I read a beautiful but disturbing story in the New Yorker this week. It's about a guy who looks after the new baby while his wife goes to work and studies to become a lawyer in the evenings. His own job is necessarily casual such that he can be there to drop off the baby at daycare and pick the baby up before cleaning up and cooking dinner.

It's an ironic tale, using gender reversal very subtly. I only realized he was joking about being so fine with his daily responsibilities when he wrote;

I was twenty minutes early to pick up Xana and while dinner was cooking—meat loaf with baked potatoes and asparagus vinaigrette—I took her to the park and listened to her screech with baby joy as I held her in my lap and rocked higher and higher on the swings.

If you have young children and are trying to cope with a meaningless, low-paying job to survive, and a blank partner to boot, it is a very real but jarring read. See The Lie here.

The Flickr photo above is Tenderness by Juvertson.