I was looking for a good photograph of Mr. T for Father's Day, and whoa...looking through old photographs of your children is transfixing. Instead of a picture of her father, y'all are getting a picture of the big kid when she was much, much littler.
So.
My mom is in town from Arizona, and I went up to visit with her at my sister's house for a couple of days last week. Mr. T was not at work those days, so he was planning on doing a bunch of work around the house: dishes, laundry, etc.
When I got home, I could tell that not a whole lot had been done...the dishes were mostly finished, and the counters had been wiped down, but there was laundry all over the place and the big kid's room was still a big mess. At this point I view division of household labor as an ongoing process; we seem to do a bit better every year finding a balance that keeps the house livable and me from strangling him in his sleep with one of the dirty socks he leaves in the middle of the living room floor every evening. I don't often get angry about it (I'm not exactly Martha Stewart myself), but it can be confusing: how, exactly, does he not see what needs doing? And what was he doing while I was gone?
As it turns out, the explanation for this particular episode totally makes up for the amount of catch-up I'm doing today:
He cut our grass with a hand scythe.
Apparently the push mower doesn't work well on a steep incline on the property we live on, so he found a little scythe in the garage (!?) and did it by hand. And you know...okay. I can see how he wanted to be outside in the sun. And I can see how doing something by hand that really, really does not need to be done by hand can be soothing and meditative (hello, knitting). But guess what? Our landlords hire a yard service. Apparently they arrived a very short while after Mr. T had finished trimming the grass in his own particular idiom.
Today I'm dealing with two over-tired, over-stimuliated, incredibly obnoxious children, a mountain range of laundry, piles of papers, cluttered horizontal surfaces, new-to-us pieces of furniture and old-to-us, never-was-the-right-thing pieces of furniture, a handful of long-festering organizational problems, and homeschool math. And despite the fact that my husband, the father of my children, could have put major dents in many of those problems, he very kindly pre-cut the grass for the yard workers. With a scythe.
THAT IS HILARIOUS TO ME. Every time I think of it I start laughing. I'm not being sarcastic at all. Seriously.
The coda is pretty good, too.
While I was dumping out the two baskets of clean laundry he did create over the weekend, I saw a handknit sweater fall out. Rather, I saw the handknit sweater fall out: my very, very favorite deep yellow children's cardigan with the turquoise buttons, made of wool, knit by me, for my children. He had put it through the washer. And the drier.
It is...smaller. What ought to have fit my oldest child through two years, and then my younger child through three, will now be lucky if it remains useful for another six months.
But.
It didn't felt. It just shrank. I may have grandchildren. Who knows.
And now he is not allowed to say a word when I order another skein of Mushishi (Creams, color 15).
Win, lose, win, lose. At the end of the day, laundry or no laundry, grass high or grass low, it ain't no thing. The thing, the only real thing, with husbands, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, friends, dogs, whoever, is to be excellent to each other.
From one deeply flawed mother to all of you deeply, hilariously flawed fathers out there, happy Father's Day.
A hand scythe.