In twelve years of education, plus two years of childcare, I can't remember a single time where I wasn't the first person called when there was a problem with our kids.
Not just when they were sick, but if they were playing up, having social problems, and in one mystifying instance, when a primary school teacher rang to tell me, in shocked tones, that my son "deliberately broke wind in another boy's face".
In all that time my kids had two parents working, but only one who was expected to drop everything if the children needed care.
And in almost every case, I did. At the time, it seemed to make sense. I was only 25 when I had my first child, and my career wasn't well established. So, if one of us had to put the kids first, of course it should be me. I didn't earn as much as their father, and wasn't up for promotion; it seemed to be much less of a problem for me to put work second and kids first.
It took years for me to understand the price I paid for that. Partly, I think, because it was so normal. All the other mothers I knew did the same thing.
But later, when I was on my own, trying to find a way to support myself and my kids, all those missed promotions added up to a whole lot of financial independence I struggled to find.
As I said, my story is far from unusual – so much so that public debate about the difficulties and costs of managing work and family is still solely centred on women.
"Working mums" are, apparently, going to be pitted against each other in the upcoming paid parental leave debate.
"Working mums" need to be put first when the senate cross bench considers changes to legislation.
"Working mums" will be $12,000 worse off under the new PPL scheme.
"Working mums" are always the topic when we're talking about making financial and career sacrifices to raise children.
Why don't we ever talk about working dads?
Women and "mums" are taking on almost the entire weight of caring roles, and yes, this is an enormous problem. It results in ongoing economic disparity between men and women. The huge gender pay gap, the dearth of women in senior positions, lower superannuation balances, gendered housing insecurity, and women's higher risk of poverty in old age can all be traced back to this.
Why though, is the solution supposed to be simply giving women more money in the first few months of their child's life? Caring for children lasts a lot longer than a few months. It's an entire working lifetime of the expectation that children come first for mothers, and work comes first for fathers.
Women are never going to be able to access an equal level of professional opportunity until men take on equal responsibility for unpaid work. I'm not talking about men "helping" more with the children, I'm talking about a fundamental change to how we understand family roles.
Men need to assume their value as fathers is equal to their value as workers, that caring for children is something in which they can find self-worth and identity, in the same way that mothers can. Essentially men need to start 'leaning out'.
They need to start talking to their employers about going part time; and they need to start preparing for sideways moves and pauses in their careers, as women do. They need to expect that work is not going to be a consistent upwards trajectory after they've had children, and plan accordingly. And they need to extend these same assumptions to other men in their workplaces, until it becomes the norm rather than the exception.
The men who argue for equal custody after relationship breakdown should be particularly willing to wholeheartedly embrace this change to their careers and earning capacity.
Because while we continue talking about "working mums" and ignoring working dads, while we keep talking about childcare and parental leave and flexible work as women's issues rather than parents' issues, we are never going to change gender disparity in the workplace.
Arguing for those options as a women's issue doesn't help women, it actually has the opposite effect. It just reinforces the perception women are not as hard-working or fully committed to their work as men, and that men are not involved in caring for children.
The real issue for women is not that women find it difficult to juggle work and children, but that it's only women who have this problem.
This is one of the feminist issues where men can really step up. Not by telling women what to do or how to change, but by changing themselves, and insisting that other men to do the same.
If they don't, the statistics won't move and in ten years' time we will still have articles talking about parental leave as something that only affects mothers.
The numbers:
- 40% of working age women are not in the workforce at all, nearly half of them say this is due to caring for children. 25% of working age men are not in the workforce, and only 6% of those men are caring for children.
- 70% of working women are part time. 60% of female, but only 9% of male part time workers are caring for children.
- Around 85% of fathers (and only 19% of mothers,) with children under five, work full time.
- Women do more than twice as much unpaid work looking after children than men, regardless of both parent's employment status. Even if both parents are working full time, women still spend more than six hours a day on child care related work, men only average around three.
- The number of women caring for a person with a disability is more than twice the number of men, and where they are the primary caregiver for a person with a disability, women are twice as likely to only work part time.