“How easy is it for you,” my wife often scolds me. “No matter what you do, your kids love you. They idolize you,” he continues. “You can lose your temper, talk badly to them, and with two stupid things you’ll win them back. They punish me for the slightest mistake,” she adds, frustrated. Sometimes, more heatedly, she continues with arguments that validate her idea that my position as a father is privileged: “I spent six years almost without sleeping and no one said anything, and since you put them to sleep sometimes, or slept with them many times, it seems that you always did it. Look at your mother: how poor my Adrián, he had to carry one girl down the street in his backpack, and then the other, so that they would fall asleep. And you did it five times! How many times did I do it?”
Those comments of yours bother me sometimes. They hurt my pride and, in my anger, I mistakenly attribute these outbursts to an attack of jealousy because at this moment in our lives our children, especially our daughter, seem to have a certain predilection for me (it hasn’t always been like this, and one day, I know, they will open their eyes and discover the cake): it is me they call, the one they try to play with, the one they expect to do their homework with, the one with whom they show the most signs of affection.
If I have to be honest, these comments bother me above all because they tarnish the image I have created for myself as an involved and egalitarian father. Even though deep down – beyond the facade and the Instagram filter – I have never stopped being aware that egalitarian is not an adjective that does justice to reality. Our experience of motherhood and fatherhood can never be the same if we start from the assumption that it brought an infinitely greater physical burden: two pregnancies, two births, two postpartums, two breastfeedings, that absolutely animalistic physical and emotional dependence that children have on the person who brought them into the world. “A father can be everything to a child, except the mother who gave birth to him for nine months and all those who come after,” wrote Manuel Jabois in manual (Pumpkin Seeds, 2013). Also more mental load, more worries, more headaches, more insomnia. “All those men around me who say that women worry too much about their children haven’t understood that everything around us turns women into worrying machines, and that worrying is a job, an obligation,” notes Danish author Olga Ravn on the pages of my job (Anagram, 2025)
She also carries the invisible burden of being a mother. I am referring to the low social evaluation of care work when it is carried out by mothers. They are taken so much for granted that they have no value. No one has a complimentary comment about her for doing what everyone thinks she will do. On the other hand, these same caregiving tasks appear to be the pinnacle of physical and spiritual fulfillment when performed by parents. We are great dads. “(…) Women’s work will always be considered lesser work in a patriarchal society. What will happen then when men join in the care? We are already seeing it. The work is the same, but the care provided by a man will have more prestige, value, recognition”, observed the anthropologist Julia Cañero Ruiz in an article published in Pikara magazine in October 2022.
The mother’s bar, strongly influenced by the image of the devoted and always available mother, is unattainable. It appears to have been placed by Armand Duplantis 6.30 meters above the ground. And even if she succeeded, no one would celebrate that woman the way the Swedish athlete is celebrated every time she breaks her record. The barrier for parents is four or five meters lower. Jump effortlessly. You don’t have to do much to surpass those who came before us. From there, every small gesture of involvement is an accomplishment worthy of celebration, a “great dad” sticker on your chest.
In the pages of my job, Olga Ravn’s courageous exploration of motherhood, Anna, her protagonist, alter ego by the author, deals with a couple deeply imbued with the principles of equal parenting. So much so that, at times, he perfectly embodies the figure of usurper or Trojan fatherwhich the perinatal psychologist Máximo Peña defines as Fatherhood here and now (Arpa, 2023) as «the man who engages in parenting, but who, instead of cooperating in the perspective of the well-being of the children, enters into competition with the couple or directly usurps the maternal bond, even questioning breastfeeding, because, at the height of egalitarianism, breastfeeding can be discriminatory for the member of the couple who does not produce milk».
To that usurping father, Anna dedicates a poem of enormous relief in every sense, full of truth and pain:
It’s not just this
our bodies
be different
if not also
our history
you have very little to lose
and for this I hate you
I think
you can only win as a parent
you don’t have to try too hard
to stand out
do more
Compared to the men who came before
all women
in me
your hard work
throughout history
when you lean on it
about the child
you are not burdened by
that story
with unpaid work
Women’s
birth
pregnancy
you say
that you want us to be equal
but we are not the same
And that poetry, as only good literature does, overcomes the barrier of paper, language and time and finds me. And if Anna’s words don’t bother me, even if they say the same thing as my wife’s, it’s because I understand that her message is for Aksel, her partner, not for me. Or at least not directly to me. And you see things more clearly from the outside, as a spectator and not as a protagonist. And maybe that’s why he feels less attacked – although no less challenged – and it’s less difficult for him to admit that yes, being a father is very easy.
