As a father who is very involved in my kids’ life, I feel this frequently. At the start of each school year I submit my contact info as the primary contact info and yet sometimes emails will circulate among the class moms anyway. Or I’ll get a text from another kid’s mom asking for my wife’s number so they can plan something.
When we started making friends with parents of my kid, all the moms in the group created a chat group which they still use to this day. The dads didn’t make one because that’s just not a thing you do, and I wasn’t invited to the moms group, even though I knew them at least as well as she did, and I am the extrovert and my wife is the introvert. So I frequently feel lonely and isolated (I also WFH) and my wife is socially overwhelmed.
Yes I could just buck the system and try to get the dads to have a group, or have my wife add me into the moms group, or similar things in other areas of life. But that’s the point: any time I do that I’ll be going against the grain.
I have struggled so hard with this. My child’s school cannot seem to understand that I, the father, am the one who primarily takes care of my daughter. My wife and I have started to flat out refuse to give the school my wife’s contact info, even as an “emergency contact”, just to make them communicate with me. I did manage to make a bunch of faculty at her old school mad when I asked, publicly, why they felt the need to discriminate against me when trying to contact patents, and this had the unintended effect of making a bunch of other fathers in the group pop up and ask the same question. Now my daughter is old enough that she, herself, will call them out on it. Having a ten year old lose her shit and tell the teacher that she needs to contact the right parent is really funny, almost as funny as when they insisted on contacting my wife instead of me, again, to complain that my kid had yelled at them for not contacting me.
I deal with this also except my ex abandoned us to move states away. She will still get notifications via email or text that she forwarded to me because they have her information on file. They have her information because I was forced to provide divorce paperwork showing I had custody of the kids to enroll them in school. Wonder how many moms get asked for paperwork proving custody when they try enrolling their kids in school. It’s reduced over the last three years but the first couple were ridiculous. Finally have a mom of one kid and dad of another kid that recognize I’m a parent to my children. Everything is stupid though. Every doctors apt, school visit, dentist apt, hell even trips to the store. Some BS content like “where’s mom” or “oh you’re filling in today”. I’m so sick of it. I cope by telling myself that at least it would be worse if the love of my life died horrifically instead of going bananas and abandoning us and I had to deal with this shit. At some point I’m worried I’ll snap at people but I never want to say anything negative about her around the kids.
As a father who is very involved in my kids’ life, I feel this frequently. At the start of each school year I submit my contact info as the primary contact info and yet sometimes emails will circulate among the class moms anyway. Or I’ll get a text from another kid’s mom asking for my wife’s number so they can plan something.
When we started making friends with parents of my kid, all the moms in the group created a chat group which they still use to this day. The dads didn’t make one because that’s just not a thing you do, and I wasn’t invited to the moms group, even though I knew them at least as well as she did, and I am the extrovert and my wife is the introvert. So I frequently feel lonely and isolated (I also WFH) and my wife is socially overwhelmed.
Yes I could just buck the system and try to get the dads to have a group, or have my wife add me into the moms group, or similar things in other areas of life. But that’s the point: any time I do that I’ll be going against the grain.
I have struggled so hard with this. My child’s school cannot seem to understand that I, the father, am the one who primarily takes care of my daughter. My wife and I have started to flat out refuse to give the school my wife’s contact info, even as an “emergency contact”, just to make them communicate with me. I did manage to make a bunch of faculty at her old school mad when I asked, publicly, why they felt the need to discriminate against me when trying to contact patents, and this had the unintended effect of making a bunch of other fathers in the group pop up and ask the same question. Now my daughter is old enough that she, herself, will call them out on it. Having a ten year old lose her shit and tell the teacher that she needs to contact the right parent is really funny, almost as funny as when they insisted on contacting my wife instead of me, again, to complain that my kid had yelled at them for not contacting me.
I deal with this also except my ex abandoned us to move states away. She will still get notifications via email or text that she forwarded to me because they have her information on file. They have her information because I was forced to provide divorce paperwork showing I had custody of the kids to enroll them in school. Wonder how many moms get asked for paperwork proving custody when they try enrolling their kids in school. It’s reduced over the last three years but the first couple were ridiculous. Finally have a mom of one kid and dad of another kid that recognize I’m a parent to my children. Everything is stupid though. Every doctors apt, school visit, dentist apt, hell even trips to the store. Some BS content like “where’s mom” or “oh you’re filling in today”. I’m so sick of it. I cope by telling myself that at least it would be worse if the love of my life died horrifically instead of going bananas and abandoning us and I had to deal with this shit. At some point I’m worried I’ll snap at people but I never want to say anything negative about her around the kids.
I’m not even a parent and this shit pisses me off.
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