Stay at home Dads have it tough too
I remember it well. The day was March 25th. I had just driven home from my last day at work, looking forward to two more paychecks, and then that was it. No more Marine Corps.
While working, my wife had stayed home taking care of the children, possibly the ultimate untrained housewife. But despite her lack of training, she was a wonderful caretaker, great cook, and fantastic pie maker. Cleaning…….I took out the trash and did the dishes.
And we always had dishes. I knew that I was ready to stay home with the children, take some online college classes, and park myself on Easy Street.
K – my wife – had started working nights the Thanksgiving before. Now she was on days. She would get up each morning, rush out the door, and we’d see her sometime around five, maybe six. I managed to watch plenty of television, sign up for summer classes, and we always had clean dishes.
March turned into April, and April into May. Summer semester began and K finally said, “Are you going to clean this house?”
I looked around. We had dishes.
“I haven’t said anything,” she said, breaking the wonderful silence that had begun on that late March day, “because I thought you would eventually clean up.”
“I have cleaned up plenty!” I told her. “As far as I can tell, this place looks much the way it had looked before I was home.”
After some back and forth on this matter (and after I had missed the verdict handed down from Judge Judy), the devil woman said,
“Clean the house!”
And so it began: my search for the floor. I started in the bedroom, digging through many things. I will tell you, my friends, that I saw much that day; I saw things I had not seen before, nor since, but kept digging anyway in search of the beige carpet I had remembered when we bought the place.
I am unsure as to whether summer had turned to fall in the course of this escapade, but I can tell you that something had changed in me as the slave driver demanded more of me than any ten men could deliver.
And then I saw it, like a mirage in the distance, a swipe of carpet that may or may not have been beige, and something else. A paper. I took it, opened it, and read the contents.
It was a receipt. The date: March 25th.
