"Have you ever noticed that men never become very good at the jobs they don't like to do in the first place?" her column begins. "Take, for instance, dressing small children. If Veronica is wearing a pink shirt with red pants, a plaid blouse with a floral skirt, or jeans so loose she looks like a 4-year-old hip-hop artist, it's a good bet Jim dressed her that morning."

I've never actually met him, but Jim sounds like a pretty typical father to me. Which means he understands that it really doesn't matter if he dresses Veronica in an ensemble from the Donna Karan Kiddie Kollection. Because the first thing Veronica is going to do when she gets out of the house is search for the deepest mud puddle she can find.

And, even if there are no mud puddles, it won't make any difference. Because even the slowest father eventually learns to accept one basic truth when it comes to fathers taking care of children. No matter how we do it, it will be wrong.

Fortunately, most fathers eventually figure out that it's nothing personal. Mothers do not think ANYBODY can take care of their children the right way. It doesn't matter if you are the chief of pediatrics at the Mayo Clinic; a mother will assume that you will not know exactly what to do if her child sneezes twice.

The first time we left our children with a baby sitter overnight while we went out of town, I practically had to drag their mother to the car.

That baby sitter has shifty eyes," my wife whispered as talked out the front door." How do we know we can trust her?"

"She's your mother," I whispered back. As a particularly slow father, it took me several children to completely understand this lesson. I think the breakthrough came on the Friday night when she went out and left me to put the whole mob to bed.

Which I figured I did pretty well, because by the time she got home, all four of them were in bed. They weren't necessarily in their own beds, of course, ;but at least they were in somebody's bed.

"How did everything go?" she asked as she opened the front door.

"No problems," I assured her. "Did you have them brush their teeth?" "Two of them don't even have teeth," I pointed out. "How about baths?" "I meant to, but it got late, " I explained. "anyway, they smelled pretty clean to me."

Not bothering to take off her coat, she sprinted to the nearest kid's bedroom. A moment later, she sprinted back out. "I can't believe you put him to bed in those pajamas," she said. "What's wrong with those pajamas?" "The tops don't match the bottoms," she said.

"What's the difference?" I asked. "No one's going to see him." "What if the house catches on fire and we have to call the fire department?"

As she went on about the lifelong ridicule we would face if the firefighters found our kids wearing mismatched pajamas when they came to rescue them, I finally understood the problem.

The issue really has nothing to do with how the kids look. If Ralph Lauren dressed his kids, Mrs. Lauren would tell him that blouse didn't go with that skirt. Because it's not that fathers do things wrong. It's just that we do them differently.

Stewart writes for Tribune Media Services. His column appears on Thursdays and Sundays.