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“A man needs time to think.” So said my father when I was griping about my husband locking himself into the bathroom while our three little kids were tearing up the place.

My jaw dropped and I looked at my father. He was serious.

My father was a kind and generous man. He was forward-thinking and voted the way I did. I was damned lucky with the father I drew from the deck.

There was nothing false about his statement; I agree, a man needs time to think. In context, though, when I was at my wit’s end with getting dinner on the table and diapers changed and hosting relatives to boot, it was an insightful comment. Insightful into the paradigm I and everyone else on earth was born into.

Like, a woman doesn’t?

I said nothing at the time, nor ever anything more to my father on this subject. He meant no disrespect. But he dumped disrespect in bucketloads.

When I look back, I realize my father did a lot of thinking. He would get up before dawn and drive hours to the job. He worked late and got home late, often after bedtime. He busied himself all weekend preparing for the workweek. The only time he wasn’t working – I mean, thinking – was when he was thinking on the tennis court Saturday and Sunday mornings.

My mother was home raising five children. She taught us how to play Spit and she gave bang-up birthday parties. She made papier-maché masks for our Halloween costumes. She taught us the napkin goes on the left, the knife and spoon on the right, and the hands in the lap. She rigged up French lessons on a record player so that when we turned on the bathroom light, we would hear, “Pere, c’est Pierre.”

I remember one day she sat and thought. We left for school while she was sitting in the kitchen – she wouldn’t even say good bye --, and she was still sitting there when we got home from school. Whatever those thoughts were, she never shared them, not even with my father late that night. How do I know? We listened to their conversations through the heater vent.

In all fairness and to show how equality prevailed in the next generation, my husband didn’t have any more time to think than I did. But he never claimed it as a right. And he never took it at my expense.

I remember another day when I was locked in the bathroom and reading a magazine article. It was a huge day in my life. I read that women are smarter than men in language skills and should be in charge of all language-based professions: law, government, diplomacy, education. That was then and we’ve learned a lot more about the brain since then. But at the time it knocked me off my seat, and I unlocked the door and went back to work with a different spring in my step. See what happens when a woman has time to think?