Born or Made?

I was having a discussion with some people recently about parenthood and it really surprised me how many people felt that women, i.e. mothers, have some innate difference (they argued advantage) in terms of meeting their baby's needs. I, having been brought up by a classic liberal feminist, protested. It's true, I am the primary caregiver, but this, I argued, is for two reasons only, one economic and one physiological.

I'm home during the day because I happen to make less money right now, and it made more sense for me to take advantage of our country's relatively generous parental leave (which is obviously not as generous as D's salary!) Secondly, because we're breastfeeding, I am kind of glued to him in these early days. But, I argued, if it were Dad at home, he'd do the exact same thing as I do. Other than those two factors, mothers are no different than fathers.

But two things kind of made me rethink this a little. First, someone asked a hypothetical question about how if there was a fire, would you first help your baby or your spouse. My immediate response is BABY! Not because I love the baby more, but because he's my child and I just feel this overwhelming responsibility for him. I don't think the answer would change if he was 26 instead of six weeks. I assumed D would feel the same way, but when I asked him his immediate response was "You, hon!"

Then last night, as I was up late pumping in an effort to have enough of a stash of milk to, I don't know, get a haircut or go out to eat, I was sitting in the living room in the dark with my two guys down the hall in the bedroom. I heard the baby moan in the room, but being hooked up to the machine, I assumed D would deal with it. He didn't. The murmurs eventually grew to full-blown screaming, but D slept through it all until I went in and said, "Don't you hear him yelling his head off?"

So anyway, I'm wondering, is there more of a difference between mothers and fathers than just breasts and a few social conventions? Is there something underlying innate difference that goes beyond that? Are mothers (for the most part, there are always exceptions) just better suited to certain parts of the job and fathers to others?

It seems like motherhood has meant something very different (not better! just different) for me than fatherhood has meant for D. We are totally falling into this hunter-gatherer dyad, and D's role is all about providing and playing and mine is about nesting and feeding the family. Is it just economics that's forced us that way, or is it something more? Or am I just starting to feel like there's this innate "mother-ness" because motherhood is pretty much all I've got going on right now is baby, whereas D has this whole work life where he doesn't have to be Dad 100% of the time. It's just, I'm starting to think that even if I were working full-time, there would be something fundamentally different in our roles.

For some people these might seem so obvious - like, duh! Mums and dads are different. That was the way the discussion I had went. But I have to say, as someone who's always thought that gender differences were more nurture than nature, this is all a bit of a revelation.