In Jools Oliver's charming memoir, The Diary of an Honest Mum, a best seller in England that will be published on this side of the Atlantic in November 2006, the wife of Jamie Oliver (a.k.a. the Naked Chef) describes a telling scene from her labor. "As we all sat in the hospital room, I noticed that Jamie had a concerned look on his face. I tried to reassure him that although it looked like I was in hell, really I was okay and he was not to worry," she writes. "As he held my hand with a furrowed brow, he said, 'Babe, I am not worried about you—you are doing brilliantly. It's just that my chicken is in the Aga and it looks like we are in for a long night. Shall I go home and refuel so I can support you later on when you need it?'"

What's this? I thought as I read. The Naked Chef is leaving his wife, as she pants her way through labor, to check on his roasting chicken? (To be fair, he returns with time to spare before the actual birth.) What is most compelling about this story is the way it dizzyingly captures both past and present, offering a throwback to the days when fathers were unencumbered by childbirth, but with this modern twist: Hubby is racing home to cook! It's nice to know this 50-50 thing—today's fair-and-square efforts to divvy up duties between husband and wife, mother and father—is a conundrum that even Mr. and Mrs. Naked Chef struggle with.

From the beginning, my husband, Jesse, and I have made heroic efforts to be fair. I recall our first Valentine's Day together, when we were stymied by the bill at a restaurant—so even-steven were we that it wasn't clear who should treat whom to dinner. Splitting it seemed so sad-sack, really, but then which one of us, in our cutting-edge relationship, should pick up the tab? Finally Jesse, bless his heart, plunked down his credit card, and that settled that. For the most part, however, we managed to achieve our high-strung equality with remarkable precision and grace: We both worked, made similar salaries, divided the household chores without much fuss, each of us reliably pulling an oar.

And then we had a baby.

As Rachel Cusk points out in A Life's Work (a book I so dearly admire, I'm having trouble getting through a column without mentioning it), once a child is born, the lives of its mother and father split so sharply that while they once may have achieved equality, they now exist, in Cusk's words, "in a sort of feudal relation to each other."

"It is well known that when both parents work full-time, the mother generally does more than her fair share of housework and child care, and is the one who curtails her work day in order to meet the exigencies of parenthood," she goes on to say. "Even in the most generous household, which I acknowledge my own to be, the gulf between child-carer and worker is profound. Bridging it is extremely difficult."

Or, as a friend of mine complained recently, "I knew I'd have to do more of the work once we had a baby, but I didn't know I'd also have to pretend that my husband is doing the same amount!"

Marriage, hopefully built on love, tends to become an arrangement, particularly after children enter the picture. My own husband and I have continued to draw a line, albeit a wobbly one, right down the middle. I am with the baby more than he is, but he pays more in monthly expenses. He cooks more; I clean more. If our son gets sick, we alternate days at home with him. Our pact isn't ironclad, but it does offer an illusion of equality that allows for peace and contentment in our home ... I'd say a good 70 percent of the time.

There are, of course, other deals struck within marriages. I know couples, both parents working full-time, who need round-the-clock child care during the week and thus must cram family time into the weekend. I have more than one friend who supports her husband while he, in turn, takes on more of the parenting obligations. Some friends are stay-at-home moms with husbands who work all hours and walk through the door at the end of a long day as if through a time warp to the '50s, dropping their briefcases and getting a drink. I know a couple of lucky ducks with trust funds, interesting jobs, and afternoons free to spend with their children. Even Caitlin Flanagan, ever the critic of romance-busting transactions within marriage, cops to her own trade-off in To Hell with All That. "My husband had taken a big corporate job to pay for the type of motherhood I had chosen to pursue," she explains of her decision to stay home with her twins, along with a full-time nanny. One thing, however, is consistent among all these households, including my own: Someone, on occasion, is keeping a secret tally of how many more of the familial duties he or she is doing.

Next Page: We're not having children as a reason to lunge for each other's throats.