Sometimes Jill says she’s the worst mother in the world. Other times she simply says she’s the worst mother in the world for an autistic child.

She yells. Her Times is splayed all over the dining room table, and that probably does nothing to maintain Alex’s sense of order. Yes, Jill may be right, but only at terribly rare moments. Her average as an outstanding parent in both categories is at least as good as mine, and in fact a lot better. She’s the one who picks them up from the bus, sits through Ned’s trumpet lessons and signed him up for youth soccer, and she’s the one remembering to get only the strawberry yogurt, the Hebrew National hot dogs, and the Utz Extra Dark Pretzels for Alex.

She has a number of greatest hits as a mom:

Alex’s toilet training: One day long ago Jill just said to herself, “It’s time!” Maybe Alex had tried to weedle another diaper out of her, maybe she just looked at him there getting taller in the living room and figured she was going to take a shot. And she did. She sat him down and in the course of about 48 hours, at most, introduced Alex to the proper uses of that special piece of furniture in that special room. Every time I squeeze into some postage-stamp men’s room in some Manhattan coffee shop, I think of the job Jill did with this.

Knitting: She started by teaching a few mornings a week in Ned’s classroom. She loved it and the kids loved her, so she took the project to Alex’s classroom. Though, she says, he rarely pays much attention during knitting, but he loves making little letters out of plastic and yarn.

Restaurants: I’ve always been a little jealous of Jill, since she was in the booth years ago to see the moment Alex’s eyes went wide at his first taste of bacon. Since then, she’s taken the lead in getting us into restaurants — coffeeshops, Chinese and Vietnamese joints where he often now spoons at the rice — and she did it for the most sensible of reasons. “Because sitting down and eating in a restuarant is just something a family ought to be able to do.”

Appointments: Jill tracks them all, from doctors and field trips to zoos and cathedrals, to classroom visits to Ihop. She rarely misses one. She’ll tell you this is because she isn’t working right now, but soon I won’t be working either and I bet my average won’t be as good as hers. She can do it because she’s smart and organized despite our dining room table, and because she’s the best lady all three of her guys could hope for. We’re going on a picnic.

Image: Torontoroses.com

Seven extra hours of washing, dusting, vacuuming, tidying up, putting away: A new study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has found that that’s how much more housework women who are married do. From Science Daily:

“It’s a well-known pattern,” said ISR economist Frank Stafford, who directs the study. “There’s still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage—men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor. Certainly there are all kinds of individual differences here, but in general, this is what happens after marriage. And the situation gets worse for women when they have children.”

The researchers did find that the amount of housework that women have been doing has steadily decreased since 1976.

Well. Until we bought our house in a town in northern New Jersey in 2003, we always lived in apartments or condos and, aside from more clothes and a few more dishes, I don’t recall any significant increase in housework on my part after Jim and I got married. Charlie’s birth definitely inaugurated a new era of Lots to Clean, mostly in the form of laundry (clothes, sheets, towels upon towels) and the floor (whether linoleum, hardwood, or carpet.) Some experiments making gluten-free bread on a hot summer day in Minnesota and some memorable “it’s all over the rug and spreading!” moments have tested my cleaning and multitasking skills, as has the need to mop up a major mess while simultaneously tending to a distressed child in need a shower.

And of course, it’s not just the house that needs to be cleaned, but that other place where we semi-live, the car, proper cleaning of which would probably add a good hour or two of “carcleaning” time (a whole 40 minutes would be needed to pry out the dimes, French fries, pens, and plastic utensils lodged under the front and passenger seats and in one of the seatbelts). And the soda, and the sand in the summer (but what’s a trip to the beach without getting sandy?).

Happily, as Charlie has gotten older, he’s been doing more and more around the house, from taking out the garbage to folding laundry—-if (quoting Prof. Stafford above) the “situation gets worse for women when they have children,” it’s possible for it to get better as they grow up, and for more hands to lighten the (house) work load.