In our house mostly, if he doesn't have the kids, then I do. Our general rule is that you don't leave the house without at least one of them. However, feeling in an unselfish sort of mood (must be sunstroke), I wanted his summer holidays to end on a positive note.

Now, when I say he "gets free time", it certainly doesn't imply pool sitting and DVD watching. It means doing rotten jobs without having them made more rotten by constantly attending to a child's needs, or at least stopping to swat them off of your lower leg.

I felt good about letting him get to a "million" things he had been talking about getting done -- mowing the lawn, sorting out the garage, cleaning out his truck, building a bike rack with his new miter saw (woo hoo live it up), and hopefully even cleaning up the breakfast dishes and throwing on a load or two of laundry. Okay, I admit the last two items were pure fantasy on my part.

So while I carted about a squalling toddler, a 5-year-old who needed to have a "number 2" at every stop, dropped off a 10-year-old boy known for trying out the seat warmers on hot sunny day, and hauled along an awakened-too-early (before noon) surly teenager in search of the perfect swimsuit (I should just tell her now this doesn't exist), I did so in the knowledge that I had given the greatest gift a parent can get -- time.

After arriving home with basically all of the children in tact, I drove up to the house in happy anticipation of a tidy lawn, tidy garage, and a little bit tidier house. You know where this is going.

Long grass, jumbled garage -- this did not bode well. I dragged the tired, sweaty, and arguing children from the car, carefully ignoring the buyer's remorse which was already beginning with my eldest over her swimwear purchase.

"The truck is spotless!" He announced with pride. Blink blink. I looked at him, and with a pathetic attempt to keep the sarcasm and scorn out of my voice I replied, "I left you alone for three uninterrupted hours, and you cleaned a truck?" He said, "No, that's not all." Phew, at least the interior jobs would have been done, I thought, just before he continued, "I went to the Canadian Tire to pick up the cleaning supplies I needed for the truck, too."

Spare me. We have all heard that women have the ability to multi-task and that our male counterparts are more singularly focused. Nowhere is it more true than in our domestic lives.

I don't think my husband is alone in his disability.

I think maybe we're just more trained to have our eye on many different projects simultaneously -- there is some truth that we mothers have "eyes in the back of our heads", so that we can carry on a telephone conversation, pour milk, gesticulate as to the location of a lost bike helmet, and backhand an errant adolescent all at the same time.

Send a woman to a grocery store to pick up a "few items for dinner", and she'll likely come home with $150 of essentials. Send a man with a list for a few items for dinner and count your blessings if each list item is present in the basket. There will be no extras, with the exception of potentially a new snack food he thought we should try, which we in fact have tried three or four times in the past and have the half open bags in the cupboard to prove it.

My teenage daughter has inherited this skill and can watch television, paint her toenails, work on a beaded bracelet, screech at her younger siblings, and throw me a contemptuous look, all in stride. Her younger brother can play Gamecube. He might forget to go to the bathroom.

If men were the hunters and gatherers as we are anthropologically encouraged to believe, and the women were the homemakers, it would appear that through the evolution of time we have taken on the men's roles while attempting to maintain our traditional spots, while the men have continued to hunt, and then gather, but not at the same time. I think they might be on to something.

Kathy Buckworth is a Mississauga-based freelance writer whose first book about the real life of a SuperMom will be released in Spring 2005, from Sourcebooks.

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