Tag Archives: daddy

Mommy is not in the picture

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We had a perfect winter Sunday. Sure there were the usual battles, and we may have locked the kids out of the house for a while to force them to play on their own, but it was about as perfect as a winter Sunday at home with two little kids can get.

As a family, we got all bundled up to go sledding. By “go” I mean we walked up the hill between our neighbor’s house and ours. It’s the perfect sledding hill for little kids. Sally can go down on her own; she skids out further than anyone because she doesn’t break through the crust layer of snow. Luke takes huge, fearless running leaps. We slid (sledded? slode?) down the hill in all sorts of piling configurations with all four of us laying on our bellies, stacked up together. The kids took turns sitting in my lap on the little round sled while Tim gave us huge pushes and we flew down the hill at lightening speeds, spinning ourselves dizzy. It was fun.

Later in the day the kids wanted more. Tim had some work to do so I took them out myself. That’s right. I put on my snow gear to go sledding twice! I set the kids up on two tracks and pushed them off for races. I raced them back up the hill or dragged them on sleds. We made snow angles and tried valiantly to build a snowman with the wrong kind of snow. Sally went inside cold and wet after a while but Luke and I stayed out there. We must have raced down that hill 100 times.

He was all rosy-cheeked and glowing with joy, Sally too. So much so that I forgave the battle and tears when it was time to go in; I accepted that more snow was dragged in than left out; I acquiesced to the sweaty work of bundling and unbundling two kids twice before being able to bundle or unbundle myself. All this is to be expected. Sledding as a mom is, at it’s best, 40% play and 60% work. But it was all worth it that night when Luke said as I tucked him in, “I had the best day sledding with you, Mom.” A huge mom-ego boost.

That ego boost didn’t last long. Every Monday in school each kid reports, and draws, their weekend “news.”  On Monday afternoon Luke came home with this:

KId's drawing of family

kindergarten school work, writing, drawing

WTF, Luke? Where’s Mommy?

This is typical. I’ve said before how much Luke prefers his dad over me. I could spend the weekend with him flying on magical unicorn dragons; if he came home from that adventure and watched an episode Peppa Pig with his dad, you’d better believe that his weekend news would read, “I watched TV with my dad.”

I figure that for him I’m like air. It’s life supporting and he’d certainly notice if it were suddenly gone or unavailable, but it’s invisible and taken entirely for granted. No one reports how many liters of air they breathed over the weekend. I wonder if air feels sad about it? Does it wonder if it’s all worth it? Is air thinking of all it does for everyone and how it gets all the shitty jobs and none of the glory that, say, Dad helium gets?

This is what people mean when they say that motherhood is a thankless job.

No Such Thing as “Off Duty”

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Last night I went out, like I do once every never. T handled bedtime while I slathered myself in make-up to conceal, well, everything. My children, who normally don’t give a crap if I’m in the room or not when their dad’s around, were completely despondent over my sudden unavailability.

L bargains: “I have a good idea. How about you put us to bed and THEN get ready to go out? After we’re sleeping. And then you’ll get us up in the morning. Isn’t that a good idea?” Yes, it is. But I’ve clocked out for the night. Daddy’s here, deal with it.

S cries: “I only want mommy. I don’t want mommy to leave me.” She won’t let T touch her. She puts on a legendary pout. She will NOT let him brush her teeth. She will NOT sit on the potty. She will NOT stop crying. “Mommy always leaves!” (So unbelievably not true.) “Mommy never takes care of us.” (WHAT??)

Despite myself, this pulls on my heartstrings. Half dressed, I come out of my room and into the bathroom where T is struggling to get anything done towards bedtime. (By the way, thanks a lot, kids. You TOTALLY made daddy more amenable to me going out and leaving him with evening duties on his own. Thanks SO much!) I go to scoop up S. My plan is to give her a hug and kiss so she’ll be full of mommy-love and settle right down. Instead, she pushes me away, throws herself at T’s legs, and cries that she wants only Daddy. WTF? We got played. We got played by an illiterate, tiny human who can’t reach a faucet.

At this point, the only way to make bedtime go smoothly is to have us both involved in every step. This is what the kids want. This is what T wants. This is not what I want.  So I return to my bathroom, lock the door, and flip on the switch for the extractor fan. Ah, that’s better. I can’t hear a thing.

T grumpily puts to bed two grumpy children while I gleefully block it all out with the fan. Eventually they go down. Did the process include me singing a lullaby to L? Yes. Did I have to pick S up out of her crib and then put her back into it so that it was ME putting her down? Yes.

Had I simply not been around, things would have been fine; the whole problem was that I was still in the house. Children are like sharks smelling blood in the water, working themselves into a frenzy where they otherwise would have been calm and happy. Is there any mom out there who can truly disappear or go off-duty while still at home with her kids?

Marital Bliss, Except at Bedtime

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I’m struggling with something that I imagine is pretty common, especially for couples where one partner is a stay-at-home parent. So, I want to put it out there and hear what you all do to keep your marriages copacetic. Here’s the scenario:

I’ve been home all day with the kids, or even part of the day with some of the kids if it’s a school day. I’ve made dinner, gotten them fed, lived through the first half of the witching hour (which, in my house, is actually 2 hours – from 5-7,) and then my husband comes home at 6ish. The kids get all wild and wound up to see him and immediately start acting like jack-holes. I’m DONE. I need to walk away from these small people. T also feels like he is done. He’s tired from a long day at work. He’s hungry. He doesn’t think that it’s fair for me to just pass the kids off to him when he walks in the door.

Our kids go to bed early. By 6:30 S is asking to go to bed, and L just gets wilder and wilder the longer he stays up so we try to put him down around 7-7:30. That doesn’t leave any time for T to come home, get some unwind time, and then face the kids. Basically, he walks in, gets to eat if he’s lucky, and then it’s bedtime routine time.

We just can’t agree on this. What do you do? I imagine that this scenario plays out in millions of homes every night. We both end up feeling frustrated, under-appreciated, and aggravated.