Sunday, June 18, 2017

Father's Day not my favorite day. My dad is gone, as are both of my grandfathers. We've never spent Father's Day weekend with Austin's dad, but we try to remember to send a card (Allen, they're in the mail, I promise). I try to make sure that Austin has a good day, but he's not all that into making a big deal of things unless I tell him to, so he's content with a quiet weekend. We spent this weekend at the splash pad, eating Chili's (his favorite), and going to see a movie. He got some cards we all forgot to sign (so we can give them to him next year!) and two ties and I remembered to get the kids to write and draw in his notebook. I even gave him the last 1/3 of my molten chocolate lava cake from Chili's, prompting him to say "this is the best day ever!" I questioned that yesterday was a better day than the day he proposed or the day we got married or THE DAYS HIS CHILDREN WERE BORN. Apparently 1.5 chocolate lava cakes in one day is pretty hard to beat.

When my dad died, Mom gave each of us something of his. My brother John got a Father's Devotional book of some kind and when he flipped through it, he found a list of ten things a dad should do. I have a scanned pdf of it, but I don't know how to convert to a jpg, so I'll just transcribe it below. I'm not sure if he came up with it himself or if it’s part of the devotional book, but these were words he lived by and I think it made him an excellent father....but then I might be biased. 

Top 10 Things a Dad Ought to Do: 

10. Hug her & Hug her to the very end. Be crazy in love with your wife. Your children will follow your example. - Eccl 9:9

9. Leave the back door open and the light on. A lifelong commitment to being a dad. Be sure they are welcome home. - Luke 15:20

8. Cry when you leave home. Don't be afraid to show your emotions. - Gen 45:1,2; 46

7. Teach your kids to work hard. Lead by example. II Thess 3:10

6. Marry off your kids many times. Be actively concerned about your kids' future spouses, no matter what age. - Gen 24:3

5. Never be too busy for your kids. Let your children interrupt. (BBC dad anyone?)

4. Be a man of your word. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.

3. Treat your family as if the preacher was there. Be a true man of God, and practice holiness at home. - Eph 5:4

2. Build your wife a phone book holder. Fill your life with loving deeds. - 1 John 3:18

1. Wear a cowboy hat. Be yourself within God’s freedom.

I think those are the references. Some are hard to read on the pdf. I feel like Dad managed to exemplify these traits. 

Dad liked chocolate a lot, but I think he would have rated his children higher than two pieces of cake in one day. He loved us and our spouses and our children tremendously. More than that, though, he loved our mom. He made sure we saw that in a lot of little things he did for her, the courtesies he extended to her, the affection he felt for her. It was so much a part of our daily lives, I can't think of many specific examples other than him squeezing oranges for fresh orange juice for her periodically. He wrote her some pretty mushy letters when they were dating and engaged and some sappy (though not too terrible) poetry after they were married. 

That was a good thing for a father to do. It gave all of us an example of what to look for and be in the future. He may not have consciously done it thinking about the example he was setting, but just because hey, he loved this woman he'd married and had all these kids with and why WOULDN'T he want to show her how he felt about her? That is the best example, the one where it's not a pre-planned thing, just a natural, instinctual part of life. 

So to all the dads in my life, raising your own children, raising someone else's, stepping in to help out adults who aren't your kids but are kids to someone you love, doing it with a partner or doing it alone, Happy Father's Day. It’s a pretty thankless job sometimes, so I'll say it today: Thank you for loving us, your wives and the mothers of your children and your children. Have a neck tie and a beverage of your choice. And maybe a piece of chocolate lava cake. Or two. 

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

I'm gonna carry that load

A frequent topic of conversation around our house for the last month or so has been the "burden of thought." It's changed a bit how we do things, though it is a tricky change to make.

The burden of thought, very basically, is the fact that women know/do everything in the home. We know when the doctor's appointments are, we know how much toilet paper we have and where it is, we know what's in the pantry, we know who the teacher is and what kind of drink she likes from Sonic, or if she prefers Starbucks instead, we know what's going on with our kids and what time of day is their best. We know everything and do everything. Men don't for the pure reason of not being there when things are scheduled or purchased or revealed.

