As a blogger, I constantly have post ideas flowing through my mind. I’ll find myself composing a post while doing the dishes, or other mindless activities. I’ll play with the word selection and sentence structure until it “reads” as I’d like in my head. But then, I’ll never find the time to write it down. There’s very little “free time” for me these days, and that’s okay, but it does lead to this condition of thought overload. Sometimes at night Tom will get bombarded with my thoughts. I’ll ask his opinion on each one, hoping for a good in-depth conversation so I can flesh them out and find resolution of some kind. But the last thing he wants to do is think deeply when he gets home, he’s exhausted, spent. He just wants to be silly with his three year old, cuddle with his baby and watch a movie with me. I’m not criticizing him in anyway, I understand the mental exhaustion of a full day’s brain work. But it does leave me in a bit of a predicament.
This leads me to my post. (I always have to wait and just see which one will surface, which subject will demand to be addressed.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges of the working husband- stay-at-home Mom relationship. Let me highlight a view differences that I find the most challenging:
-Social: My husband interacts with all sorts of people everyday. He interacts with a rotating cast of friends and co-interns, he interacts with inspiring and challenging patients and their families, he interacts with nurses and other doctors. His social needs are met, and probably exceeded at work. As a result, when he comes home the last thing he wants to do is hang out with friends.
While I have upped my social interactions considerably as a stay-at-home Mom, I choose to spend the majority of my day solely with Scotland and Anders. And as such, my ability to interact in certain social settings is difficult. The idea of meeting up for a game night or going out to dinner with friends almost always sounds appealing to me. However, when you’re married you primarily socialize as a couple. Here lies our challenge. When we have a weekend free, my thoughts turn to getting together with friends- Tom’s don’t. I’m trying to figure out ways to meet my social needs independently. But even my upped solo socialization doesn’t meet the desire to have “family friends.” To socialize with my husband.
-Mental: Tom not only has a very social job, but a very brainy job. His mental capacity is taxed everyday. And so, as I mentioned, when he comes home he wants to mentally relax.
I, on the other hand, often look forward to those same “after work” hours to do some real mental exertion. I want to write, to read or tackle a project. (Though to be fair, physical exhaustion often leads me, like him, to take up less demanding activities.) And yet, that’s our only time together. Tuning him out so I can delve into a writing project feels selfish. My desire to keep a strong marriage supersedes my desire to pursue my academic needs, and so I leave them, and sit down on the couch to snuggle and watch a show.
-Children: Tom only gets a handful of hours with our children each week. As a devoted and loving father all he wants to do when he gets home, or has weekends off is play with his boys. Its one of the things I admire most about him- his dedication to spending quality time with Scotland.
I dedicate everyday to my boys. We have full, rich, highly-interactive days, and thus at the end of the night or on weekends when Tom’s home- I’m excited by projects that I can’t do with the boys. This leads to a predicament where we have very little “family” time, and by that I mean quality- play together, work together, create memories together, family time. Yes we eat dinner/breakfast together, but then often we part ways- Tom and Scotland to play Duplos and me to pursue my own projects. Scotland said the other day, “We’ve had a lot of Mommy days, but we haven’t had many Daddy days.” His life is primarily divided into Mom days or Dad days and rarely true Family days. Even when we are on an outing as a family, I’m usually distant, enjoying my own thoughts and plans, instead of constantly engaging my three year old. While I don’t think there is anything integrally wrong here, my own desire to create powerful family memories makes me concerned with my choice to too often, go off on my own. And yet, I’m clearly meeting a need.
So what does this mean? (This is why I need to blog, it helps me find solutions!) I think it means that I need to find time to meet my individual needs, by hiring a babysitter from time to time or putting on a movie for Scotland, when Tom isn’t home. That way when he is home, we can spend it together as a family. Then, instead of checking out and going into my own world when he gets home, I will have met that need previously, and I can instead focus on him and our family.
Funny, I awoke early to write this post. Scotland awoke and came downstairs as I was wrapping it up. My instinct, based one habit, was to leave the post and divert my attention to him. But then he requested to watch a show. My response was “Not now, maybe we can watch a show later.” (He only watches shows once a week on Family Night Movie Night.) And then, I thought about what I’d just written. Would it be so harmful to put on 20 minutes of PBS kids so I could finish my post. I guess not! I don’t believe in babysitting my children with the TV, but I suppose 30 minutes a day wouldn’t kill him. In fact, it might enrich him- especially if it lead to more family togetherness later.