My husband and I recently had a brutally honest discussion about allocation of housework within our home. It may or may not have been preceded by a bit of a melt-down by none other than yours truly…

We had gone out to eat together, sans baby—the first date we’d been on since the baby came almost three months ago. And as he watched me picking at my sushi, he asked, as well-intentioned men will,

“How are you doing, babe?”

I, of course, said that I was fine. And looked down at my sushi. And burst into tears.

At which point, of course, my poor husband began to realize that I was, in fact, not fine. Not at all. He was probably thinking, “Curses! I should know better than to ask that question!”

Anyway, all of this led to a conversation about who was doing what within our household, and since we reached the conclusion that he was (sometimes) putting his dishes in the dishwasher, and I was doing everything else, we decided to maybe divvy some things up a little differently.

Which is how it came about that my husband is now doing the laundry for our family. And he’s doing a fabulous job of it, I must say—he’s a good deal faster at folding things and putting them away than I am.

But the other day, I walked into our bedroom and saw my husband looking at me ruefully from the other side of a veritable Mount Everest of clean laundry.

“Babe,” he said, shaking his head somewhat mournfully, “I really liked it better when the laundry just magically got done.”

I probably got a smug little grin on my face as I started helping him fold clothes…because inwardly, I confess I was thinking, “Cool. I’m a magician. A magic laundry woman. I knew I had special powers of some kind…”