Does He Or Doesn't He?

By MARGARET CARLSON

If the gum-care institute calls to ask how often I floss, I might say a couple of times a week, because I know I should and wish I did. No doubt this was the mentality of the more than 3,000 working adults who, when asked by the Families and Work Institute whether they were spending more time with their families, said, "You betcha!" Men claimed they were devoting more than two hours every day to Kinder and Kuche, half an hour more than 20 years ago. This, naturally, spawned outsize headlines, led by the New York Times's MEN ASSUMING BIGGER SHARE AT HOME, NEW SURVEY SHOWS.

Have husbands really evolved from hunters and gatherers into nurturers and helpmates? I don't think so. A yuppie dad I know puts Junior in the Snugli, hits the gourmet market, lights the grill, and then boasts of fixing dinner and tending baby. Poke a superdad in the middle of the night and quiz him on his kids' shoe sizes, their birthday-party preferences or Sara's science-fair entry. Tops, he nails two out of three.

It's women who still expend the psychic energy that keeps a household going (Is Dave & Buster's right for Ethan's birthday? Christmas here or at my sister's?). As for chores, let's define the term. A chore is the thing that has to be done right now or all hell breaks loose. A chore is putting in an extra load of laundry or cleaning up after the kids before you get rec-room Pompeii. It's not installing an antique doorknob, planting tomatoes or grilling salmon for company, which are fun. Hobbies--surfing the Web, working out, tinkering with the sound system--are not housework simply because they're done at home.

Author Arlie Hochschild, who visited 50 families over several years, wrote in Second Shift that sleep-deprived women work an extra month at home each year. More recently, University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson found that mothers still spend about four times as much time with children as fathers do. Psychologist Carin Rubenstein, author of The Sacrificial Mother, found that twice as many moms as dads are involved at school. Soccer moms make up a third of soccer coaches. When the real crunch comes, 83% of mothers stay home with a sick child, reading Goodnight Moon endlessly, compared with 22% of fathers.

It may be ever thus. Women realize that they have five decades to make law partner but only two to raise a child. A mother's triumph, day by day, may seem small, occurring not in the corner office but in the kitchen over strained peas, with the results apparent not in the next deal but in the next generation. So we married someone whose nose can discern the vintage of a Merlot but can't smell a dirty diaper when it's right in front of him. It's easier to change the diaper than to argue over who changed the last one. So we're a little more tired, and men are pulling a fast one on these gullible pollsters. In the end, we're the ones who just might turn out to have it all.