HUSBAND PROOFING

It’s late. We’re watching TV. There’s a beer commercial or another interchangeable ad in which the girl is unattainably hot. The guy is a doofus bordering on…my husband interrupts, “Why does every ad make the guys look like morons?”

“Research,” I reply.

My front door is open. There’s the unmistakable smell of carcinogens. Something’s burning and yet no one’s home. The images in my head are Movie Of The Week worthy. A torch-bearing bandit played by the actor who plays “Bo” on Days of Our Lives, takes my husband and kid. Maybe Valerie Bertenelli plays me, hopefully in her skinny phase so people don’t think I’ve let myself go.

I follow the smell of fire to the kitchen. No fire here, just a pot of water left burning on the stove, next to it 3 uncooked eggs. No bandit here, just one husband, who started something, which had the potential to burn my house down, without finishing it.

We have a lot of these incidents in our house. Ever since the baby came, I feel like I’m following him around, my husband not the baby, making sure everything is safe for him, my baby not my husband, so that I don’t have one more reason to be up all night grinding my teeth down to sandstone. Ovens are rarely turned off and safety gates usually left open. Toilet seat safety locks remain unlocked without fail and our floor is a smorgasbord of hazards like coins, shoes, and dry cleaning bags, all of which are met with a gleam in my son’s eyes as he thinks to himself, “I wonder what that plastic bag tastes like?” You see while my house is baby proofed, I can’t figure out a way to husband proof.

I’m faced with two choices: put on an orange vest and become the family default Safety Patrol or nag. Trust me, every woman gets accused of nagging, every man distracted to forgetfulness. As far as I can tell, no woman wants to spend her time reminding her husband about the minutia of life. Truth be told, for every nagging wife, there’s a husband who forgot to finish what he started. I can’t help but wonder, which came first, the chicken or the eggs left burning on the stove?

Before you think that I think I’m perfect, I don’t. It’s just that my flaws won’t say…kill our kid. And before you think I believe all men are actually morons, I don’t. They’re just very distracted. We all are.

I can’t remember a time when my husband and son were playing together when a Blackberry, a magazine, or a computer weren’t involved. Technology, it seems, makes us feel like everything coming in is important, timely, must be handled immediately. The Blackberry buzzes “Incoming!” and we feel like we’ll miss the boat and be passed up by some other colleague or friend who’s armed with their technology all the time. Time spent with our kids feels like wasted time, we’re not “getting things done.” But isn’t the whole point of technology to free us up so we aren’t locked in an office, unable to spend time with our own families? We’re distracting our lives away to the point of missing out.

Drive down the street you’ll see a Mom driving a Suburban full of kids yet she’ll be texting while driving like she’s 16 year-old trying to find directions to the kegger. Go to a park on any afternoon and most parents, Moms and Dads, will have half their attention on their kids, the other half on the cell phone call they’ve been on for the past hour. Look around a busy restaurant, you won’t find a table where at least one patron doesn’t have their head down, hands under the table, answering emails or texts that need “immediate attention.”

All parents will face a day when we’ll go to kiss our kids and they’ll push our face away, roll their eyes, and squirm out of our reach. They’ll dread spending time us for fear that they’ll miss an email, or won’t be able to get anything done while wasting time with Mom and Dad. We’ll long to have the moments back of uninterrupted kid time, which we squandered adding friends to our Facebook page or checking our stock portfolio on our iPhone.

TV Dads are portrayed as morons, but in truth we’re all morons if we miss out on our own lives. It’s a lot of pressure having a family, whether you’re the primary earner or the primary caretaker, but it takes discipline to turn off that pressure and show up for your own life. It takes discipline to unplug, unclog, and turn off whatever beckons, “Incoming!” and be with your family, friends, and loved ones long enough to cook breakfast without burning the house down or drive down the street without turning your car into a death bomb because you just “had to answer that text.” And while it seems like “getting things done” is moving our families further forward, sometimes the real forward movement is standing still, spending uninterrupted, distraction free time with the people we love. There’s a lot of discipline in doing nothing.

We’re watching TV. It’s a beer commercial or another interchangeable ad in which the girl is unattainably hot. The guy is a doofus bordering on…my husband interrupts, “Why does every ad make the guys look like morons?”

I think for a moment, grab the remote, “I don’t know,” I tell him as I turn off the TV, roll over, and snuggle into my spot. We’re foot-to- foot, cheek-to-cheek, doing nothing. Minutes feel like hours when you’re doing nothing. We’ve got time on our hands, just to be together. That's forward motion.