store midweek and making sure our produce drawers were stocked fresh, taking Dorothy and Coop to their ortho appointments, doing dance driver duty and the diving practice shuffle two days a week. He was HOME if something came up or if more than one kid needed something in more than one location at the same time. He had time to take my car in for oil changes and tire rotations. I COULD SCHEDULE A COLONOSCOPY AT MY LEISURE.

And! Like a jerk! I have spent the last 17 years of motherhood taking all of this (and more!) for granted.

Sometimes I think about what my life might have looked like if I had devoted more focus to work than to kids, and I will admit to being a little wistful. I’ve never really thought about what my life would look like without the kind of partnership we have created, though. I would have been lucky to scrape together the time to grab some holiday sweater-folding shifts at the Gap, it turns out, when we had 4 kids in 7 years.

(Luckily, we did both have flexibility when we had many little kids, and now we have the infrastructure in place to handle 2 busy parents OK. I don’t want to lose sight of that in all of my complaining— things are totally fine. I have just been kind of a bad partner all of this time, focusing on what I was doing that was hard and forgetting that I had someone by my side doing at least half of the domestic heavy lifting.) 

The other night at hockey pics, I suggested Coop and Minnie get a photo with the mascot (Jack was at high school diving practice; Harry was getting ready for NHS, and we watched Dorothy jump from our slowly moving van at the dance studio (TUCK AND ROLL! WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE) on the way there)

COOP:

MINNIE (running away)

That particular night, Ben drove straight from work to collect Jack at practice (just to make things more complicated, Jack’s team practices with another high school at the other high school right after school. It is SO FUN to add that pick up and drop off to THE BUSIEST TIME OF THE DAY) (we have a carpool, but it is still on me 2-3 times a week), fed himself and Jack (I made the other 4 kids early bird grilled cheese and tomato soup before the chaos began), ran by the house to begin cleaning up the dinner mess the rest of us left behind when we bolted to sort of be on time, grabbed Dorothy a little early from dance team, and met the rest of us at the high school for NHS induction. PHEW! We spent 20 minutes having a glass of wine while packing lunches and finishing the kitchen clean up, and then we hung out with H and J for a few minutes and PASSED OUT. 

AND THAT IS PRETTY TYPICAL FOR US NOW.