Over the years, several folks who have come to know Mr. Mom and me have marveled at how different we seem and they often ask what brought us together . . . and how we keep from killing each other. (By the way, Oliver and Jenny’s definition of love might mean never having to say you’re sorry, but the Magpie’s definition asserts that love is healthiest when both people can freely say You’re pissing me off and I want you to stop it right now!) 

So in celebration of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d share a bit about our vast affection for each other.  Suffice to say, ours is not a traditional romance.  To use an example with which many of my readers are familiar, I’m no Pioneer Woman.  She has written lovingly (in 28 chapters!) of her passion for Marlboro Man.  Me? The other day my blog featured a poster of Mr. Mom wherein I called him a Lying Liar.  What I can say?   We both have an irreverent sense of humor and, in our house, foreplay equals making each other laugh.

We met on a blind date on Christmas Day during my senior year of college.  My cousin arranged it and I was an uncooperative participant because I figured anybody who would respond affirmatively to a last-minute blind date on Christmas Day was an utter loser.  (Present company excluded, of course.)  It was a disastrous evening for more reasons than I can enumerate here, and any hope Mr. Mom had of starting a romance was quickly thwarted by my immediate pronouncement:  Nice to meet you. I’m getting the hell out of Oklahoma as soon as I graduate!

So instead of dating, which was doomed for geographic failure, we became fast friends.  And that first spark of mutual interest transcended romance and became the foundation for a relationship that soon thereafter weathered a two-year, 2000-mile separation; sundry other romances and dalliances by both parties; and the initial awkwardness of kissing your best friend.    (Yes, it’s kind of a How Harry Met Sally story, but we did it long before Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay.)

More than 20 years later, we’re still fast friends, we’re still cracking each other up, and we’re figuring everything else out as we go along.  There’s been plenty of ups and downs, but thankfully no major fissures.  And I don’t know -- I think things are pretty darn good.  (I hope Mr. Mom doesn’t contradict me again in the comments section -- on this of all posts!)  One of the most difficult-to-navigate stretches of our relationship has been in the last five years as he transitioned from a small business owner to Mr. Mom, and I transitioned from a woman who dreamed of leaving the rat race to the Chief Rat.

A few years ago, I wrote an essay about our transition, and it appears in the book you see featured on  my blog’s left sidebar.  I reprint it here today -- both as a reminder of the fact that love is a wonderful, crazy thing, and as a testament to this thrilling improvisation we call a marriage.

Cat on a High Dive

In my dream, my son is far ahead of me, just around the corner, I think.  I can’t see him, but I hope he is there.  I move faster, my eyes scanning the horizon, ravenous for any glimpse of his small silhouette as proof he is not lost.  He’s been gone for hours, but I control my panic and tell myself if I just keep moving, just keep looking, I will find him.  When my fear can no longer be suppressed and I am on the verge of hysteria, I awake abruptly.  Sometimes I am nauseous, always near tears.  Often I get up and walk down the dark hall to stand over his sleeping form and calm myself.  The moonlight barely illuminates the pile of toys beside his bed, much less my psyche, and I am left to wonder “What am I so afraid of?”

The carefully composed drawing I find in the study – small in size but enormous in import – answers for me.  I am not in the picture. There is a pickup truck on a winding country road, complete with birds and trees.  My husband is driving and my son is riding in the back.  I know the identities of the stick figures included in this illustration of my son’s life because, lest there be any question, he has labeled them “Dad” and “Me.”

One night I ask my husband if he has noticed my son’s drawing.  He says ”No,” so I describe it.  He then explains that on a recent weekday afternoon he took our son on a slow drive down some back roads near our home.  A boy of vast persistence, my son was obsessed with the forbidden delight of riding in the back of our pickup.  My husband relented, and the resulting ride was so thrilling as to merit documentation.

