By Aaron Traister
I never realized how hard working dads have it
until I was forced to confront my wife about her performance in the
traditionally male role of the breadwinning parent.
On a recent evening, after the kids had gone to bed, I hunkered
down for a long painful conversation with Karel, my wife of seven
years, about the quality of time she was spending with our nearly
three-year-old son, Noah. I wanted to stress to her the importance
of sharing time with our son, without me, in a situation that was
Noah-centric.
Karel spends almost all of her free time with the family as a
whole, but the number of one-on-one moments between the two of them
in the last eight months can be counted on one hand, and they
mostly consist of trips to the grocery store. I gently tried to
explain to her that my fondest childhood memories of time spent
with my mother do not usually involve purchasing mouthwash and cat
litter.
It was an extremely unpleasant conversation, and unsurprisingly, to
her ears it sounded like an accusation of neglect. She was
defensive, as I knew she would be, and in many ways her anger was
justified. There were extenuating circumstances for this lapse of
mommy-and-son adventure time.
The trouble started during the later stages of her pregnancy with
our second child, an abnormally large (even in utero) baby girl
named Josefina. Karel's third-trimester, Weeble-like
proportions meant that she could not be left by herself to tend to
the fruits of destruction caused by Noah, who since turning two had
morphed into forty pounds of elbows and knees in rapid and
perpetual motion.
It quickly became apparent that Noah was not the only family member
on the brink. For painfully obvious reasons,
Karel's inability to handle the unintentional head-butts, very
intentional belly flops, and wildly out-of-control pratfalls of our
aspiring pro-wrestler/Buster Keaton impersonator increased tenfold
in the two months following her C-section. The gut-busting hilarity
my son strives for with his acts of physical comedy and derring-do
had almost become, literally, gut-busting.
By the time Karel's body returned to a semblance of normalcy,
it was time for her to go back to work. Toddler Madness overtook
our house. We witnessed the new-baby regression other parents had
warned us about. I became increasingly worried about Noah as he
became increasingly sick of me. It was obvious that Noah didn't
just want Mommy to help with dinner and a bath at night, or a
family trip on the weekend; he wanted her, without me, and
definitely without his new sister. I tried to fill the void, but
Noah would accept no substitutes. For her part, Karel, who was
struggling to re-adapt to work, just couldn't see what was
going on at home. I felt as though I had all my fingers plugging
the cracks in Noah's emotional levee, and I waited vainly for
Karel to come lend a thumb before our son turned into the mental
equivalent of the Ninth Ward.
The night I confronted Karel with my concerns about Noah, it
quickly became apparent that he was not the only family member on
the brink. Because of my focus on the kids, I didn't realize
how thinly Karel was stretched. She complained that she felt like
butter spread over too much burnt toast. The idea of trying to find
more time somewhere in her week for Noah wasn't simply
daunting; it was terrifying.
And not because of Noah's recent moodiness, or because of
lingering physical issues from the pregnancy, but because she was
already balancing a full work week on top of a home life where her
attentions and affections had to be split between three very needy
individuals. Those three people of varying sizes and desires all
missed her equally during the day, and wanted her complete focus
during the meager hours between the moment she walked through the
front door and bed time.
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