My husband and I both work. His time is his, and mine is always spent with the kids.

• My husband and I are both full-time educators.
• He wakes up at 2:30 a.m. every day to have at least five hours to himself.

My husband and I are both full-time educators with two children at home — I'm a college professor and he's a substitute teacher — but our concept of free time is the biggest divider between us.

My husband gets up at 2:30 a.m. every day to have four to five hours of alone time that he treats as nonnegotiable, during which he'll read, work out, golf, and scroll on Instagram. I rise just in time for school drop-off for our 6 and 13 year olds and treat alone time as a luxury, not a necessity.

He watches football on weekends

On the weekends, his plans largely involve the NFL scoreboard or how long it takes to make it through nine or 18 holes of golf.

My plans entail a deep-dive investigation starting on Thursday for activities our kids can do over the weekend. Whenever I'd show up to an event alone, my friends would ask where he was.

"Golfing, maybe?" I'd say. "Or watching TV?" I'm not trying to be coy; I really don't know because his time is his, and my time is a communal commodity. So these days, the women I've known the longest know better than to ask — either that or they've found themselves in the same boat.

I teach gender differences

The irony of all this is that I teach about gender differences.

In my undergraduate classes, I teach mostly Gen Zers in their early 20s with nary a domestic commitment in sight — no marriage certificates legally binding their estate to another, no small humans who depend on them for survival. We discuss the many flavors of sexism — hostile, benevolent, institutional — before we get to the findings that even the single, childless college kids in the room can understand: the unequal division of labor in most households.

If a sure sign of adulthood is realizing that the toothpaste we used growing up didn't magically appear but that someone had to go out and get it, then we must not all be adulting equally. Some of us grow up to become the person who stocks the toiletries, and our other halves get to revert to the joyous oblivion of childhood, when things they need appear whenever they need them.

So while my husband makes fun of me for the number of Amazon Prime packages that show up on our doorstep — whose contents I cannot even remember thanks to their frequency, a phenomenon so common, it may now come with the human condition — he neglects the fact that these deliveries only come because I spend my free time running inventory checks on everything — from whether we have enough flour for holiday baking to adequate deodorant for keeping everyone's smells in check.

It's no surprise that our free time is not treated equally

But if time is money, then surely the gender-wage gap is as much about time as it is about pay. If women still make 82 cents to the male dollar and pay more for goods and services — the so-called "pink tax" — then it's no surprise that at home, a woman's hour isn't treated the same as a man's.

Still, I consider myself one of the lucky ones: After making dinner, my husband quickly shoos me from the kitchen. Every day, I look forward to that golden post-dinner hour when my man is wiping counters and loading dishes, and I'm hiding in our room, alone, pretending to be him.