A chore is putting in an extra load of laundry or cleaning up after the kids before you get rec-room Pompeii. It's not installing an antique doorknob, planting tomatoes or grilling salmon for company, which are fun. Author Arlie Hochschild, who visited 50 families over several years, wrote in Second Shift that sleep-deprived women work an extra month at home each year. More recently, University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson found that mothers still spend about four times as much time with children as fathers do. Psychologist Carin Rubenstein, author of The Sacrificial Mother, found that twice as many moms as dads are involved at school.
Soccer moms make up a third of soccer coaches.
It may be ever thus. Women realize that they have five decades to make law partner but only two to raise a child. A mother's triumph, day by day, may seem small, occurring not in the corner office but in the kitchen over strained peas, with the results apparent not in the next deal but in the next generation. So we married someone whose nose can discern the vintage of a Merlot but can't smell a dirty diaper when it's right in front of him. It's easier to change the diaper than to argue over who changed the last one.