Family Portrait

I used to wake up at five a.m. and write my guts out. This morning I woke up at five a.m. and itched to write, so here I am. The cursor is doing that blinking thing and there's an awful lot of white space to fill.

Crap, I'll just jump right in knowing it's not going to be perfect, and I don't have time to make it perfect, because my job and my family take all my time. That and sleeping and reading Game of Thrones and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

The Kid is five years old now, going on six. He is not laid back. He is high strung. Change is hard for him. He has reddish-brown hair and freckles and bruises all over his legs because he randomly falls down. It's like watching the out takes at the end of the movie, the blooper roll, where the actor is standing there one minute and falls on his back the next, and the crew laughs. The Old Man and I are laughing all the time. The Kid asks insightful questions like, "Who is the boss in this house?" and "When do I get root beer with dinner? Is there a system, or are you just saying no tonight for no reason?"

I gotta say too that I totally deserve how happy he makes me. I really do. He and I go to the movies together and watch The Avengers and Cars 2. I love the movies because all the truths are universal and black and white and there's heroes and villians and no regular people who just screw up because they're human. There's no giving anyone the benefit of the doubt in movies - you might as well just shoot them with a laser and get it over with.

I used to call her The Baby, but she is now two years old. I'll call her Chica I suppose until a better term pops up. Remember from the story two years ago how I looked in her little baby one day old eyes and saw that she totally forgave me for being a messy human who desperately needed someone to give her the benefit of the doubt. Chica is incredible. She is assertive. She is wickedly funny. She is laid back. When I go to work and she is sitting on The Old Man's lap, watching Little Einsteins, she lazily waves goodbye to me with one hand, kind of a ghetto sideways wave and says "Bye Mom," never taking her eyes off Leo. I think, in fact, that she has a crush on Leo, the little red-headed ringleader, from Little Einsteins. She's kind of obsessed. She's also got the reddish-brown hair, but no freckles yet on her olive skin. She has something against shoes and socks. Her favorite outfit is a black t-shirt and a hot pink taffeta skirt fringed in bright yellow. I think she rocks.

The Old Man is still my better half, and I have to say that I absolutely deserve him too. He is patient and gives messy humans the benefit of the doubt as a default of his personality. He's not a morning person but he jumps out of bed to sit with Chica and let her play with his fingernails as she drinks juice from her sippy cup and watches cartoons. He comes home from work Sunday afternoons and sprawls on the living room floor to take a nap and lets The Kid and Chica sit on his back like a sofa. Every once in a while Chica swats at his head to make sure he's really not sleeping. I've given up suggesting he take a nap upstairs because I realized he likes the torture. The Kid has two loose teeth, so The Old Man spent yesterday morning at the bank getting shiny new one dollar coins so we can play tooth fairy the correct way. I was just going to give The Kid some nickels from the change jar. See? My better half.

There's a little pocket of magic where I live, and I'm probably the lynchpin of it all maybe, or maybe I'm just lucky. When I come home from work the first thing I do is take off my underwear because it's constricting, and then change into shorts and a t-shirt, and I get to play dodgeball and have water fights.

All I will say about work is that it's annoying right now and takes up way too much of my time, but one thing about having this particular family is that they force me to remember what is real, and what is just fluff.

Men

Who needs 'em?

That's a joke. It's Father's Day. I wanted to write something about the Old Man who is, as I type, play-fighting with The Kid. They are smashing our couch pillows into each other and making growling noises. Like bears or wolverines or really pissed-off marmots.

http://www.literarymama.com/interact/blog/archives/002518.html

Look at the link from Literary Mama. The post is about a panel discussion about the questions "When are men going to care about work/family balance? And what is the role of men in the feminist movement anyway?" Why ask this around Father's Day? These questions must plague many, many women, and I am sympathetic to their desire for their men to fully join them in child-rearing, home-life, etc. Many, many men simply don't pull their weight at home.

The Old Man was raised by a strong woman. He did chores growing up. He learned to respect women. Plus, I'm a loudmouth and tell him what I need.

"Darlingest, please from now on and forevermore do all of the laundry because I can't do it all?" And he does it.
"Light of my life, there is .5 inches of dust on the kitchen countertops. Be a dear and wipe the counters after you do the dishes from now on?"
And there he goes, wiping the counters.

And I'm benefiting from that. I wonder if the women of Literary Mama asking those questions are from the previous generation, or are there men out there still, men in their twenties and thirties, who are husbands and fathers, who don't care about work/family balance? Aren't couples sharing the work these days? And if not, why the hell not?

Anyway, thanks Old Man for doing the dishes and the laundry and wiping the counters and vacuuming on Mondays and fixing the smoke alarms and changing light bulbs and mowing the lawn and dropping The Kid off at daycare and working full time.

I love all of this. I am most grateful, however, for your calm voice of reason, your unconditional acceptance of a crazy redhead's rants and temper tantrums, for your eye-rolls and hugs when I take myself too seriously.

You should go to the Literary Mama panel so that these women can meet a man who cares. I love you.