Yet another oldie but goodie, published in November, 2006 in the Ahwatukee Foothills News, and going out to all my homedogs who have not yet killed their husbands when they stepped over a Big Wheel to announce they were a) leaving for work and b) did he mention he was going to have to work late and, oh, c) was entered in a weekend-long golf tournament but that’s okay because d) you don’t really work, since you’re home with the kids.

Remember, kids! You can make your own Mom, Interrupted’s Greatest Hits with a printer, some staples, and a good copyright lawyer!

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Talk about your Man Law.

Here’s the first rule of new fatherhood: Never, ever, EVER say this to the wife as you leave for the office:

“You’re so lucky, you get to stay home. I have to work.”

He ignored this rule and found that she can, and will, discover the hidden talent where she can laser him with her eyes and leave him a smoking crater in the front hallway.

He said exactly that to her a week after the baby was born and he was heading out the door back to the cube farm, to a place where no one had mastitis but still had to somehow feed a colicky baby, and where cleaning crews emptied the trash and got the pretzel crumbs out of the carpet. And if her day had consisted solely of cradling her newborn baby and gazing dreamily into a landscape of rainbows and ponies, she would have felt very lucky, indeed.

Instead, that day consisted of cleaning projectile vomit off the walls. She was able to marvel that any creature in God’s creation could move anything that far without a rocket launcher, and was even able to summon gratitude that she had a baby who could go for that kind of distance, but it sure felt like ‘work’ when she was working that mop.

She was also able to spend the day marveling at the other end of God’s creation and just how much it could produce. And cleaning that up, too. Ten times. Twice during the trip to the grocery store.

That day also involved chasing a three-year-old who was hell bent on a) hurling himself off a roof; b) jamming Mr. Potato Head’s eye into a wall outlet; c) leaping from the bunk bed on to the blade of the (mercifully) unmoving ceiling fan; and d) all of the above.

And she was still able to consider herself ‘lucky,’ spending the day with her children.

It’s a good thing she couldn’t consider herself ‘working,’ because that meant she had time to have dinner ready when Poor Working Stiff came home and announced that he was going to watch Monday Night Football and so he didn’t think he’d give the baby a bath tonight or help with the dishes.

If housecleaning, child-rearing, and errands aren’t ‘work,’ and are, in fact, right up there on the Luck Meter with lounging on Waikiki getting cocoa butter rubbed on our backs by a cute cabana boy, then why aren’t new dads dashing home every night at 5:01 so they can get them some of that lucky?

Let’s call a wet wipe a wet wipe. We all know that scraping peanut butter off the curtains is nowhere near an equivalent to an Hawaiian vacation. So quit insulting our intelligence by implying that it is, quit coming home and acting like you’re the only one who’s been ‘working’ all day, and pick up a kid and do something constructive with it.

Face it: the day you got lucky and then made a baby is the day you got lucky and started your family. If taking care of your family is, indeed, the height of good fortune, then I suggest you step up to the table and meet Lady Luck.

Who looks remarkably like your wife.

 

Ó     E.S. Evans 2006