"Mommy" and "Daddy" Differences (in My House)

My husband and I will have been together for 16 years this July. It marks the first year where we will have been married as long as we dated. So, I like to think I know him pretty well. 

• I know that he cares deeply for me and our home. 

• I know that since X-man's birth he feels this need to provide for us and works desperately hard at his job to keep big bucks and awesome health care available to us.

• I know he loves his work more than he gets annoyed with the stupidness that sometime occurs at his job at Apple.

• I know that he has a fabulous sense of humor.

• I know that I can always talk to him about things that are on my mind and even if he disagrees, he won't ever not want to hear what I'm saying.

• I know he came from a home where he was the fourth kid, was often told he was an "oops,"  and felt ignored and neglected and left to his own devices and doesn't want X-man to ever feel that way.

• I know that he can think in dimensions that I can't when it comes to academic and technical solutions.

• I know that every time he reads, "Mars Needs Moms" to X-man he cries and thinks of how our lives matter most in how we provide for him.

• We share the same values about all the big stuff in life. 

Knowing all this is definitely part of how we survived the long haul as two kids who met at summer camp before my junior year in high school in Rockford and his senior year of high school in Dunlap, went to separate colleges and lived in separate states during the six years before we moved in together in Falls Church, Va., when I decided to go to graduate school.

But this morning, I was uber annoyed with him.

I get up with X-man every morning. I make him breakfast. I wrestle him into clothes. I get him on the way to school. Most mornings out of the month, I do this alone because of MacTroll's erratic and heavy travel schedule. 

This morning, X-man came in our room at 5:50 a.m. I had had a great night at sushi last night with the CARE Moms and was buzzed enough from my adult time that I couldn't fall asleep until 2 a.m. I just laid in bed struggling with sleep. So I told X-man he either needed to lie down with me and go to sleep or he could go play trains in his room. 

What he wanted was a playmate and after 35 minutes of X-man crawling around on top of us, MacTroll went. I fell back to sleep for a short time. When I woke up X-man was at my bedside again asking me to come play. I thought maybe MacTroll had come back to bed. But no, he wasn't there. He wasn't in X-man's room either. I shouted for him and he was elsewhere in the house. I'll bet my VW that it was in front of an iPhone or a computer somewhere.

He responded immediately, in that "damn, I'm busted" tone, and went to play with X-man. At 8 a.m. on the dot, I hear MacTroll walking around to my side of the bed. He pats me on my left shoulder. The one I had to remind him all week was tender due to my tetanus/whooping cough vaccine on Wednesday. So when people touch it, it's like someone is pushing their finger into a deep bruise causing a fit of pain.

"Whoops, sorry! I'm going to go and get a blood test," he said.

"What?" I stammer, my eyebrows furrowing even further. 

"I am supposed to get a blood test as a follow up to my physical. So I'm going to go now."

"You never mentioned this to me this week."

"Well, I forgot until now."

"Can you take X-man with you?" I ask.

SILENCE

He looks toward the curtains that are pulled closed at the window.

MORE SILENCE

"I don't know how to do that if I'm getting blood drawn for a while and he's running around," he finally responded.

"Put him in the stroller," I responded offering a solution.

SILENCE

"I guess this means that you want to keep sleeping," he said.

"Yes," I answered.

"How long do you want to sleep for?"

"Until I'm not tired any more," I answered closing my eyes.

SILENCE

"Did he eat breakfast?" I ask.

"He had some juice and goldfish crackers."

"That's not a healthy breakfast."

"It's what he wanted."

"That's fine, but that's one element you put on his plate. You put all the other stuff around it."

SILENCE

"I guess I won't get my blood drawn," he says quietly.

"Thousands of other people take their kids with them everywhere, every day."

"I know. I know. I know," he says standing up.

SILENCE

"Well, you go back to sleep, then," he says as he walks out of the room.

Fat fucking chance now. But it took me at least an hour to work through the conversation and think of several reasons why I'm crazy about my husband before I could write about it without wanting to throw breakable shit across the room.

Any parent who is the primary caretaker of their child knows how you end up taking your kid with you everywhere. How you never get to get dressed alone or pee alone. How you take your kids to your doctor's appointments, if you have to. Or how you have to NOT go places because you have your kids, and it's not appropriate for them to go. And this is one of those things he doesn't get about my day-to-day life: 

What I need or want doesn't usually matter.