We were on our way to dinner, having left the baby with my mother, whom we were visiting. I'd covered while Bill had dressed, then he'd left me 20 minutes to get ready while he watched Isabelle. It hadn't been enough. Scrambling, I'd showered, slapped on lipstick and steamed carrots for her dinner. Whisking the baby from my husband's arms, I had run upstairs to change her diaper (he offered but he's slow). Back down to the oven for the carrots. Upstairs again for a few flips of the curling iron -- this was our one evening out alone, after all. Down to the living room to talk to my mother, who was setting up "Lawrence of Arabia" on the VCR. Barking instructions at my husband: "Tell the restaurant we'll be late! Find her sweater!" Now, in the car, I realized I'd given my mother almost no advice about putting our active 1-year-old to bed. "Lawrence of Arabia"? I turned to Bill angrily: "Did you ever find her sweater?"

Oh my God, I thought, I'm becoming one of those kind of women.

When we travel, it seems to take 10 times as much brainpower to keep the details of Isabelle's little life straight. My brainpower. Heading to the restaurant, Bill remained irritatingly calm and centered, blissfully unaware of the laundry list of things I'd run through. How could he be aware of them? He doesn't do them. He doesn't even think about them.

Like so many women, I handle most of the details of child care.

I don't mean to. Supposedly I don't want to. Bill and I are committed to equal parenting; as he is an academic with a flexible schedule and I'm a freelance writer, we've been able to bring it off. Or so I had thought. We put in equal shifts with the baby. He has his own areas of expertise, like getting Isabelle to bed. We routinely congratulate ourselves on our 50-50 arrangement. I constantly brag about what a great father and partner he is.

But traveling recently I realized that something is missing. A thousand and one things, actually, that I do in a semiconscious Mommy-driven state. While these things remain oddly invisible to my husband, they keep me in a constant state of motion and distraction, always feeling that I'm forgetting something -- which I usually am. At times, especially when traveling, it's hard (did we pack the baby nail clipper?) to think (the ear thermometer?) a straight thought about anything else (will the hotel have a crib?) for all the details of child care.

So after a year with Isabelle, we've established a pattern. I do these little things all week. Bill does his assigned tasks and shifts with Isabelle. Then we go out for our weekly "date" and I yell at him for not having cleaned the squished peas off the highchair seat. The devil is in the details.

There are several problems here. First, you can't appreciate what you don't do. And you especially can't appreciate what you don't even know is being done. My husband doesn't thank me for keeping Isabelle equipped with Pampers, wipes or Desitin. He doesn't see me cruising Walgreen's, baby on hip, itemized list in hand. What he sees is a woman who suddenly explodes when he mentions that we're out of diapers. He sees the detail that broke mommy's back but not the 1,001 tiny tasks that led to the outburst.

Adding insult to injury, some husbands (luckily not mine) actually believe that they are doing these things. We know that this is not true. Our spouses may handle garbage and recycling, but it's our agendas that are filled with baby appointments and play dates, our purses that are stuffed with pacifiers and Mylicon Drops. A recent MacArthur Foundation study found middle-aged men much more likely than women both to overestimate their contribution to child care and household chores and to underestimate how fairly chores are divided.

Pat Schroeder hit the nail on the head in an anecdote in her book on her 24 years in Congress. Asked soon after her election how Schroeder's new job had changed his life, her husband told a reporter: "I spend more time involved in things like taking the children to the pediatrician." Reading this, Schroeder immediately called her husband from the House cloakroom. "For $500," she asked, "what is the name of the children's pediatrician?" Schroeder's husband stammered something about having been misquoted. Busted!

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