One of Martin’s favorite friends from school has a father who stays home with the two young children and their mother works at an office full-time.
The mother told me about a typical sort of day for her husband when he’s out in the world with his children. He took their daughter for a haircut, and when he asked the stylist to cut it shorter than usual, she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t cut this little girl’s hair, she said, unless the mother gave permission.
The assumptions stacked up here–that he had a partner, that that partner was female, that there was a mother in their lives at all, that he was not authorized to make decisions–are staggering.