There is nothing funny about your wife leaving you. Mine
left me on Saturday morning. She claims she’s just on vacation with her mom,
and they’ll be back this coming Saturday, but I remain skeptical. The boys and
I are on day four of mom-less-ness, and things are looking bleak. Actually, we
were doing OK until yesterday.
Yesterday Son Number Two played chicken with a sidewalk
crack on his Razor scooter, and the crack won. It managed to grab his front
wheel and hold it tight, stopping his scooter instantly and sending him
head-first over the handle bars. He was able to save the sidewalk from any
further damage by protecting it with his left hand.
Yesterday was October 1st, which happened to be
the same day that our brand new health insurance plan went into effect. I
wonder what our new insurance provider will think about us using our new policy
on the very first day it was active? A few x-rays later, and I’m happy to
report that no bones were harmed in the making of this story. Some ligaments
and tendons took a beating, though. I’m guessing I won’t have any trouble with the
insurance company, since I doubt they will suspect that a sprained wrist was a
preexisting condition.
I was planning to start writing this column on Monday, like
I normally do, but something else came up in the morning. I would have begun
Monday evening, but evening follows afternoon, and the afternoon is homework
time. Homework time is the worst time in the whole wide world, ever. I think I
would rather go to war naked with a stick than sit down with my three sons and
try to get them to finish – or even start – their homework. It’s so bad I don’t
even want to keep talking about it, because my left eye is beginning to twitch.
After the three hours it takes us to do fifteen minutes of
homework, it is dinnertime. Right around dinnertime is usually when I realize
that I need to make something for dinner. We eat cereal a lot. Right after
dinnertime is bedtime, since homework time runs into dinnertime, and dinnertime
runs into all the time we would have had to do anything else before bedtime. Someday
we’ll have enough time to have bath time. I hope.
After bedtime, I had another opportunity to begin this
column, but due to the existence of homework time, all I am able to do after
bedtime is sit and stare at a blank wall, and whimper softly. When I am done with
that, it is my bedtime, because breakfast time is coming up fast.
So I figured I would start this column on Tuesday. I would
have, except I went ahead and spent most of Tuesday sitting in a waiting room
with Son Number Two and his swollen left wrist, next to a lady who sounded as
if she had tuberculosis, whooping cough, and pneumonia all in one.
We managed to get home – hopefully tuberculosis-free - in
time for homework time, and you can imagine how my day went from there.
So here we are on Wednesday, and I was all set to get the
kids off to school and bang this column out. Then, when Son Number Three woke
up this morning, he came out of the bathroom and informed me that his heart
hurt. When I asked him to point to it, I deduced that his stomach was really
the offending internal organ, and he confirmed that for me about a half-hour
later when he threw up his breakfast.
He was kind enough to throw up as he was passing through the
door into the garage, so the majority of his bagel ended up halfway out of the
house. As a result, the cleanup was the industrial tile and concrete hose-down
type that I prefer to the more delicate indoor variety. I am happy to report
that our garage doorway threshold has never been cleaner.
So, here I am, after a morning of janitorial service, writing
this column in between trips to the bathroom, and laundry loads. Like I told
you, there is nothing funny about your wife leaving you. I completely forgot
what I was even planning to write about on Monday, so this is what you get today.
This week has been a little off to say the least, but today
is really highlighting for me why the Mr. Mom job is not more widely adopted
across this great country. Women are just better at this kind of thing. I truly
believe that moms come with a naturally larger tolerance for listening to
whining than men have. This is probably a result of years of listening to men
whine about how loud the baby is whining. When the kids get older, that
increased tolerance helps women deal with homework time way better than men
can.
Illness is another good example. It would never occur to me
to get down on the bathroom floor and hug someone when they’re throwing up, but
that’s exactly what a sick five-year-old kid wants. My first instinct is to get
as far away from them as possible. Moms just naturally hug them. Go figure.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go burn our garage
welcome mat, and pray for my wife’s safe and willing return.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen
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