People making me feel guilty because DH does the school run...

[Twilightimmortal]

I dont know what it is but because he does the school run i feel as though people treat me like I dont do anything.

I cant put my finger on it. But if I'm working or doing something else people might say in shock, but who is picking up the kids? And when I say DH they act like its strange.

I do EVERYTHING at home and deal with all the mental load. He wakes up does the school run, sometimes goes to work (self-employed), picks them up. Waits for me to come home so I can cook, clean, bedtime story etc.

But the respect people give him for doing the school run because he is a male...

Its making me feel guilty too. Right now I'm feeling like a shit parent. Like I'm not doing enough because my day isn't revolved around the school run.

Of course I am grateful that he does it as it allows me to work without thinking about picking them up but I have also done the school run in the past when my hours were different and it wasn't a big deal.

I suspect it massively depends where you live and the local dynamics. I had to be pretty blunt with the school when they kept calling me (#3 contact on the list and working an hour away, rather than the CM (5 minutes away and paid for such eventualities) or DH (10 minutes away and with a PA who could take calls)) as there simply wasn’t a situation where I was the best person for them to call. My friends who live in London were astonished. But school told me that I was ‘the only mother who wasn’t contact #1 so they’d assumed we’d got the form wrong’.

DH agreed long ago that I had to be properly polite when someone said (always so very sorrowfully) ‘wouldn’t you rather be PT?’ once he had been asked that question just once by anyone. I was probably asked it about once a month and I never had to be polite.

Hmm just don´t listen to them. NOne of their business. My husband has done the picking up all September and most of last June as my timetable doesn´t allow me to do it, although I´m nearest. My dad used to do the school run in the early 80s and share with two other kids´s parents, also dads. I noticed at nursery a lot of dads doing drop offs, more than half I would say. At school now, there are less dads but they are still present. Nobody has ever commented.

In our house, DH used to do the morning school run and the afterschool service would collect DD from school at the end of the day. When DH was away 50% of the time in the last recession, we got an au pair who did the morning school run and AS collected her from school.

I did the morning run a handful of times each year.

It had developed that way because DH used to bring DD on the back of his bike into town to creche in the mornings, but often had to stay late so I would collect her and bring her home on the bus. So we continued that approach in school - DH had more reliability of getting in to office on his bike than me on the bus once school drop had happened, and I collected her from afterschool club in the evenings. If we needed to juggle or be in at the opposite end of the day to normal, we would swop.

There were a lot of mothers but there were still quite a few dads in school yard with DH. As a 2-parents working family, it is what it is.