For some reason it feels like January 1 to me. Around the first of the year I am always filled with a sense of optimism. I feel like I can make changes, start fresh, reboot. Mondays often tend to feel like mini-New Year's days for me but today really feels like a fresh start. I think it is because I have seen my husband for more than one hour for the last seven days. Sam's birthday was fun. We had a great trip to Notre Dame for graduation and yesterday we did yard work. None of this sounds extraordinary but it is. It is totally extraordinary because we were a team. We were a team in getting the car packed. We were a team in handling the kids in Chuck E. Cheese. We were a team when the kids got tired and cranky. Jeff is an amazing, involved, active father. He was also completely overwhelmed for most of the last seventeen months which left him for little space to be on team mommy. He still helped out but I tried not to ask to much and he did not instinctively step up the way he normally does. After about the first three months I just sort of got to used to it and it did not feel like to much of a burden but now that it is over I realize that it was really hard. It was just hard feeling like I carried the weight of the family rock.
I am trying not to whine because I certainly know that there are people out there who have it worse than me. There are single parents and there are women who are married to inattentive unavailable men. There are workaholic dads and moms who leave the other spouse to carry the entire family load. I get that, but I am not in that boat. I married a man with an amazing sense of work-life balance who comes home from work and is completely present with me and the kids. I married a man who offers to take the kids and enjoys taking the kids so I can have a break from them. I married a man who will take his children to the auto show or the air show or any other crazy busy public venue...without me. He has no fear of changing diapers or wiping tushes, he brushes hair and teeth without being asked. He reads stories and plays "tickle tickle tickle daddy eats a pickle." But for seventeen months he has not had a lot of time to do those things and if he has the kids so I can take a break, then I am not getting to see him. Most evenings I spent on the couch watching whatever while he studied. I missed just sitting with him and talking with him and being with him. I have him back and I am grateful for that.
This MBA has been good for both of us. Jeff has grown personally and professionally. It has stoked a desire to lead and rekindled his sense of who he really is. It has been good for me in a different way. While I find myself feeling a little jealous of his new found sense of self but I come away with a new found sense of who he is also. I am so thankful for him and who he is and what he does for our family. Maybe in the following months I will have a chance to learn more about myself and who I want to be as our family grows up and evolves. Maybe not, I don't know what will happen but I do know that I am not alone on team mommy anymore. Today that is good enough for me.
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