My Husband, the Bum

If you ask C what he does, he will tell you he is a bum. If he is a bum, I do not care. It does not bother me that he spends a good part of every day sleeping or playing video games. Because here is the thing – he deserves it. He EARNS it.

I love Pop Tart. I love her more than just about anything, but there is a reason I am the breadwinner in our family and C is the stay at home parent.

I get home right around 5pm. That means that by the time I walk through the door, he has been dealing with whatever is going on for two hours already. It is generally under control. I get home, and I get to go be a bum myself for about an hour before dinner. He has homework, trumpet practice, chores all under control.

And please do not think this is an easy thing. Pop Tart is 12. She is a tween with all the hormones and emotions of a tween. But, she also has emotional delays which give her the attention span of an 8 year old. However, she gets 6^th grade level homework, not 2^nd grade. Somedays homework is done quickly and the world is beautiful, and somedays it is a fight.

Tonight, it was somewhere in between. Her best friend was over and they were doing homework together. This is a difficult section – the introduction to statistics in math, so they are doing mean, median, mode, outliers, something called IQR… So C was down there helping them through it. The best friend seemed pretty focused, but Pop Tart was twitchy, in one of those places where she cannot sit still or focus, and makes random vocalizations.

Simply hearing the process from our bedroom where I got to sit and cuddle doggies, I was tempted to ask the best friend to leave multiple times. Again, not because the friend was causing any issues but because Pop Tart was so obviously in an attention seeking mood where the presence of her friend was exacerbating the issue. But C managed to power through, to get them both through the homework, making them do it themselves and just helping by teaching them additional “tricks” of working with the numbers.

And really, this was a “good” night, as there was no crying or screaming, no frustration or tears. Just extreme twitchiness. And I am not saying I absolutely could not have handled the situation without yelling myself at the end of the work day, but I am rather certain that I could not have handled it as calmly and as successfully as C did. He is, without a doubt, the better parent.

And so, if that means he is a bum for a good part of his day, I do not care. He earns it by being an amazing parent every moment he is with Pop Tart. He earns it by being the best partner I could ever ask for.

If you ask C what he does, he will tell you he is a bum. I will tell you he makes our lives possible.