I want to be relieved that my son’s picture represents an actual rather than an imagined experience, as if that somehow gives less emotional consequence to my absence.  Then I am reminded that I am absent because I am . .  well . . . absent so much of the time.  I am not in the picture because I am unavailable for such spontaneous jaunts in my children’s lives.

I am a working mother, with all the same fears and guilt triggers of every other working mother I know.  The difference for me is that my husband is no longer a working father.  He left his job to care for our son, Parker, and our daughter, Kate.  The modern, two-working-parent family has a litany of flaws according to popular literature, but the arrangement offers a soothing emotional salve we rarely contemplate.  Namely,  when both parents work full-time, both are more or less equally connected to their children’s lives.  Now that my husband is staying home, he has ascended to the throne of preferred parent and I have been relegated to the second string – a brutal blow to the maternal ego.

My demoted status was hammered home recently when my daughter came down with a sore throat while my husband was away for a few hours playing tennis. While I was scrounging in the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen, my daughter’s faithful assistant ambushed me with the question at the top of both their minds:  “When is Dad coming home?”  Parker blurted out, “Because Kate is shivering!”  The clipped words I think came out of my mouth were something like “I’m fully aware of that and I’m quite capable of handling a fever!”  For the record, I usually try to avoid exposing my insecurities so fully to my children; not because I’m a mindful role model, but rather because they are masters at exploiting them.  The stark reality I’m facing is that the parent who is home most, rules.  It’s a comfortable, instinctive role for a mother to fill, but I can’t fight the math.  I can compile chore lists, establish laundry guidelines, and suggest nightly menus but, frankly, I can’t enforce a damn thing.  I’m Barney Fife – a deputy with no bullets in a town where the sheriff is both beloved and wise.

For the first 12 years of our marriage, my husband and I both worked; he to build his business and I to pay our bills.  My mother provided our childcare.  As households with two working parents go, ours seemed comparatively calm and functional.  Because my mother shouldered a great deal of the domestic burden, my husband and I were reasonably free of the typical worries of working parents.  When Mom’s age and health forced her retirement, my husband and I were abruptly awakened to the reality most our friends had already confronted: this daycare-thing sucks!  We stitched together a patchwork solution and spent a year fretting over its deficiencies.  As we faced our first summer – the Grand Canyon of daycare scheduling – my husband made a radical suggestion:  he could sell his business and raise our kids rather than turning them over to a surrogate.

On the surface, it was perfectly logical.  I made more money than my husband, and my employer provided our health insurance and retirement benefits.  My husband, on the other hand, had 100% equity in a business with a willing buyer.  The new arrangement would require more budgetary discipline since the sale wouldn’t make us instant millionaires, but the idea wasn’t financially impossible. Surface assessments aside, however, his suggestion was buried in field of emotional land mines I had no idea how to traverse.

I’m a child of the ‘70s, which is to say I’m screwed.  In 5th grade I watched Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs and felt strangely empowered.  My favorite television show was the Brady Bunch.  I wouldn’t realize until many years later just how conflicted these two influences made me feel.  On the one hand, I identified with Helen Reddy and her feminist roar, yet I still wanted Mike Brady to complete my picture (and to foot the bill for what I expected to be a solidly middle-class life.)  My career advancement always had more to do with financial imperative than personal desire.  I was fresh out of college when I discovered the first law of career physics: once you get on the treadmill, acceleration is tolerated in direct proportion to compensation.  As long as my daughter was dressed in Laura Ashley and my son enjoyed the latest Play Station game, I didn’t seem to mind the running so much.  With every new promotion, I bought more Martha Stewart books and dreamed of making marzipan fruit at Christmas.  Then a friend gave me a box of tiny sugared oranges with a note that read “Real women buy marzipan.”  It was a disingenuous way of saying “You can have it all.”  Every working mother I know understands that’s a load of crap, but the illusion was secure because there was no alternative on my horizon.

