Man is just not cut out for womanhood

There are just some things man cannot do and being a mother is one of those. I obviously have not been posting anything on this blog because I found it impossible to take care of the family and do anything else. I don't know how my wife plans meals. I don't know how she can multitask. I don't know how she can listen to four kids at once. I don't know how she can put up with a husband like me. 

I do know this: my wife is a gift, a precious gift. I will probably never praise her enough or thank her enough. 

But today I can say to her, thank you.

Weekend survival

Last week ended with a Friday visit from one of my grown-up godchildren (I have over two dozen godchildren). She came with her two young children because she had a day off. While she enjoyed watching me scramble about the kitchen, within minutes she offered to help clean. Now this dear soul is the kind of person who enjoys cleaning and there was no way I would dare refuse. To refuse her help would be like refusing to let a mechanic friend fix your car. As she began cleaning, I found myself just standing and watching in awe. It was like watching Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa. She was a master.

While the kids played and we conversed, she was able to clean nooks and crannies in the kitchen that would’ve taken me months. She knows she was being nice, I doubt she has any idea at how immensely her gift blessed me and my family (thank you dear one).

Saturday brought two more godchildren (they came not to clean but to continue an ongoing fantasy game that we play), so meals and cleaning were split between my wife and I (thank you Melissa).

Sunday was St. Patrick’s Day.

This day I hosted a long planned St. Patrick’s feast, complete with corned beef and cabbage, and Irish whiskey (the whiskey was a rare and special treat during Lent). More godchildren came and food was had by all (but not the whiskey). I think I was able to balance hosting the feast among my dear friends with maintaining the dishes and other kitchen duties.

My beloved wife (in her infinite wisdom), also insisted that I rest as much as possible from housewife duties (on Sunday). She said this, knowing that a day of rest would put me in a strong position at the dawn of a new week.

Needless to say, however, that from a housewife point of view, Monday’s kitchen was a wreck. Many of the dishes were done but as every housewife knows, an ordered kitchen merely starts with clean dishes.

I’ve always considered myself the “social butterfly” type, but this weekend seemed to take everything out of me. Today I was running about two hours behind. I got the last load in the dishwasher just before midnight, and the kitchen will remain a mess overnight.

As my grandiosity slowly gives way to humility, I am coming to realize and accept that I can’t and won’t get everything done that needs to get done.

Question: Is there a way to keep the kitchen from becoming a total disaster WITHOUT sacrificing time needed to be a proper host?

 

Day Two – No dust settles.

Today I spent less time trying to reorder the old system and clean large messes and more time trying to replicate a necessary schedule. In the old days, the only one who kept any kind of schedule was my wife. She seemed to think that scheduled bed times, mealtimes and mealtime cleanup were necessary. While I agreed, I was always reluctant. Now that I carry the burden I know that with my ADD a rigid schedule is necessary.

I remember, as short as a week ago, sitting in my man cave wondering what I should do. I wondered if I should clean it up a bit, work on a book that I’m writing, work on a fantasy game that I game-master, or paint some of my miniatures (for said fantasy game). As of the past two days, I don’t seem to have that problem anymore. As I finished cleaning up after breakfast, I realized that I need to start lunch. And as soon as I finished the lunch cleanup I was faced with the dilemma of cooking dinner.

It looks like everything I do from here on out has to be planned around mealtimes. I have to ask myself, How much extra time can I create in between meals?” Or to put it another way, “How efficient can I be with each meal time, so I have time to do all those other things a housewife does?”

Tools bought today: large dustpan, two hand towels for the kitchen, microwave dish cover (also called a  splatter guard), and dishes exclusive for the family meal.

I only drank 3 cups of coffee (How much coffee does a normal housewife need?).

I am happy to report , however, that there were no shouting matches or meltdowns today. I have been using a system to police myself. In the past, whenever I would shout or grump or speak harshly to my children (and sometimes my wife) I would pay them a dime (and apologize of course). So today, rather than yelling at my 13-year-old when she would sass, roll her eyes or crab at me, I simply charged her a dime.

Plenty of dimes were traded.

Preface and Day one

For years now (no, actually decades, almost two decades in fact) my wife and I, fantasized about her doing her art full-time, while I would stay home and play homemaker, homeschooling teacher and chef. In the year 2000 we had our first baby. A dear baby girl named Lucy, who fascinated and captivated us. Then as we got into the swing of things, we were expecting baby number two, our son Mario, hereafter called Momo. Five years later, we were blessed with our son Daniel, and in 2009, our little Princess Alicia was born. During all this time with tiny people around, very dependent on their mother, I’ve been eagerly waiting for the moment when we could go for our dream, analyzing and preparing myself, a man’s man, to play the role of housewife and homeschooling mother.

No. I actually did no such thing. In fact, I didn’t give our fantasy, our dream, a second thought. My ADD allowed me to just go on with life, trying to be a good husband and father. My one responsibility outside the home was to make money to pay the bills. And my one responsibility inside the home, was to make money to pay the bills. I mean, after all I was the breadwinner, the big cheese, the macho man, the man with the plan, etc. So I’d come home tired from a long day at work (from various employments over the years) and sit the kids on my lap and wait for dinner. Of course sometimes I’d help with setting or cleaning the table after dinner. There was a while when I would actually cook the meals (and I’m a pretty good cook I might add), and I continued to cook once or twice a month (or more) since then. But due to the ongoing childhood trauma involving the two youngest siblings of six, me and my twin, having to do entire loads of dishes (piled so high  they towered over us like dinosaurs, no like dragons, evil dragons!), I as an adult, quite simply refused to do dishes. Not because it was “woman’s work,” or anything chauvinistic, but standing at a sink full of dishes always brought me terrible anxiety (anxiety like the fear of a 10-year-old boy getting caught playing with his G.I. Joe in the sink full of dishes instead of working hard to finish his task at hand).

The whole kitchen, in my mind, was my wife’s domain. After all she did all the food shopping, the cooking, and the cleanup afterward. If she wanted a new pot, I was okay with it (as long as we could afford it). We got a Vitamix blender when she wanted it. I built whatever counter space would fit in our small kitchen at the time and was happy to do any other construction or building project that would make her life in the kitchen easier. However, my mindset was such that since it was her domain anything more than cooking an occasional meal was tantamount to interference. And since I didn’t really want her stepping into the middle of my projects, I wasn’t about to intrude on her space (or so I conveniently thought). So when she would ask me to help around the house, I would either cite these facts or explain how tired I was or find something else I needed to do.

Now before you start hating me for being a no good, lazy lump of a husband, there was another factor playing into my anxiety/behavior/lack of action. But before I explain that away, I want to make sure that the whole picture, my whole reality is clear.

I’ll start with this: There are three types of people in the world. First, there are artists. Artists make everything that is beautiful, they make everything that is ugly, they make everything that you can see, taste, hear or react to. In short, they make the world go round in a meaningful way. Second, there’s everyone else, who does everything else. Third, there’s dead people. Now generally speaking, the “artist” kinds of people in this world have so many things going on in their mind that the world around them seems messy, disorganized and sometimes even chaotic. Again generally speaking, the “everyone else” kinds of people seem to have order around their lives. Their beds are made every morning, their cars are clean and they never seem to bounce a check. Finally, and generally speaking of course, dead people contribute nothing.

My wife is a kind of artist who makes things beautiful. She arranges the furniture in the house. She chooses what hangs on the wall.  She also can look at an object or person and sketch on a pad of paper the very thing she is looking at. She can watercolor, Prismacolor, or paint the most beautiful things at will. We discovered that she can also carve the most beautiful three-dimensional objects (such as angels, fairies, birds etc.) out of wax (which one of her employers would then cast in pewter). I am altogether a different kind of artist. I am the kind of artist who creates stories, jokes or meaningful analogies to entertain, encourage and sometimes admonish. So being both artists, our home has always reflected a thought process or an evolution of creation rather than a pristinely ordered environment (read - we are messy).

So back to me being a lump of a husband. A large contributing factor to my unwillingness to lend a hand was that my ADD and artistic disorderly thoughts saw her inability (to clean up after me, and four children, while homemaking, homeschooling, gardening, etc.) as a failure in myself to be the clean and tidy person that my family always told me to be and as gargantuan impossibility. It was a debilitating self-hatred manifesting as a failure to contribute to the cleanliness and order of our home. A quick spoiler is that I grew up (kind of).

Fast-forward 10 or so years, and you will see a happily married couple with four well-adjusted children. My wife’s perseverance, patience, and forgiveness paid off over the years. Sure, we’re still kind of messy. You’ll still find an occasional bunch of rotting bananas under the seat in the van or rotten homemade chicken stock in the fridge. But we have learned to balance joy and creativity with due diligence and discipline (not a perfect balance by any means, but not a wild pendulum swing either).

Now that you have a taste of where we came from, this is a story of where we’re going. Since our baby is three years old, our artistic lives, our business contacts and our home life have all culminated to the real possibility of seeing our dream materialize. My wife is poised to earn a real living making artwork. This has brought me to the launch of my new life as a man journeying into motherhood and the life of a housewife.

The following will be a collection of thoughts, successes, failures and quotes as I, a man, step into the role of homemaker, homeschooling teacher and general life as a “soccer mom.”

Day one – The great Transition of power

Tuesday March 12

6 am – woke up for no good reason.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. Then as I thought about the implementation of my new role, I all at once realized that success or failure hinged on one room - the kitchen.

I never understood why my wife placed certain things in certain places in the kitchen. If I was to have success, I realized that I would have to rearrange everything in the kitchen in a way that made sense to me. So I got up and got busy.

6:30 am – 1^st cup of coffee

As I finished my first cup of coffee, I looked about the place. None of it made sense to me. Our weekend and Monday had been very busy and chaotic and while nothing was rotting or festering, the countertop was a mess and the table was a disaster.

Step one: clean.

First I put all the clean dishes away. Then I took everything off the corner counter nearest our stove. As I did this I realized that I should set up the rice cooker so we could have rice for breakfast or lunch (we mix rice in with our scramble eggs). Of course when all of the items were removed from the counter (rice cooker, knife block, jars containing large utensils, etc.) I found all sorts of debris and food scraps. After a thorough cleaning, I moved to the right side of the sink. Once that side was satisfactory, I placed the rice cooker there in its new spot. On the table was yesterday’s roasted chicken dinner. I cut the meat off the bone and readied the stock pot for broth.

My wife snuck into the kitchen wondering what I was doing up. To her surprise (and mine) she found me cleaning. At this point, I left for the hardware store to get an adapter for a dishwasher I put in the basement last night. While at the hardware store I bought the obvious things needed for a dishwashing machine, but I also bought a dish towel rack to hang on a cabinet door, a wire contraption that hangs on the inside of a cabinet door and will hold a plastic grocery bag open for trash, and two soap dispensing scrub brushes.

8:30 am 2^nd cup of coffee

(Just a quick note, I typically drink one cup of coffee every morning and that’s it)

At this point in the morning my wife and all the kids rushed the kitchen. So I had to stop what I was doing and feed the little people.

First injury: Deep paper cut on my left index finger – the kind that doesn’t bleed but sticks out so that it smarts like the dickens whenever you touch something.

When breakfast was finished, I had the children thoroughly scrape their dishes and bring them downstairs to the dishwasher. I set up the machine and let it go. When I returned upstairs I looked around the kitchen satisfied in my ignorance. Then I realized I needed to start thinking about lunch. So I walked over to the refrigerator and opened it to my shock and horror.

Now since my wife had previously been busy doing everything in the house, any cleaning that involved the dismantling of objects was left to me. As I opened the refrigerator, I saw that I had not cleaned the refrigerator for possibly years.

