Every year, I fill out my son’s school emergency contact form. Every year, I put my name first. My cell phone. My work number. My email.
And every year, when the nurse needs to reach someone, my wife gets the call.
I don’t know if it’s muscle memory or an assumption that the mom’s number is the right one to try. But it has happened consistently enough that I no longer feel that it’s just a random occurance.
This is the frustrating thing about being a dad who has actually stepped up: we’ve spent decades telling fathers to be more involved, but when we actually show up, the systems don’t know what to do with us.
My day is more flexible
I like to call myself the default parent in our house. Not because I’m more nurturing or have some evolved parenting philosophy. Not because my wife is an absent mom or does not want to be involved. I’m it because I work from home. The math is simple. I have enough flexibility that I can be at the school in 15 minutes when I need to.
So I’m the dad on the class roster. The one at the bus stop. The emergency contact who can pick up. If only they would call me.
Courtesy of Reuben A. Ingber.
Our system has been hard for others to adopt
In the day-to-day management of our children, others see my wife as the default parent. When my wife gets added to the class parent WhatsApp groups, she adds me manually, like I’m a special accommodation rather than a parent on the same class roster she is on. Birthday invitations go to her email — always.
When I show up solo to the class Halloween party, I get disproportionate praise. “Oh wow, Dad came!” Like I’m a heroic unicorn instead of a parent doing normal parent things. The moms who show up get nothing. Because, of course, they’re there.
If one of our kids is sick, I am working from home with them, and this somehow still shocks people. I’m not angry about this. I’m just noticing it.
The assumptions are not fair to my wife
The arrangement makes sense for our family. My wife is a dean at a middle school, and shockingly, working in education doesn’t offer much flexibility. I work from home with a calendar I largely control. We’ve chosen this system for our family, and it works.
But here’s what I don’t say enough: it costs my wife something real.
She carries guilt about not being the default parent, and those calls from the nurse and birthday party invites that go to her first are a constant reminder of this. Our society hasn’t caught up to our arrangement, and she feels the weight of every cultural assumption about what mothers are supposed to do. She misses things. And she feels that.
Courtesy of Reuben A. Ingber.
I sometimes resent that my flexibility automatically makes me the one who adjusts. My calendar gets Swiss-cheesed when a kid is home sick. I burn meetings to handle a situation in the nurse’s office. And because I’m a man doing “mom work,” I get praised for the same things women are simply expected to handle without acknowledgment.
That imbalance is strange to sit with.
I’ll continue to put my name first
Here’s what I love about our system, though: I get to experience so many things that a lot of parents, moms and dads, don’t get to. Not because I’m exceptional — because I am fortunate to have the flexibility to be there. I’m embedded in the weekday rhythm in a way a lot of dads aren’t. I’m grateful for that. Genuinely.
I want my son to grow up seeing equal parenting as unremarkable. I want my daughter to expect her future partner to actually show up. We built an entire society around the idea that moms take care of the children. Then we started asking men to participate more. We forgot to update the infrastructure.
The WhatsApp groups still add the mom by default. The birthday invites still go to her. The nurse still calls her first. So every year, I’ll keep putting my name first on the emergency form. And every year, I’ll notice when it doesn’t matter.
This year, my son’s day camp scheduled orientation for Sunday, June 21st. You know what else is Sunday, June 21st — Father’s Day. You know where I will be.
