Intelligence is as intelligence does. Ask my dad.

My dad had something to say about traditional gender roles. Mom, it turns out, had some news for him, our essayist writes.

Dad was the smart one. That’s what Mom said, and she could be trusted. 

She was a very nice woman and not inclined to elevate herself. She was in charge of the Department of Affection, but Dad had all the answers. He was a good explainer, and he’d go as deep as I wanted him to. Not many 6-year-olds ask why the sky is blue and then get a treatise on the physics of light waves.

But he could be brief. “Why do we have to have mosquitoes, Daddy? What good are they?”

“Frog food,” he said. Ecology 101, in two words.

He wasn’t rigid, really. He would adjust his opinions if given new information, but he was kind of old and there wasn’t much information that was new to him, so his opinions didn’t change that often. He knew logic. He knew Latin. He had principles: He refused to buy a power mower because the push mower did fine. He uprooted dandelions with his pocketknife and kept a compost pile. No one else we knew had a compost pile.

He also said lots of implausible things: that lawns benefit from a little clover; that all the forests in New England had been cut down at least once; that starlight bends around planets. They all turned out to be true.

He made his living as a mathematician. I thought, as a small person, that being smart meant you were good at math. So I aspired to that. I loved it, right up through calculus, and it took me years to recognize that I was not, actually, all that good at math. It didn’t stick.

I remember being upset when I came home from seventh grade because I wasn’t catching on in algebra. I figured I’d have to wait until Dad came home, but Mom sat down at the kitchen table with me and we went through my homework until I got it. “Mom knows algebra? Huh,” I thought.

I knew she could type 130 words a minute without making any mistakes. I knew she’d been a first-rate secretary with perfect grammar and spelling. But that was the “before” Mommy. “Current” Mommy baked bread and kept a tidy house and was real nice.

My aunt once took me aside. “Your mother was always so darn smart,” she said, sounding a little irked about it. She was? I thought she was just nice. “She graduated from high school when she was 15, you know.” She did? Huh. 

In the late 1960s I was fully on board with the women’s liberation movement, and at a family get-together, I instructed my father about oppression and exploitation and probably the patriarchy. By then I’d begun to question Dad’s infallibility. It was a spirited conversation. OK, it was loud. My sister Margaret and I might have ganged up on him, in fact. Then my brother’s wife came charging in with her two cents, too. This thing was on.

There was no question Dad would support any choice we made, and he did hope to get a scientist or two out of his progeny, but he felt a need to put up a defense of the status quo. 

“Let us not so easily abandon the wisdom of traditional roles,” he intoned, one finger raised. “There is honor in the humblest endeavor; yea, the maintenance of the home and the nurturing of children is a noble and fulfilling enterprise.” Then he tossed his head, losing a little powder off his wig, and dislodging his monocle. 

Margaret blew a raspberry.

OK, no. He didn’t say that. It wasn’t that bad, and he didn’t have a monocle or a wig. But our father always spoke in complete sentences without pause. You could even make out his semicolons if you listened carefully. He turned toward Mom for confirmation.

She smiled, of course. “Oh, I don’t know, dear. I feel as though my IQ dropped quite a bit when I quit working to raise kids.”

This was new and startling information for my father. He took it in. And he said no more.

That’s how smart he was.