With Father’s Day coming up it got me thinking about fathers post kids vs. mothers post kids.
What is Father’s Day? Is it a made up holiday as they say that the greeting card companies founded? Or is it a reminder of the men who helped create our amazing offspring and give them praise. I feel like most men fall into the “provider role” and take a back seat to the parenting role. In my household growing up that’s what I witnessed as a little girl. My father would come home after a long day of work, wake my sister and I up and make my mother angry because it took her all day to tire us out, and just as we finally shut our eyes and she could sit down for a moment to herself he would rile us all up again. I used to never understand why she would get so mad …after all we didn’t see him all day, she also would envy our missing him and our excitement which I also didn’t understand.
I realized as a parent a lot of things that didn’t make sense to my little girl mentality. For one; I never had compassion for either of my parents when this nightly wakeup debacle happened. Of course now I see both sides. Being that my husband and I are repeating history, years later with a few differences.
My husband explains to me every night how upset he is that he didn’t get to spend all day with us. Kiss the kids goodnight or even be there for the occasional milestone or extracurricular. In fact, he and I have arguments about trading places. I feel like a lot of parents struggle with these ins and outs of parenting. Most husbands feel like they deserve to be able to come in the door and eat and rest and IF they feel like helping with the bedtime routine they will. Others rush home craving the bedtime turndown. Some have no choice. They either have to miss everyone and wait for the weekends or days off or if they do make it in time to help their partners “get the kids to bed,” they sacrifice time together as the mothers usually end up passing out somewhere between a shower and getting everything ready for the groundhogs day to come.
This leads me to this popular phrase from traditional wedding vows.
For better or worse….
Let me start by saying I’m one of the few lucky ones. I managed to lock down an amazing man. The kind of man you dream about. The ones that they write great love stories about. The kinds we as mothers are praying to raise our boys to be and hope to God our daughters marry. So why is it that ever since we had kids my patience with him has disappeared into thin air? It seems to me that we argue so much over unimportant issues.
Do you ever feel that way? Do you ever feel like you’re angry with your man / baby daddy/ partner/ husband for sleeping in? I swear every morning he has the nerve to keep those eyes shut and stay in our comfy bed I want to suffocate him with my pillow.
I never wanted to mirror my parents in how my treatment of my husband went down in our household. However like the sayings go….”like mother like daughter,” “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” etc. etc. I feel so terrible after each and everyone of these nonsense fights we have over him forgetting things on the “honey do list,” or how I let our four year old watch YouTube.
In the end we are both trying to survive the day, sleep deprived, malnourished and under romanced. When he comes home at night, I’m trying my hardest to skip the anger when he goes into the garage or the bathroom for a ½ hour, or turn a blind eye to him adding salt to the dinner I made him without tasting it, because at the end of the day that’s not what matters. What matters is that my husband the wonderful man that he is will occasionally let me sleep in! He always helps out with dishes, vacuuming, and any other favor I ask. He also will watch, feed, and bathe both of the kids and let me have an hour or more to myself whether that is to take a yoga class or lay out in the sun. THAT IS A GIFT. Especially because as I mentioned earlier…. those are the kind of men I’m hoping to raise, The ones who tell you they love you everyday, the ones that tell you, you are beautiful, and most importantly the ones who always have your back.
For better or worse…. well postpartum most of us are at our worst. We feel awful, look different, hormones are going haywire and our life is turned upside down once that little butterball joins the household. That version of ourselves shouldn’t get in-between our relationships.
So if you’re struggling with an idea as a gift to not only our kids’ fathers but to ourselves, how about the gift of being Better …
Better partners, better communicators, better listeners, and better lovers.
Lets face it, none of us would have a reason to celebrate the greatest gifts we’ve ever been given without a mans swimmers. So with that being said…
I’m gonna work on “bettering” these 3 things:
1- I will have more compassion for him sacrificing precious memories and moments to provide a better life for our kids and us.
2- I will stop the dumb arguments IF they start.
3- I will treat my husband like we just started dating again.
I know that everything that comes with parenting and children is a phase. I just personally would like to skip ahead from this phase. It is not fair to the man I love who gave me my beautiful boys. He is trying his hardest, I have to believe that. He is providing for our family and hustling to have a better life than he did
He is there for better or worse, through the ups and the downs and he still loves me through all the mom-madness and postpartum batshit. He still looks at me and finds me as sexy as he did pre-babies. That is a love that deserves to be treated as a gift not just on father’s day but EVERY DAY!
So that’s all for today thank you for reading hopefully you enjoyed my thoughts
Long story short…..HAPPY FATHER’S DAY
-Joey
