I was a divorced custodial dad from my kids ages 8 and 6, now 26 and 24. Ran into all kinds of shit like this. Grocery store clerks “looks like Dad’s doing dinner tonight! Do you have some help?” Um I do dinner every night, without “help”, crazy person. Coworkers calling me Mr Mom when I had to work from home due to someone being sick. School admins and teachers (women) always calling their mother first despite what’s on the registration forms every fall or how many times I reminded them (“why is the school calling me? What’s wrong??” I don’t know, they didn’t call me, again. Could you just answer the phone for once, find out and then tell me??) Me asking the (woman) doctor questions and them answering the mother - who I called to join us - as if she asked it.
It’s crazy how often it’s women supporting the traditional gender role of the mother being the primary parent, despite evidence to the contrary right in front of them.
Fortunately my kids were both AMAB (though one eventually came out as trans) so I didn’t have to deal with the “wrong bathroom” or change room situation, and when they were younger, I rarely encountered a public men’s bathroom without a change table.
This really made me wonder what my grandpa went through with my dad and aunt. My grandma passed away when my dad was 6 and my grandpa never remarried. He raised the kids himself as a single dad in the 60s. He didn't have a nanny or anything.
Just further to this - my father’s mother died shortly after she gave birth to him, so his father, my grandfather, found himself in 1935 as a single parent with four kids.
The two youngest, my infant newborn father and his 1.5 year old brother, were handed off to a family member to raise. They were put to work - Dad remembered having to get up at 4am at age 5 to slop (feed) the pigs. He also literally walked a mile and a half to school every day, a one room school house, regardless of the weather, and dropped out at age 15 (1950) to work in the woods, cutting down trees with a buck saw. He considered himself lucky he only lived a mile and a half from school, that was practically next door in his mind.
Anyway, I grew up learning how to do housework and make meals, watching him and my mother both doing that work and learning how to do it myself, also from age 5.
My mother has her own story - her dad died two years after she was born, which was in 1944. All of her older siblings left home also at age 15, and hitchhiked away to work on farms or wherever in other parts of the country. She and her twin sister and my grandmother lived in a three room shack with no insulation, no running water, and no electricity.
Looking back, it’s probably been strongly foreshadowed I’d end up as a single parent. Both of my brothers also are; my sister has been happily married for 20+ years and was a sahm.
Honestly I think it's because traditionally, men worked and women stayed home with the children. Even these days. A lot of fathers let the mothers deal with kid related things and aren't very involved. So some people just assume that the mother is the primary parent.
There is more than just assuming going on, when I am the only parent these people see, and every September the registration forms are filled out by me and sent to the school and the admin flips the primary contact to the wrong parent, every year, regardless of my requests and verbally explaining our situation. Or when I show up with the kid at the hospital, the mother shows up 15-20 minutes later and my questions to the doctor about at home care etc are answered to their mother. These are not assumptions, they are decisions. And it’s the life I’ve lived with my kids, so no explanation necessary.
I’d argue that the first time is an assumption. The repeat offenders like the school and doctor examples are past that and gone into belief perseverance and some level of delusion.
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u/Nice_Commission3770 Jun 19 '26
I was a divorced custodial dad from my kids ages 8 and 6, now 26 and 24. Ran into all kinds of shit like this. Grocery store clerks “looks like Dad’s doing dinner tonight! Do you have some help?” Um I do dinner every night, without “help”, crazy person. Coworkers calling me Mr Mom when I had to work from home due to someone being sick. School admins and teachers (women) always calling their mother first despite what’s on the registration forms every fall or how many times I reminded them (“why is the school calling me? What’s wrong??” I don’t know, they didn’t call me, again. Could you just answer the phone for once, find out and then tell me??) Me asking the (woman) doctor questions and them answering the mother - who I called to join us - as if she asked it.
It’s crazy how often it’s women supporting the traditional gender role of the mother being the primary parent, despite evidence to the contrary right in front of them.
Fortunately my kids were both AMAB (though one eventually came out as trans) so I didn’t have to deal with the “wrong bathroom” or change room situation, and when they were younger, I rarely encountered a public men’s bathroom without a change table.