I am the first to admit that I totally take my husband for granted.

It’s an embarrassing reveal. There’s a part of myself that takes a bit of pride in owning the burden of primary parenthood. If there’s laundry to do, meals to cook, noses to wipe, temper tantrums to navigate - I’m the it girl around here.

When I wake up in the morning to a sink full of dishes, I’m grumpy from the word go. No matter that Ken was up until 3 a.m. finishing design work for one of my zillion projects or working on the film that is paying our bills.

Really, he should have stayed up that extra 15 minutes to do the dishes (I say before that first cup of coffee). It is so much more valuable to keep me from being grumpy than to have actually gotten the four hours of sleep that is about the norm for him – dishes done or not.

Laundry on the line? Just take it down. Don’t leave it in the laundry basket for a week. Put it in an actual drawer already.

Dinner to be made? Shouldn’t he just know by now that my cooking mojo has gone the way of the unholy-amounts-of-busy dodo?

Why God Why do I have to make dinner every stinking night?

OK, so I am mildly dramatic (only mildly, the dinner drama is so very real), because when I step back and look at Ken, my dad, the other fathers in my life, I am overwhelmed by the huge hearts, remarkable sense of responsibility and dedication that comes from them.

Laundry be damned.

I’ve often said that the challenges for men and women in the realm of parenthood in what remains a very traditional North American society are like Venus and Mars.

For women, we struggle with the balance of daily drudgery, maintaining our sense of self whether it be through work or personal projects and honoring the absolutely remarkable task of raising our children.

For men, it’s more about defining their place within the family as something more than the guy who goes to work every day. The rolls for dads are changing intensely and many more guys are able to structure their lives to be at home with their kids at least part of the time. But, the reality is most dads leave for work every day, spend most of their time in the adult universe, and have to come home to learn what they missed out on.

I know that, for Ken, this is a heart breaker. Even with his office a few steps from the kitchen, the realities of work and the intense dedication that has to be placed on maintaining that space, hitting deadlines and doing it without the interruptions that come from daily life is challenging at best.

Me getting in his face about the dishes – bah.

What matters, in the end, are those moments when I hear him giggling with our daughter in the living room – when I peek my head around the corner and they’ve built a giant fort and are making up fart jokes about imaginary goblins who love barbecued chicken.

What matters is when they take off for a day together and roll out of the truck six hours later covered in ice cream and french fries, smiles and stories about the amazing day they spent together exploring.

What matters is when the tiny person mutters in the middle of the night “Daddy, you are the best daddy, good thing you’re my daddy,” and you can see Ken choke up. Or the countless times he wanders into her room during the night to make sure she’s covered up, her pillows aren’t all bunched up, the ghosts that hang in the shadows understand the rules when it comes to M.

Whether the house is clean or the laundry is folded – yeah, I don’t want to do it. I’d much rather spend my time out in the forest with the tiny person looking for snails and slugs and baby birds.

Now all I need to realize is that’s all Ken ever asks for too.

Happy Father’s Day!