Confessions of sexism - yup, it's alive and well, even in me

I have a friend at work.
Yup.
One.
And, a few weeks ago, she brought her daughters to work to say, "Hi."
They're like 4 and 2, so this is just fine. They come in and wave and hide behind her legs, and then they go off to the kitchen to have a snack and in about an hour or two, they go home.
My friend has worked at the company a long time. And when I first went to work there, her partner worked with us as well. We bonded over dogs, you see. And we learned that we liked each other.
So, when my friend go her promotion and her raise, her partner decided it was appropriate to quit so she could stay home with the kids. I miss her. But I hear about the dogs all the time anyway and see her on occasion.
If you haven't figured this out by now, they are lesbians. The girls have two mommies.
Now here's what I did.
I asked the girls if it was fun to be at work with daddy. And then I almost died, I was so embarrassed.
I don't think of my friend as a man. I don't think of her as a lesbian, except that I know her partner is a woman.
But I do still think of the parent who works as the daddy, and the parent who stays home as the mommy.
Even I can't believe it... but...
It's true.
I have done enough psychological analysis to recognize a deep-seated belief when one surfaces. And I said that horribly offensive thing to two little girls in front of their mother because of a limitation in my own brain.
I apologized for days.
I even explained myself.
And then I said... what the hell do women everywhere, of every sexual orientation, still go through every day, if I, the girl who grew up with a Mom who earned more than her dad, am still so intrinsically bound by old stereotypes and beliefs?

There's a fable about a father and son in a bad car accident who are taken into different hospitals. The surgeon walks in to do the surgery on the boy and says, "I can't operate on this child because he's my son." People get super duper confused on this... because we are told that the father was also injured and taken to a different ER. Why do we not automatically assume that the surgeon is a woman and the child's mother? Because we (Gen X and everyone before us) really never had the chance at equality of thinking...

And without that, we won't have equality of living either.

In the mean time, it is a woman's right to be called mommy even is she works full time and her partner stays home with the babies (cute babies, too).
And it is a woman's right not to have to listen to the insulting and horrendous assumptions we all make, even those of us who know better; even those of us who are her friends.

And so, on women's writes day, I am confessing to you that I still have a ways to go. And all of you probably do, too. Like it or not.