MOTHERHOOD is a hot topic in bookstores now.

From the best-selling novel I Don't Know How She Does It to the self-help handbook The Working Mother's Guide to Life: Strategies, Secrets and Solutions to the constructive critique The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women, working mothers' quests to "have it all" are under scrutiny.

It's the same on the magazine stands, with celebrity mom profiles of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kate Hudson, a recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on nannies, and a widely discussed New York Times Magazine article last fall on the so-called opt-out revolution - the exodus of burned-out mothers from the workplace.

But despite the boatloads of ink spilled on this topic, all of these books and magazines strangely seem to see only half the picture. The other half is fathers. Men are hardly mentioned; it's as though balancing work and family is solely a women's issue. Why is it that only mothers are supposed to worry about working too much?

Here we are in the 21st century, and we're still clinging to Victorian-era gender roles. Decades after women first began to enter male-dominated professions, it's still more natural for us to think of the father as the provider and the mother as the primary parent. There's nothing inherently wrong with this arrangement, but too often it happens on automatic pilot (for the rich and married, that is - poor or single mothers who have no choice but to work are hardly ever mentioned).

I'm recently married and don't yet have children, but I'd like to ask all of these authors and magazine editors, on behalf of other men thinking about being stay-at-home dads: Don't leave us out. Acknowledge the possibility of full-time caregiving fathers, or at least fathers who share in caregiving and housekeeping with their wives.

As it stands, stay-at-home fathers are still regarded as an aberration in America. My jaw dropped when I saw a Fortune magazine cover story a few years ago on the stay-at-home husbands of female CEOs. Trying to get cute with the headline "Trophy Husbands," the subtitle read, "They deserve a trophy for trading places." The headline makes it sound as if those husbands stooped to the lowly level of caregiver. What an insult to stay-at-home mothers, and what a messed up message to fathers.

Now Pizza Hut is airing ads for a "Mom's Monday" special, urging mothers to avoid cooking on Mondays by getting a deal on pizza. They also sponsored a Mother's Day contest called "Why Pizza Hut Should Cook for My Mom." I didn't see any such promotion for Father's Day. The idea of men in the kitchen may as well be science fiction.

These subtle messages about gender roles have an impact. A friend told me of a father who says he's sick of hearing the same compliment when he takes his children to the park: "How nice that you're baby-sitting your kids!" He is tired of explaining that no, he's not baby-sitting - they're his kids.

There are some small indications that stay-at-home dads are starting to register on the cultural radar. The New York Times Magazine story on opt-out moms mentioned in passing (though it quoted no male sources) that the number of married men who are full-time caregivers is up 18 percent.

In her book Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First, Suzanne Braun Levine, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, says she sees more fathers walking their kids to school, a "profusion of pink and yellow and red cartoon-character backpacks slung over their shoulders."

A couple of recent movies have celebrated caregiving fathers. Main characters played by Nicolas Cage in The Family Man and Ben Affleck in Jersey Girl initially wrinkle their noses at changing diapers but ultimately come to see that workaholism is no match for family life.

It may sound a little hokey, but this is a useful response to the message of the media to young males - that caregiving isn't macho enough to concern them. I don't know if I have what it takes to be a full-time caregiver, but I do know I don't want to miss out on family life. I'm not wild about sitting in meetings all of my life instead.