One Unexpected Bent Gender role Reversal from a Prior Decade, Hold the Mayo

Life is constantly handing us things we do not expect. Some are good, some are bad, some are just weird. This is about the third one.

Trish is busy this semester (nothing tells the world you are married to an academic person more than the tendency to think and speak in terms of semesters). Really busy, at least in terms of time away from home doing stuff. And not just in teaching, research, and her writing (40K words this year) and trying to do her part to corral the herd of cats that is the typical university department (and really, you can just hear Alec Guinness intoning that famous line from Star Wars:TOS "never was there a more wretched hive of scum and villainy").

It's scary to consider how snowed under she would be if her classes this time around required a lot of grading, because in addition to that she has been working on our church's Call Committee, engaged in the search for a new minister for our congregation. Oh, and she has also been acting as a mentor for one of the teens in our church.

Now naturally, part of the reason she can do all this is because I'm not working late. This also creates an exaggerated sense of her being away; when I got off work at 4:30 and picked Jake up at his day care at 5:00, we might be home a hour or less before Trish arrived. But now he comes straight home from school and we spend three hours before she gets home. That, plus the extra time away because of these (note emphasis here) temporary extra duties have created a peculiar situation for me.

You see where this is going, right?

I caught myself the other day worrying if Jake is seeing enough of his mom, if she is working too hard, wishing she could get home earlier, and not have to have evening meetings.

About thirty seconds later I snorted my English Breakfast tea out my sinuses (I don't recommend that, by the way. Hot or cold). Was I in a Bizarro World Sixties time warp or a Seventies one? Or what? Whichever it was, I'm not sure if it means I need to switch to decaf or get as much more caf as possible. File this one away under Things You Don't Expect When You Become A Stay-At Home Dad, cross referenced with Gender Bending.