In this house, hanging out of windows is my job. There's no good reason for it; I can't scrape myself off the pavement like Wile E. Coyote. But when we moved in, I hung the screens without serious injury and have been doing it ever since. Even after last weekend, when two of the first three screens I tried to hang went tumbling out second-floor windows, I'm probably on the hook until the day we're too weak to open windows. Our roles have become ruts.

Lucy cooks, I wash. Lucy irons, I fold. The pattern is almost embarrassingly obvious: Of any task, Lucy's the skill, I'm the muscle. Most of what I contribute, in fact, from chopping vegetables to grilling meat to taking out the trash, involves lifting my right arm up and down, over and over. That's it.

Maybe this is what happens when you marry late, already deep in the groove of your own predilections. You spin around the same house on separate tracks. Or maybe I'm a special case. My cooking skills devolved in my fourth decade of singlehood into something more akin to gathering: a little hummus, some steamed broccoli, a handful of nuts. Single ingredients consumed separately, like a grazing goat.

My cleaning was even worse. A friend once came into my apartment to water plants while I was on vacation and found the place so disheveled that she wondered if I'd been robbed. My only vacuum was a Shop Vac, with a long, wide hose that came in handy when I needed to suck the fruit flies out of the air.

The skills I have honed have almost no place in household management. Guitar playing is useful only if the guitar can be used to serve snacks or squash spiders, and even then no playing is required—it's an up-and-down movement. Good writing has sometimes earned us airline vouchers through persuasive complaint letters, indeed it pays roughly half the bills. But I should probably be emptying the Diaper Genie right now—up, down.

It may be too late to change now. With Pepin in the mix, the need for efficiency has locked our roles into place. I could learn to cook, but my next free weekend is probably sometime in 2025. If we do what we're best at, everyone gets a little sleep and no one gets hurt unless they're standing under a window.

Whether Pepin herself falls into gender roles is something I think about every time I slip her into another pink sleeper, standing on her pink carpet under pink pom-pom decorations. Even so, I often forget she's a girl. In the first couple posts of this blog, I accorded her the wrong pronoun. Freud might say I actually wanted a boy; I say she kind of looks like a boy. She's a baby, which is pretty close to gender neutral. It's a good reminder that she could become just about anything—including a boy. She'll follow her own path until it's worn in, and she'll finally understand her parents.

(Pepin as the poster child for not overthinking gender stereotypes: pink on pink on pink.)