By T. Dawn Daum of W.T.F. words thoughts feelings
Being in a relationship with a level headed, Windex-ing superhero isn’t easy.
He’s the guy who rarely walks by you without a gentle touch to your shoulder or a feisty slap on the ass. The one who makes you coffee every morning. You get to wake up to Folgers in your cup and his selflessness wafting all over the damn place.
He’s that father who can distract a toddler in the midst of a straight-jacket worthy episode. His mac n’ cheese just tastes better. He manages to squash the sass pouring out of the older child’s mouth like some kind of parent whisperer.
Sound familiar? Yeah, I’m married to one of those men, too. How I got so lucky I’ll never know. But if I’m being honest, sometimes his commitment to being awesome is irritating as hell.
Some may ask, “Why are you complaining?”
The shit we witness in a day—changing a diaper simply because they smell a funky butt, folding laundry the “right” way, playing games with the children and laughing about it—it’s ridiculous. We seriously get to complain less than 20% of the time.
Exhausted by Wednesday, I suggest take-out for dinner. That SOB offers to marinade and grill the chicken he already thawed in the fridge. It’s really hard to deal with his practicality and enthusiasm for feeding us.
The kids almost always have me at certifiable levels of crazy by 6 p.m. The hubs just remains calm and parents on.
I sit in silence and write as much as I can, if I have time to myself. This guy splits wood in eighty degree heat and grows ribbon-worthy tomatoes. He casually suggested I go to the beach kid-free on the last day of summer vacation. Really?
My son hurt himself yesterday and cried for his daddy as I was rushing right towards him. I’ve seen this happen to several of my girlfriends. Perhaps you’ve experienced this heart-wrenching phenomenon as well. How did this happen to us? At what point did dad start to trump mom when it comes to fixing boo-boos?
While my sister-in-law, who is about to have her first child, and I were discussing breastfeeding, my husband recalled the name of the most effective nipple cream before I did. Show off. Despite occasionally mooing at me, he was nauseatingly cool with the whole breastfeeding scene.
Every time I’m recognized in public without my adorable spawns, I’m faced with this question: “How did you get out of the house alone?” My husband has no idea what I go through, being the wife of such a reasonable man. He’ll never understand the hardship of husband-envy I have to experience when I answer, “He keeps them because it’s easier.”
Although he rarely has a drink during the week, he can somehow manage to throw back a six-pack with swag on the occasional Saturday night out, while I’m over here gettin’ bridesmaid-drunk on three glasses of wine. The next morning he’s mowing the grass and I’m bribing the kids with high fructose corn syrup and red dye 40 to just let me sleep for thirty more minutes.
It’s unfair how little ammo these guys give us. So many women these days have nothing to offer in conversation when the hens start heckling about their husbands.
They do come with their faults, but they tend to sound like first world problems in the grand scheme of things. It’s hard to complain about a man who farts in his sleep, asks me to make the occasional call for him, and watches too much Alaskan “reality” TV, when he’s the same man who reads to the kids before bed every night and has dinner smelling up the house upon my arrival home from work.
These men embrace our crazy and help us keep it at a tolerable level. They pay no mind to what is and what isn’t “their job” and instead just do what needs to be done—usually in a much calmer, more practical way than us.
We aren’t jealous of our husbands. We’re envious of these beautiful men because they just get it right so much of the time. If they could just go one day looking like we do, with nerves on end and a maniacal twitch of the eye, perhaps we wouldn’t be so fed up!
We’re grateful, but let’s be real here…we’re totally doing the five-year-old’s version of the na-na na-na poo-poo dance on those rare occasions when the kids admit that no one does it quite like mom.
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About T. Dawn Daum
Dawn is a thirty-something wife, Momma to two, writer, funny girl, survivor, and student of life. She blogs at W.T.F. words thoughts feelings, and is co-editor of the upcoming anthology Trigger Points: Abuse Survivors’ Experiences of Parenting. Her work has been featured on Huff Post Parents, Huff Post Comedy, The Indie Chicks, Elephant Journal and Scary Mommy. Dawn can be found on Facebook and Twitter.