husband | Modern Mommy Madness

If you are easily offended by adult language, stop reading now because I’m going to say fuck.

I don’t use the F-word aloud very often because it’s unladylike and I wasn’t raised that way. When I was pregnant with my firstborn I told Robbie that I was worried he would say bad words around our kids on accident, and asked him could he please work on his language? Little did I know I would one day be a stay-at-home mom to three children and find myself fighting back F-bombs on the daily. Sometimes, no other word will do. Ah … irony. We meet again.

Sometimes people who have never met me feel like they know me because they read my blog or my articles online, and expect me to be a certain way. Then we meet, and they’re like “Oh.” I’m not that funny, angry, or even smart in person. I’m a calm, mild-mannered Southern girl who has to tamp down her emotions while she’s parenting, and all of that energy has to go somewhere. So I write it out. If I felt like it was acceptable to verbalize my every feeling, such as telling my kids “I hate meal times in this house,” or, “You are annoying the shit out of me right now,” I might not have as much angst to channel through my writing.

Robbie’s last day in the car business was Thursday. He started out as a car salesman at a dealership in Birmingham, AL when Maverick was small, and I was still working at State Farm. I got pregnant with Asher and continued working full-time until he was born. Then, all of the sudden, I was a stay-at-home mom to a three-year-old and a very colicky newborn with a husband that worked 12-hour days. It. Was. Hell.

I remember tearfully telling him I couldn’t go on like this, and he agreed that we needed more help. We moved back to Baton Rouge, our hometown, and he got a job as a salesman at a huge dealership.

He quickly got a reputation as someone who could SELL. I got pregnant with Penelope when Asher was 12 months old, and all the while Robbie was working every holiday (except Christmas and Thanksgiving), every Saturday, and 12-hour days minimum. Pepper was born in June 2013, and Robbie was promoted the next day to Finance Manager. He continued working like he’d been, and I kept on doing what I’d been doing. We were surviving. We were making it work. But it was insanity.

I was grateful to be home with the kids, so I didn’t want to complain … but it was so hard. I kept telling myself it was a season, and all seasons eventually come to an end, right?

And suddenly, it did.

Robbie is now working at the business my grandpa started in 1950, and I don’t think it’s actually hit me yet that he will be home for dinner tonight. We have this entire weekend free! Two consecutive days! This is all new to us.

Here’s what he looked like last night when he got home from his last day. I thought he’d look happier, but I think he was too tired to put effort into it.

Yesterday morning before he left for his last day of work at the dealership, he said, “This is weird, it’s my last day and I’m not sure how I should feel.”

I stopped in my tracks and said, “I’LL TELL YOU HOW I FEEL. I feel like I could walk in there with you and do this.”

A job is a job and I’m grateful that we somehow made it through that impossible few years, but parenting alone all the time? What we’ve been doing?! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK THAT.

Carry on.

I have lost count of how many times I or one of my friends have said, “My husband has NO IDEA what it’s like to stay home with the kids.”

Before, when I was working full-time and pregnant, then working full-time and balancing motherhood, and then working full-time while pregnant with a toddler at home, I ranted a lot about how my husband “HAS NO IDEA.” And to be fair, he didn’t.

My husband doesn’t really know what it’s like to do what I do, just like I don’t know what it’s like to do what he does. Our occupations are mysterious and confounding to each other; he doesn’t know where the peanut butter or extra towels are kept, and the baby is always in pajamas when she stays home with Daddy. I’m almost certain it’s because he doesn’t know how to dress her. She’s also always missing a sock when I get home, the air smells like farts and chicken fingers, and the boys are drenched with sweat because they’ve all been wrestling.

I used to get upset with him because he didn’t take care of the kids the way I would have — I mean, if I was home, there would be no fart smell or chicken fingers, and certainly no wrestling. But after I quit my job and starting caring for them 24/7, I was so happy to get a break that I didn’t really care what went on while I was gone. Things have now leveled out so that I am just flat-out grateful to him for providing for us, and he is flat-out grateful to me for everything that I do … even though we both realize he isn’t even sure what all that entails, which is probably the biggest reason why he’s grateful that I’m doing it.

But … he has no idea.

He has no idea how much coffee I drink.

He has no idea what it’s like to run errands with three kids.

He has no idea what it’s like to have to change your tampon in front of an audience.

He has no idea how lonely and overwhelming it can be on really bad days when the kids are being terrible and I need an extra pair of hands.

He has no idea how hard it is to watch your body change three different times and have little control over it.

He has no idea how happy he makes me. He can’t possibly, because I’ve never been able to put it into words.

He has no idea how grateful I am to him for continuing to love me even though with each passing year he has seen more of my imperfections.

He has no idea how thankful I am to be in a front-row seat for our kid’s lives, never missing a day, good or bad, and I’m in that seat because he put me there.

He has no idea how hard it can be to be me, but he also has no idea how amazing it is.

So to my husband, who has NO IDEA what it’s like to stay home with the kids … thank you. I wager that we don’t say thank you enough to the people who love us the most and yet have put up with the most asinine behavior we’re capable of.