This has led to the social view of men being helpless dolts around the house and women being the frazzled "how does she do it all" mature one of the relationship. Men are children and women are the long suffering adults who got suckered into spending their lives raising their children and cleaning their homes.

This is wrong. Men are not HELPING around the house when they pick up their laundry or wash dishes or put children to bed. They are being a part of the household. I don't care if he works all day and she stays home or vice versa. The house has to be cleaned periodically, the children have to be tended, the food cooked, the laundry washed. It all has to be done and just because he works outside the home and provides the finances to keep the family going does not give him a free pass to do nothing.

Austin read an article about the burden of thought and asked me about it. It hadn't occurred to me that he just didn't know these things and that he might want to. We keep our communication lines pretty open but we still have times when we miss something, like all couples. We talked about how I'm the one who's always making lists of what we need to take when we go on a trip, I'm the one making all the plans for the weekends when we do something (like CALF...that weekend was planned out weeks in advance, then altered slightly Thursday night and again Friday night....all by me), I'm the one planning all our meals and shopping for everything. Austin never hesitates to run to the store when I've forgotten something or to pick something up whenever I'm just wiped out and too tired to cook. He's not "helping" exactly, he's being a member of the family. He and his children need to eat and if I wasn't there, he'd have to do it on his own.

For a couple of years now, I've sent Austin a weekly email with our schedule for the upcoming week so he knows what's going on while he's working. Sometimes it's packed full of school and doctor's appointments and outings around town. Sometimes there's nothing but praise team practice. He likes knowing what's going on so if there's a day that's going to be particularly busy for me and the kids, he knows that maybe that's a day he can take over and "help" me. Since things have been changing on short notice recently we got the Cozi app and started using that. Austin can pull up the calendar and see what's up that day at a glance. It has a place for grocery lists, too, if I need him to hit the store so I don't have to go with 1-4 children in tow.

Writing this I've had to stop myself from typing "help" a lot. It's so ingrained in our heads as women that men are helping us it's hard to get away from that. It's even Biblical that we are helpmates to our husbands, though it seems that women have had some pretty difficult tasks historically, what with raising children, keeping vegetable gardens, cooking, cleaning, making clothes, etc. Almost always in long skirts and long sleeves. God bless the women before me. I'd not survive without my leggings and tank tops and a/c in this Texas heat. My generation hasn't seen it much in the previous generations. I remember my dad reading to us and occasionally cooking breakfast (always on Mother's Day, though) but that's about it. He wasn't even a grill kind of dad. He worked a lot of long hours so he just wasn't there for that kind of thing, but he was there for us in other ways. It seems that most dads of my peers were like that.

I'm getting off track.

The main purpose of this is to say: I'm trying to relinquish some of the load, but it's tricky. For 9 years of marriage, my "job" has been to run our household. And Austin was my assistant. When kids came into the picture, he stepped up, almost eagerly, to do more. He has always taken the diaper changes when he's home and most of the feedings in the evenings once they're on bottles. He does bath time and bedtime and playtime and clean up time. He's really the parent in charge in the evenings. I'm the back up then. He's in charge of dinner on weekend nights when we don't have something planned. He gets that I need time away from my kids to be a good mom so he doesn't mind when I run away to play with my friends at 8pm and don't come home until midnight. I don't ask his permission, but I check to make sure he's got the energy to parent solo for the evening or that he didn't have plans  or a thing he wanted us to do as a family. He's taking over more with the boys when it comes to travel plans. We sit down and discuss day by day what we'll be doing and eating and he takes on some of the tasks. I'm apparently too much of a control freak (who knew?) that I can't give up complete control of things, but he's ok with that. Sometimes he needs a reminder or a little push.

We're both learning how to share the load and it's trickier than you might think, but we'll get there.

Disclaimer: this is not to say ALL men are clueless at home. Some are very hands on and stand shoulder to shoulder with their wives or partners in the trenches of young childhood. I'm just speaking in general and personal terms. 😊