Earlier this school year I was elated when my daughter’s teacher asked my husband to be one of the room parents. I immediately thought she was the best teacher ever. She figured out our family dynamic within a couple of weeks of school and wasn’t confused by it. I do take my daughter to school most days, but my husband picks her up every single day. At 2:25. In athletic clothes. With a two-year-old in tow. At her previous school, it was the same thing, only he picked her up at 11:30 daily, but with the same wardrobe and company. When my husband worked and my kids were in full-time care, he usually picked them up early, most days after he had squeezed in a run between finishing work and getting her. But he was always the one who would take them late if she had a doctor’s appointment or pick them up when she was sick. Yet he was never asked to do room mom-ish stuff, not once.
My husband and I have a system where we delegate. We are true partners and share responsibilities. I go to work so that we can have money for food and clothes shelter and preschool and activities, and he buys and prepares the food, keeps the clothes and shelter clean, and transports the kids to and from preschool and activities.*
This works really well for us, and I can remain unburdened by thoughts like What’s for dinner? or I wondered if I paid the utility bill, or I wonder if we can get through the week with enough clean underwear for all of us, plus a dozen more things that I don’t even know that I don’t need to worry about, because he just takes care of them.
When at previous schools I would get an email from a teacher or another mom about bringing stuff for a party or going in on a teacher’s gift or my upcoming snack duty, I forwarded it to my husband and he would handle it. The first time I got such an email I completely screwed this up. I got a group email about our family’s assignment about bringing stuff for the Halloween party and completely dropped the ball. If the teacher was sending an email to the parents, I assumed that it was all of the parents, but it was in fact an email to just the moms. This made no sense to me. My daughter was in daycare full-time with other kids there full-time, because both of their parents worked full-time. Yet there was an assumption that it would be the mom who would take care of school duties. The next time this happened, I replied to the teacher, saying thank you, I’ve copied my husband here, he will handle this, and can you include him on future emails? Which rarely happened. I also could never get him added to group texts with the moms, so I found myself sending him screenshots of all of the parts of text conversations containing action items.
So this first month of school the teacher has endeared herself to me, and probably nothing she does the rest of the school year will make me annoyed at her. First, because she recognized who might have the time to help out at school. Second, she finds that he is capable of doing it. The fact that he is a man didn’t keep him out of the running. And she asked him! And he’s doing it!
He is actually nervous about it (so cute). He thinks that he can’t live up to room mom standards, or that the potential Pinterest-worthy standards for parties and various activities are going to be so high that he won’t want to live up to them because they are stupid and unnecessary and also four-year-olds just really don’t give a you-know-what about some of that as long as there is candy. I pointed out to him that he is in a perfect position to call out anything that is over the top because the other room moms will either (1) listen to him because he is a man and probably right or (2) ignore him because he is a man and doesn’t know about party planning, but in neither situation will they call him a bitch or a control freak when he leaves the room. But THAT is a topic for another day.
*This is mostly a joke. I do help with the household chores. I do preschool drop off on my way to work and am mostly in charge of bedtime routine (after my husband has fed, bathed, and brushed them). I also will put a load of laundry in the washing machine and unload the dishwasher occasionally when I’m not too tired and I feel like it. Also, the shelter is almost never clean.
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