“I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow.”
“My back’s been killing me.”
“You already know how Ava likes her hair done.”
And his personal favorite, delivered with a shrug like it settled the matter: “Owen calms down faster for you anyway.”
Some nights I’d stare at him across the kitchen and genuinely wonder if he heard himself.
But the moment we stepped through his mother’s front door, Nathan transformed. Attentive. Warm. Father of the Year, live and in person.
At one cookout, I watched him tell his uncle, beer in hand, completely straight-faced, “It’s fifty-fifty at our house. Has been since day one.”
His mother, Barbara, beamed like he’d just recited scripture. “That’s exactly how I raised him.”
Meanwhile I was standing four feet behind him with Owen on my hip, while Ava tugged at my sleeve because she needed the bathroom right now, Mom, right now. Nobody so much as glanced our way.
At another family lunch, Barbara pulled me aside in the kitchen while Nathan sat out back with his cousins, laughing at something on someone’s phone.
“You know,” she said, lowering her voice like she was letting me in on something kind, “sometimes I think Nathan actually does more for those kids than you do.”
I turned and stared at her. “I’m sorry — what?”
“You should count yourself lucky. A lot of husbands aren’t nearly this involved.”
My face went hot. Owen had woken up three times the night before. Nathan had slept through every single cry, dead to the world, while I paced the hallway with a screaming baby against my chest.
I wanted to say all of that. I wanted to lay it out for her — that I was the one who knew Owen’s feeding schedule down to the ounce, Ava’s preschool calendar, which pajamas she’d tolerate and which ones triggered a meltdown, where the diaper cream lived, where every bottle and blanket and half-chewed toy in our house had ended up.
Instead, I heard myself say, “Right.”
On the drive home, I finally said something to Nathan.
“Your mother thinks you do more of the parenting than I do.”
He actually laughed. “She said that?”
