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I often wonder what my parents would have said, back in 1965 or so, if they'd been able to see into my future. Here I am, a robust American male, and how do I spend my time? Take one recent Thursday. After squeezing in some morning writing, I dealt with a caterer for an hour over the details (food, flowers) of a fund-raising party Molly and I are involved in. At 12:15 I picked up Larkin and stopped for a visit at my buddy Dan's house. A gorgeous day, and we put the girl in her stroller and took her for a Larkin-Has-Two-Daddies walk around the block.

The balance of the afternoon was errands and more errands. Stop at the supermarket to get something to cook for dinner. Pick up drycleaning. Duck into the liquor store for a bottle of wine. Head home to unload groceries -- and Larkin's diaper. Give soiled daughter an emergency bath and put her down for a nap. Run the dishwasher. Do a load of laundry. Head for the kitchen to begin dinner prep.

It was dawn-to-dusk domesticity, and that night I called my father out in Arizona. "Dad," I said, "you did your best. We played sports together, we exchanged bawdy jokes. But let's face it. I'm a woman."

He laughed, heartily. A retired surgeon, my father has long regarded my career with a mix of envy and bafflement. Writing fiction, reviews, and essays; traveling all over the world to report about food for Bon Appétit: instead of getting a real job, I somehow became a man whose work is play; and now I am a man who shops and cleans, who goes around sniffing his baby's butt, and who hurries to get something on the table for his wife when she gets home from the daily grind. Talk about putting old notions of masculinity into question. It seems I've deep-sixed them entirely.

And yet ... whenever I read another account of the metrosexual male or the Mr. Mom phenomenon, I think, Who, me? It's hard to say this without sounding weird, but I consider myself as manly as the next guy. I love cars. I played high school and college sports -- in fact, I still play rec-league basketball, and after the games I head out with the guys to our local Irish pub and put down more pints than are good for me.

But I guess I always had this hidden other side. As a child it had to do with reading; with experiencing tender emotions (i.e., "crybaby") that I tried desperately to hide; and with loving the kitchen. A few years ago I did a magazine piece on Emeril Lagasse, and he told me about hanging out as a boy in his grandma's kitchen. I remembered how much I loved watching my mother cook. I'd sit there on a green-painted stepladder stool while the pot boiled or the pan sizzled and my mother searched the spices in the cupboard. She had a special glass dish and a spoon for letting me taste. "Do you think it needs something?" she'd ask me.

And so a lot of domestic things seem normal to me -- and I forget sometimes that most men don't have even remotely the same outlook. For example, there was the day Molly's teaching colleagues spied me in the stands at the school basketball game, reading a cookbook. "They couldn't believe it," she says. "They're still talking about it, three years later!"

Well, I remind her, it was halftime! Plus it was a crockpot cookbook -- and aside from grilling, could there be a more manly way to cook?

So the whole masculinity thing can get me a little defensive. But it's undeniable. Sometimes I'll be taking notes on life with Larkin, and I'll catch myself writing, "I talked with two other mothers at the playground ..." Oops! And recently I received a recipe-exchange email that asked you to send it on to 25 friends, and only after I had done the email blast did I realize that of my 25 friends, 24 were women.

Every weekday I see my cousin's Nicaraguan wife, Fabiola, who takes care of Larkin in the mornings, and when I confer with her about Larkin's lunch, or ask her whether Larkin pooped that morning, sometimes she just laughs. "There are no men like you in Nicaragua," she says. "Not one." I know Fabiola left her country in part to escape the oppressiveness of male machismo and its relegation of women to second-class status. But sometimes I can't tell if she's admiring me or ribbing me.

There are limits to my role as Mr. Mom. I doubt I could go all the way and stop working. Not that I'd ever give up writing -- I love doing it too much. But there's also the issue of who makes the money. Molly and I have about the same income, and while I'm happy to be cooking the bacon, something in me still needs to bring it home, too.

Nevertheless, it's clear that roles are mixing now in America, and everything is up for grabs -- not only who will do what, but who will be what. And for the most part, I find I prefer being a woman. Some of the classic virtues of manliness -- the stoicism, the rigidity, the bluster -- have always struck me as limitations. How much better it is to be intuitive, high-spirited, and supple; to love textures as much as ideas; to relish language and talk; to not need to be right all the time. To ride your own emotions, their ups and downs, and not try flatten them out. To love, really love, your babies. And to be there, to be at home. To the extent that I've become a woman, I feel lucky. Because who doesn't want all that?