There’s this blog I read.

It’s written by a mother of a child who has survived Histiocytosis and come out the other side free of the disease, but sadly not the long term consequences of both the disease and the treatment. Neither her nor her daughter are fully out of the shadow of Histiocytosis, and it charts life for them both. It is well written (a rarity I find). She is eloquent, articulate, and the posts are all well structured. She often strikes a chord with me, and describes things I have, and still am experiencing. I have found it helps a lot to not only hear from someone who has gone throught it and come out the other side, but it helps to know what we are expereincing is not unusual under the circumstances.

But today I read her most recent blog post and I finished it feeling sadder, and more alone than I have for a long time. “Alone” is not strictly accurate. I’m not alone, my wife is amazing, and we have some incredibly supportive friends and family. But I expected to feel the way I usually did when I read her posts, and I felt the exact opposite.

Here’s why.

Her most recent post was an appeal to normal Mums. It described all the things a histio-mum is, how their life is different, and how being a normal is never going to be possible any more. I’ll give you a flavour of it.

“When your kid is sick, you get them treatment, you go the appointments. You’re a mom. You do mom things. This is just a mom thing. The difference in this particular mom thing is the degree of the mom thing. It’s mom thing to the 10000th power. Moms are just superheros without enough sleep. Well, chemo moms are just a different kind of superhero with even less sleep. Not better, and not worse.”

You see where I’m going now.

She’s a mum, and she was talking to other mums about being a mum.

I’m not a mum.

So it wasn’t about me.

I’m probably being oversensitive. I know this kind of completely non-deliberate exclusion is something women have been dealing with for centuries if not millenia. I’m proud to call myself a feminist. I dont think women should be treated as equals because I’m related to women, I think women should be treated as equals because they are equals. We’re all just fucking people alright? I dont give a shit about your gender, your skin colour, the place you were born. You are a person, just like me, and everyone else. You have the same rights, and the same value, and deserve to be treated equally.

So when I read about how my life is, and how it has changed from someone else, and that person categorically excludes me, it damages things for me, and every other dad who is trying to be the best parent they can be. It says that I cannot care as much as my wife does, because she is the mom, and I am not.

My wife and I make a consious effort to share the childcare. She’d probably tell you we don’t manage it completely equally – I’m a little free-er and easier with the TV than she’d like, and I have a tendency to stay in the house rather than take them all out because it is easier for me. But I do the vast majority of the cooking, she works several evenings a week so I pick them up from school, cook them tea, help them with their homework, give them their medicine, help them clean their teeth, put them to bed, and comfort them when they are poorly. This doesn’t make me special. It just makes me a parent. It doesn’t make me better than my wife, it makes us parents together.

When PB needs to go to the Hospital sometimes I take him, sometimes my wife does, and sometimes we take him together.

So here’s the deal.

Unless you are talking about something that has affected you because you grew a person inside of you and squeezed them out after 9 months. Or about breastfeeding, then it isn’t a mom-thing. It’s a parent thing. You don’t have a monopoly on caring because of the shape of your genitals, just as I don’t get to be excluded because I happen to only have the one X chromosone.

I’ll carry on pissing people off by arguing about how sexism is ridiculous, I’ll defend a woman’s right to do whatever the hell she wants as long as it is legal and moral. And I’ll continue to take flak for calling out bigotry, misogyny, and prejudice whenever I see it, deliberate or not. All I ask of you is that you don’t talk about caring for kids as a mom-thing.

Now don’t think I’m judging her, I’m not. I have massive respect for her, and still enjoy her writing. It is just that there is something in society that paints Dads as not caring. And I want to change that.

So go read her blog, it’s here