It continues to be difficult to have a husband who is in attendance for only a small percentage of the actual week. After a solid work week with the kids, I look at the weekend as a time to slow down, whereas after a work week without the family, my husband wants to come home and turn water into wine. He typically has only 24-32 hours in which to fulfill his obligations to the household and the finances, spend time with me, and interact with the kids. The pressure is tremendous. He wants to compensate in that short time for all the hours he’s been away.
I understand where he’s coming from. When he hears the stories of our day trips and movie nights, of course he wants to try and reproduce the experiences exactly for himself. He expects that if we clone an outing the kids and I have already been on, he’ll somehow recapture the same magic and fun of the initial event. I have tried to explain to him that we can have the same fun without having to engage in all the pomp and circumstance of our weekday excursions, but I think he wants to believe that a Xerox copy will work well enough. This is how we ended up back at the same beach the kids and I were on Tuesday, but on a Sunday.
Of course, I was tired, and the last thing I wanted to do was take another 90-minute drive to the beach, but I relented. On our way there, he wanted to stop at the same drive-in where we had eaten. So we did. He was annoyed by the real glass mugs and the semantics of eating in the car. These are the little things I try to warn him about. That sort of chaos is so normal for me, the annoyance is barely notable. For him, it’s like a mosquito in his ear. When we showed up at the beach, there was a festival blocking the entire parking lot, and obviously, being the weekend, the area was teeming with people. These are not obstacles that you face on a Tuesday afternoon, but we soldiered on. Ultimately, I’m glad we made the trip. He got to ride Eliza through the waves on his shoulders over and over again, much to her delight. He got to do this:
