“You’re a woman; you can handle it!” —the manager of my apartment complex, when I mentioned having a difficult time at single parenting

My boyfriend, Graham, is away. We’re a little over halfway through the time he’s going to be gone. (He’s doing a training for the Army so he can get a promotion.) It’s not that I’m working all that much harder than I did while he was here, which I’ll get into. It’s that there is no one to give me a break. I’ve had showers, especially because our daughter Irene has a cold, so I take them with her to drain her sinuses. But I haven’t had a long bath since the day he left. I’ve had time to myself, but it’s “I have a babysitter so I can go to physical therapy” or “I have a babysitter so I can go to the school’s program about preparing for kindergarten.” Neither of which, in my opinion, really count as “time to myself.”

If you believe the movies, that’s pretty much what being a mom is, even when your partner is around. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it be anything other than a punchline to have a father provide the level of care for his own children that a mother would. The only two movies I can think of involving stay-at-home fathers are Kramer vs. Kramer and Mr. Mom. And, okay, Kramer vs. Kramer is a drama, but Ted’s incompetence at all the jobs Joanna had been doing before she walked out is still played for laughs. And, sure, the more recent of those movies is thirty-five years old, but think about that. Two movies, four years apart, and someone born when the second one came out is now old enough to be President.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m aware of the statistics, and I’m aware of how it goes here. I just finished reading a book called How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, and it lays out the findings of any number of studies that confirm my lived experience. I am still doing the same amount of housework as I was with Graham here. I do all the laundry. I do all the dishes. I do all the tidying I can’t get our son, Simon, to do—though that’s one where Graham will occasionally spend an hour or two putting things where I can’t find them. When he’s here, he is more likely to cook than anything, I grant you, and we’ve gone out to eat more often than we probably should because I just can’t face cooking another meal right then, but literally everything else, I’m doing the work.

What I feel, though, is that the movies reinforce the idea that it’s okay. Almost invariably, if a father is doing housework, it’s either alongside the mother or with him screwing it up in some way. It’s like all those commercials that drive me crazy wherein a woman comes home from what is obviously a long day at work to see her whole family sitting in the kitchen, done with their days already, waiting for her to make dinner. The idea that she might like someone else to cook for her is a foreign one. And the portrayal in media has to come from somewhere; ad executives make commercials like that because it’s the home life they expect people actually have. So it reinforces itself when they put it into commercials.

I don’t blame media for this; let’s be clear. My aunt is actually of the opinion that our family would’ve been better off if my dad had been a stay-at-home parent and my mom went out to work, and there’s no way that would’ve happened in the ’70s and ’80s, not with my Republican dad the Air Force twenty-year man. But she thought that in part because she’s of the belief that my dad was actually better at housework than my mom. (I can say this because my mom doesn’t read my columns.) Media reflected a reality, and it was a reality for a long, long time.

But it isn’t anymore. Modern households are likely to at least pay lip service to the idea of egalitarianism. Both parents are likely to work. Stay-at-home dads are a thing; my firstborn’s adoptive dad stayed home with her while her mom went to work. (And he is actually about my own father’s age, come to that.) If boys grew up with the idea reinforced by their media that they, too, could just do a load of dishes now and again without it being a big deal, not just being told that by their mothers, maybe it would make it easier for us to just get boys to do a load of dishes now and again.

You see, I don’t believe that there’s a gene, as women joke about, that leaves you blind to housework that needs to be done. I believe that it’s a cultural issue. And I believe that this is one area where our media is behind our culture—and dragging it backward. Not showing men who do housework and care for their children on an equal footing as mothers is another area that films and TV are lacking in representation; the man changing a diaper is usually a joke, not a father taking care of his children because that’s part of being a dad. You’d better believe that man is going to be covered in pee. In his mouth, if he’s changing a boy.

As it happens, I do believe that Graham could handle the situation if I went away for twenty-four days. I’d have to write him instructions on how diapers get washed, because that’s something you really do have to do a specific way, but by the time I got home, he’d know how to do it. And might take on a load or two now and again voluntarily from that point on. I just shudder to think about what everything else would look like.

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