It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Preparenthood, Chris and I had made a clear agreement regarding child rearing. We both would work full time (or nearly full time) while our child was in day care. And then during the morning, evening and weekend hours when we were home, he would do the majority of child care, defined as 85 percent, until our son was a teenager, at which time the balance of responsibility would shift to me. The arrangement was a compromise between his desire to have children and my reluctance.

Reality played out very differently. Not figured into our plan were the future demands of our respective jobs. Chris is a museum administrator. I’m a part-time copy editor at a magazine and a novelist who writes at home two weeks a month. I work a regular shift at the magazine, have a lot of downtime and leave at day’s end without a backward glance. He works long hours, rarely has time for lunch and never stops looking back, no matter how many miles away from the office he is.

And so, when our son recently woke up with a limp, it fell to me to abandon my writing plans and to take him to the pediatrician and observe him closely for the day and take him back to the pediatrician and for an X-ray and make an appointment with a pediatric orthopedist while my traumatized little boy melted into hysteria in my arms calling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”

Then we got home and I had to make dinner and wash bottles and clean peas off the floor.

I simmered and seethed. My anger ran to a boil as I calculated the many hundreds of times I had washed the same two bottles over and over, day after day. Whatever parenthood was supposed to be, it wasn’t this. At least not for me. I’m 15 percent.

Chris came home a full hour late. He barely had time to kiss his son hello before putting him to bed. In the kitchen, emblematic of all my suffering, I gathered my forces and rose up.