And I am done fighting the battle alone so that you can wear the medal.

That distinction, between the identity of parenthood and the work of it, turned out to be the crux of the whole matter, and I have thought about it often since, because it is not unique to Julian, and it is not unique to fathers, though it falls that way more often than not.

There is a profound and seductive gap, in our culture, between how we honor the idea of parenthood and how we support the doing of it.

We give fathers, especially, enormous credit simply for the identity: the man with the family photos on his desk, the proud announcer of twin daughters, the family man, is celebrated, admired, considered to have achieved something, and all of that admiration attaches to the mere fact of having children, entirely independent of whether he does any of the actual labor of raising them.