Taming

I like to be in charge.  I plan our meals and vacations.  I pick out new furniture, new wall colors, and decide where things should go.  I pay the bills, teach the children, and make hundreds of small decisions every day without even thinking of asking for help.  I’m a girl child of the 1970’s and am a product of my upbringing.

My father was a Naval officer; my mom was his loving bride.  He went to sea; she ran everything.  He showed up in our family, that was his job.  She planned it all, and he was there to smile in the pictures.  It was not their family, but her family in which he was included.  It is the family pattern I have unconsciously followed for the whole of my married life.

I have complained to myself and out loud about the fatigue of being the person in charge of it all.  The shear volume of decisions turns my brain to mush, but I keep running down this road, determined that I really can (as the feminists promise) do it all.

It is my family.  I am here for the whole of the day, myself and the children.  Our lives go on while he works.  We play at the park, go to the zoo, visit friends and family, and lead a very enjoyable life because of all he provides.  When my husband at last drags through the door at 7:00PM or later, we rush to greet him not as the head of us all, but as an exotic visitor to the island of us. 

He deserves better than this.  He deserves to be given all of the authority which I have taken for my own, to be placed firmly in the center of us all.  He is not an extension of all of us.  We are a family because of him.  Without him, I would not be a wife or a mother and these children simply would not be.

I need to re-read my Shakespeare:

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience-
Too little payment for so great a debt. -from The Taming of the Shrew