MountainMornings

The Briefing Room will be losing one of the sweetest White House Press Secretaries in recent years. Jay Carney, who btw looks like an altar boy I once knew, happens to be married to a fellow journalist, Claire Shipman. He told the morning news feed that he has two small children and he was missing too much of their lives! I almost spit up my coffee.

What a relief, to hear a man in a position of power say such a thing, proudly, bravely and without rancor. Is it just coincidence that Shipman and her co-author Katty Kay just published a book about the confidence gap between men and women? I recently wrote about “The Confidence Code” and a woman’s tendency to talk less in meetings and ruminate more; “tortured cycles of useless self-recrimination.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/fashion/katty-kat-claire-shipman-new-book.html?_r=0

Reminds me of Josh Levs, a CNN reporter, who recently fought CNN’s parent company Time Warner for equal paternity leave. Moms and adoptive parents were allowed 10 weeks family leave whereas dads only got 2 weeks paid leave. “It can’t be a conversation by women about women,” Levs said of resolving family-work conflicts. “In a country that prides itself on family values, we need to do a much better job of valuing families … and that includes fathers.”

One of the best things we women of the 60s and 70s did was to raise our sons to expect to be involved in their children’s lives. Millennials today want to not just be in the birthing room, they want to be present in the sturm and drang of childhood. Hooray I say! Let’s all lift our coffee cups to men who change diapers.

And to my honey, who stuck by me for 35 years as of tomorrow, I’d like to say in brief, “Cheers!” Even if he did hang one piece of wallpaper upside down a long, long time ago, he proved to be the most loving father and supportive husband in the world. For sitting with me in the family room while “sleep training,” for teaching them how to ride bikes and drive cars, for telling me countless times that everything would be OK, even after endless days of toddler turmoil and teenage angst. I salute you dear partner in life. And I’d pick you again, in a heartbeat!