Step two: clean

Thankfully the refrigerator was half-empty, so I was able to consolidate items onto shelves while I dismantled other shelves. The shelves were so caked over that although glass, they were opaque. So I looked for my favorite heavy duty cleaner called Krud Cutter. I thought I saw a bottle high on a shelf in the garage. To make sure I grabbed a fiberglass pole from the floor (I have no idea what this pole is for) and used it to push some bottles aside and see if I could find what I was looking for.

Second injury: fiberglass splinter in the right thumb.

The pain from this splinter was not severe but the placement of this thing was right on the spot of the thumb that you touch everything with. The splinter was also invisible, just a tiny little thing that caused enough pain and irritation to stop me from wanting to use the entire hand. I didn’t tell my wife about my terrible wound nor did I find some other reason to quit now that I had multiple wounds. Instead, I suffered on, alone in a cold and cruel world in which tiny thumb splinters dominate the innocent.

First confrontation: My 13-year-old daughter and I engaged in a shouting match. I shouted louder but nobody won, which means we both lost. Reason for argument – unknown.

With two of the shelves cleaned, I enlisted my eldest daughter to help me finish the refrigerator. Her job was simply move stuff from dirty shelves to the clean shelves.

Second confrontation: My 13-year-old daughter and I engaged in a shouting match. She cried, I lost. Reason for argument – unknown.

After completely dismantling the lower drawers of the refrigerator I began the arduous task of scraping out the nastiest slop and gunk from the bottom of the refrigerator. It happened to be a mix of at least 50% flaxseed goo. I joked with my 13-year-old, that we shouldn’t let mama get any more flaxseed. As I continued to clean and scrub and scrape, I heard my three-year-old who was walking behind me yell out in a grumpy voice.

She said, “MAMA SHOULDN’T GET ANYMORE TAXI!”

Needless to say, I stopped talking about it.

While I was scraping out the refrigerator I asked my 10-year-old son to hose out the bottom drawers outside. As he walked by several minutes later, I asked him, “Son, are you doing your job?”  Then in the other room, my three-year-old chimed in again. “I’M DOING MINE! I’M A KID YOU KNOW?” she yelled.

2:15 3^rd cup of coffee

As I put together the final pieces for our late lunch, my 10-year-old son walks in the kitchen and asks, “Hey, Mr. Mom can I have an apple?”

I laughed and explained lunch was about to be served. For lunch I made a lovely stir fried sesame chicken and garlic sage rice. It was perfect, it was beautiful.

Third confrontation: My 13-year-old daughter and I engaged in yet another shouting match. (Does this ever get old?) Reason for argument – unknown (AGAIN!)

After the children had eaten most of their meal, I brought some down to my wife, who was working in the basement. She agreed it was delicious and asked me what was in it. And when I told her, she asked me, “You did remember that Momo is allergic to sesame oil, right?”

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

So I ran upstairs and confiscated what was left of his lunch. Momo’s allergy outbreaks consist primarily of hyperactivity and total loss of focus and not swelling, itchiness or death. So things didn’t get too bad.

3:15 Dishes in the dishwasher, and I returned to the kitchen and gave it a look over. Realizing that I had a lot to do to make it my own, I said to myself, “We have to do this kitchen.”

My 13-year-old threw her head back and groaned, “Do we have to do EVERYTHING today?”

4:45 4^TH cup of coffee

I took the three youngest kids to a friend’s house half an hour way to pick up a table she had stored for us (picked up the dishwasher there the day before). On the way back I stopped at the Goodwill to drop off stuff that had been cluttering up our lives and to try to find a covered butter dish. While I failed to find a butter dish, my five-year-old son found a Teeny Beanie Baby husky, and I found a brand-new Monopoly Deal card game (a family favorite), David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work board game, and several craft organizing containers desperately needed by a family of artists.

I came home to find that my wife had cooked dinner. So we sat together for a family meal and toasted to the end of the first day of this new adventure.