While employers often presume that working mothers will drop out, or slow down, to care for kids, they expect dads will work full steam ahead without missing a beat.
"If I roll into a single-family dwelling at 2 or 3 in the morning, I'm expecting mom, dad and 2.3 kids, whatever the average is, not 11 challenged individuals".
That's true, and yet we scrambled, pulling together after-school care, forgetting that one child had a friend coming over (doesn't work with the last-minute babysitter) and, worst of all, the child discovered at 7 10 a.m., working away on her first-grade "superstar" week poster and confidently expecting her dad to provide "10 to 15 family pictures" help, and breakfast.
He went to work at Krispy Kreme, expecting his dad to pick him up when he finished his shift.
You see, upon hearing the news that his wife was expecting, my dad, (like most fathers, if they're being honest) was thrilled by the prospect of raising a son.
"I expect that Dad's work will be a part of my work for the rest of my life, and I'm happy about that," Ms. Foote said.
At 52 I've got more hair on my head than expected (my dad was bald from his early 20s) and an unseemly amount of it has refused to go grey.
For those of us who grew up in a generation or a household where it was expected that Dad was the one responsible for bringing home the money to support the family, and Mom was the one responsible for cleaning the house and raising the kids -- the idea of the woman now being the main breadwinner can be daunting and frankly, disorienting.
I hadn't expected the dads' race at my daughter's school sports day to be a rite of passage.
