Rosa Parks and the dishes at AOL

My daughter was recently studying about Rosa Parks at her school. I've always found the sort of courage which Rosa Parks epitomized to be the highest form of courage; the one form to which all people can aspire, and which if even 10% of us mustered the world would continue to transform in marvelous ways. However, I was taken aback at a question she asked me. She asked, "Dad, do you do any work like Rosa Parks, getting bad laws changed?"

My answer wavered between lameness and non-lameness, but I was ready with my answer, and explained how the part of the world I am trying to change is that women and men should be free to do whatever work that they are best at, and that for that to happen, more fathers need to be doing the work of raising their children. We've had conversations about how in the past, men had to do certain jobs because of being men and women had to do certain jobs because of being women, instead of each person having the full scope of human action open to them. In a way, I've been waiting for someone to ask me this question for years.

It was my son's question that really made me laugh. A few days later we were talking about him missing his mother, who was at work (which we've visited a few times, so he knows the building). He said, "Dad, when you worked in that building, where was that?" My daughter and I started telling him about the AOL buildings, and she told him about going to "boring" meetings there. So then he asked, "when you worked at that building, where did you wash the dishes?" He's heard the story of how I worked at a building similar to what mom does now, and he clearly has learned that a large part of my labor is washing dishes.

So after I finished laughing, I figured that my answer to my daughter was indeed true enough. We went on to a have a good conversation about cafeterias and how I wasn't allowed to wash dishes at AOL, but that I "did stuff on computers."