For my husband to suggest that we could and should change our personal paradigm was monumentally unsettling.  I had imagined this crossroads all right, but in my version of the dream I was the person “retiring” from the rat race.  After all, everyone knew I was the expert cook, chief organizer, and self-appointed arbiter of domestic style.  I am the mother, for God’s sake.

So it was the mother in me that wanted to look him in the eye and ask, “Are you out of your mind?” Did he really think he could master the science of craft making, the intricacies of ironing, the nuances of crock-pot cookery, the Zen of bed making?  What could he possibly bring to the task?

What I’m realizing is that the task isn’t defined by the home, but by the heart.  Working mothers – at least this working mother – want desperately to check all the boxes on the endless to-do list that is our lives.  If we can keep everything tidy, everyone fed, all events on schedule, then maybe our children won’t hate us or blame us for our choices.  But my husband carries no such burden of false assurances, nor is he shackled by the societal expectations attendant to housewifery. For him, parenting comes first and parenting is about cultivating a relationship, not keeping a home. He is neither bothered nor distracted by the breadcrumbs, junk mail, and dirty socks that litter our lives.  He is in the picture, delivering homemade cupcakes to classroom parties, attending school assemblies and field trips, coaching soccer, tennis, and basketball, and patiently explaining the mysteries of nightly homework.

While I’m mourning the end of motherhood as I knew it, my husband is staring down his own demons. Since he’s no longer employed, he’s lost most of his social currency.  We live in a state where the citizens have voted to ban gay marriage.  Suffice to say, a lot of folks that populate our lives aren’t comfortable with domestic arrangements that fall outside the norm.  That in our lifetime we’ve known many straight, gay and lesbian couples, but none like us, adds to our unease.  Notice I say “like us” because a marriage like mine doesn’t yet have a social label that I’m aware of.  Individual role reversals – such as female firefighters and male nurses – are well documented in today’s popular culture.  But marriages that involve role reversals are still largely unexamined.  Our marriage is an oddity to strangers and a curious amusement to acquaintances.  Because we so strongly defy easy definition, only those closest to us ask questions beyond the most superficial.  And at least one family member (thanks, Dad) has suggested our arrangement is unnatural.

While in a recent conversation, a stranger asked my husband “What do you do?”  “Not much of anything,” my husband replied with a smile and a chuckle that led the stranger to believe he was joking.  “No, really,” came the reply, to which my husband mimicked “Really.”  The conversation ended abruptly then, and when my husband re-told it to me later, he seemed disconcerted by the stranger’s uneasy reaction and immediate disinterest.

I suggested to him that to make people comfortable, he needed to give them a label they could understand.  “Just say you’re a stay-at-home Dad. (Read: pussy.)  Or say you’re retired.  (Read: independently wealthy.)  But when you say ‘nothing,’ people can’t put you in a box and that makes them nervous.   For all they know, you’re a freak.  Or a sociopath.”

What I realized then is that my husband is like a cat on the high dive.  Everyone looks up, but no one expects to see him there.  The first reaction is disbelief – What’s he doing up there? – followed by morbid curiosity – What do we do?  Should we help him?  What if he falls?  Good Lord, won’t that be something when he hits the water!

I used to think that everything I knew about marriage could be written on a grain of rice.  My family has marched in a parade of spectacularly unsuccessful unions and I grew up in a sea of marital flotsam.  As a young girl, I figured marriage was like a nasty virus and we weren’t a particularly hardy group.  I waited far longer than most my peers to give it a try, and even then, on the cusp of my 30th birthday, a nagging inner voice reminded me that it’s a bit of a crapshoot.  More than a decade later, I realize that the best unions are a grand improvisation.  If you’re willing to forego the security of a script, you just might find the marital equivalent of a $100 bill tucked in an old coat pocket. I sure as hell didn’t set out to be my family’s breadwinner.  My husband surely didn’t set out to be our family’s caretaker.  But here we find ourselves, filling roles we didn’t imagine, on a journey we didn’t plot, in a life we wouldn’t trade.