Life gets busy with two working parents.  Deadlines call and school demands.  Bedtime routine is followed by dueling laptops at the dining room table.  Regardless of how chaotic things get, one thing never changes at our house.  Mommy is in charge of dinner.

Don’t get me wrong, my husband is amazing around the house.  He does his laundry.  He does my daughter’s laundry.  He does towels and sheets.  He washes everything but my clothes, and sometimes he even takes those out of the drier and stacks them on chairs and couches in a semi-non-wrinkly way to keep the laundry train going.  He does the dishes.  He picks up.  He does not do dinner.  When 6:30 hits and I am not home he will never come up with the independent idea that food needs to be produced to nourish our bodies.

I attribute this to several things.

1. My husband does not have the genetic tie between hunger and anger that my daughter and I have.  If he doesn’t eat there are no repercussions.  He just gets skinnier.  Oh darn.  My daughter and I turn into grouchy demons without food.  Somehow the presence of two grouchy demons doesn’t even trigger dinner ideas in my husband’s head.
2. I like to cook.  I’m not a gourmet or even a scratch cooker, but I enjoy preparing meals.  Most days I’m happy to perform the little ritual that puts food on the table, but some days I come home after working 5 hours on a Sunday and the lack of dinner smells waiting for me when I walk in makes me crazy.
3. We don’t pick up food.  We cook.  Somehow the idea that food can be prepared by others and brought home isn’t a viable option at the Afthead house.  Occasionally if I am leaving the office after 7:00 or if volleyball season has started and we can eat at the park I will get sandwiches, but mostly we eat at home.  This means we cook at home.  This means mommy cooks.

It’s not that I mind our gender roles, but as I was driving home at 6:45 this evening I had a fleeting thought that maybe dinner would be waiting.  It wasn’t.  Some gender barriers just can’t be overcome.  Like dinner.  Oh and trash.  I’m sure every Wednesday night when Mr. Afthead comes home from guitar lessons, or volleyball, or a night out he thinks that maybe the trash will be out by the curb.  It’s not.  The trashcans are always still sitting by the house.  I don’t do trash.

Okay, two things never change at our house.