Walking In My Husband’s Worn Out Work Boots.

“Every day I come home to a frazzled wife, a messy house and whiney children.”

I’m not mad at my husband for saying that. It was out of frustration, in the midst of a healthy morning argument. Ok maybe I was a little at first…or maybe a lot. Maybe, initially I took it as a personal attack on how I run this house and wanted to fly across the room, matrix style, and connect my foot with his jewels. But after grabbing the keys, spinning the tires out of the driveway, going for a ride by myself and stewing over it for at least 24 hours…I got it. I would be lying if I said I didn’t already know he felt this way. Some days, it’s written all over his face when he walks in the house.

I could get my panties in a bunch about this and start ranting about all the unknowns I do in a day that prevent me from keeping my house clean and how dare he blah, blah, blah. The truth is, I know my husband has the same love/hate relationship with me being a SAHM as I do. He’s just graciously refrained from saying it…until now.

Here’s another truth I stumbled upon this morning: A man so candidly stating he hates living in a dirty house, dealing with whiney children and a psychotic (insert nervous laugh) wife will no doubt have a mob of angry, duck faced women, shaking their heads and wagging their fingers (yep…right there with them!). He would be a total asshat that my girlfriends and I would crucify over coffee while our whiney, ungrateful kids create more of a mess around us. It occurred to me that I complain about those things on the daily to my girlfriends and if I didn’t have that option, I would implode in to a hot mess worthy of electric shock therapy.

Believe me, it feels weird to be defending men so vigorously, but this time it’s personal and I’m connected to it by my heart strings.

This is not a post for making excuses for the chauvinistic, only a father and husband on paper kind of man. I know that man. I know women that are unfortunately married to that man. That man doesn’t deserve the effort his wife, unbeknownst to him, devotes to him.

This is a post about putting my self in a hard working man’s worn out boots. Steel toed boots that carry a man who always puts his family first and says thank you after finishing a supper I cooked, whether he loved it or not. A man that vacuums the stairs and washes the windows because he knows it’s hard enough for me to stay on top of the “normal” chores. A man that brushes his daughter’s hair before bed and snuggles with his son when he is sick. A man that rolls over and reaches for me in his sleep. My man.

There are countless blogs full of stories about the struggles of, and the thankless job that is being a SAHM. And I will probably write another one next week, but today I want to just say thank you. Thank you to the Men that raise their children, that are true partners for their better halves. To the ones that bite their tongues when they come home and can’t quite understand how the house looks like a bomb went off, but choose to acknowledge his family instead of the mess.