I was busy working in my garden, today, teaching my 2 year old daughter how to mix concrete and set fence posts. Being an environmentalist, I was working on my latest project of building a raised platform for a 175 gallon rainwater tank for my vegetable garden.
In our house, we don't follow traditional gender roles at all. David does ALL the cooking and was the one who got up in the middle of the night to feed the kids when they were babies. When he's home he does probably 75% of the diaper changes. I'm the fixer, builder, I put up the shelves, and plumbed in the dishwasher. When we built a 'loft' in the garage for storage above the vehicles, I did most of the design and planning then we built it together, with me giving directions. David and I are both mechanical engineers, but he doesn't have the practical experience of DIY projects. (Left up to him, our loft would have been designed to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake, been built out of stainless steel and would have cost more than the house.)
We built a deck three years ago. David designed the 'aesthetics' of what he wanted it to look like and I designed the structural part. When we actually built it, it was the hottest two weeks of the summer and I was six months pregnant. But I was out there doing everything that didn't involve heavy lifting, because there was no way I could let our then two year old daughter see Daddy and Granddad building a deck while the women brought them drinks.
Maybe it's just because I spend my time hanging around more 'typical' stay-at-home moms at playgroups, instead of being back in the engineering world, but I sometimes get the impression that I'm the only mom I know who can use a hammer. Is it really that unusual for people not to conform to the usual gender stereotypes?
In our house, we don't follow traditional gender roles at all. David does ALL the cooking and was the one who got up in the middle of the night to feed the kids when they were babies. When he's home he does probably 75% of the diaper changes. I'm the fixer, builder, I put up the shelves, and plumbed in the dishwasher. When we built a 'loft' in the garage for storage above the vehicles, I did most of the design and planning then we built it together, with me giving directions. David and I are both mechanical engineers, but he doesn't have the practical experience of DIY projects. (Left up to him, our loft would have been designed to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake, been built out of stainless steel and would have cost more than the house.)
We built a deck three years ago. David designed the 'aesthetics' of what he wanted it to look like and I designed the structural part. When we actually built it, it was the hottest two weeks of the summer and I was six months pregnant. But I was out there doing everything that didn't involve heavy lifting, because there was no way I could let our then two year old daughter see Daddy and Granddad building a deck while the women brought them drinks.
Maybe it's just because I spend my time hanging around more 'typical' stay-at-home moms at playgroups, instead of being back in the engineering world, but I sometimes get the impression that I'm the only mom I know who can use a hammer. Is it really that unusual for people not to conform to the usual gender stereotypes?
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