Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 50

Exercising My Civic Duty With Kids In Tow

Photo by ElDave, via Flickr

Election day, I have a house full of kids: the toddler who’s always at home, the kindergartener who is waiting to reach the 24-hour mark on his antibiotic regimen so he can return to school, and First Grader who doesn’t have school. November is looking even less friendly to a NaNoWriMo run than I had expected. I spend the morning trying to write while negotiating battles over Lego blocks and the iPad.

At noon, I load the troops and rush Kindergartener off to school. I have two presentations to make this afternoon–a Down Syndrome presentation to the third year medical students and a musical presentation to a group of developmentally disabled adults. I don’t remember about voting until I’m reloading Toddler and First Grader after dropping off Kindergartener. We have twenty-five minutes until my first presentation–just enough time to detour to the polls.

It is way busier at 12:50 p.m. than it is at 6:02 a.m. As I get my ballot, Kindergartener and Toddler decide to explore the church hallway. The poll worker lures them back with stickers, only Julianna is playing shy. “Come on!” I say, heading over to a cardboard “booth” as far from everyone else as I can manage.

It’s a long ballot, and the pen is low on ink, so it takes extra time to blacken the ovals. I keep turning around to my children, who are still hanging out by the election judges, and hissing, “Julianna! Michael! Get over here!”

“I need sticker!” protests Julianna in an injured tone, but they both come. Slowly.

Toddler sees what I have in my hand. He grabs the pen, nearly causing me to draw a long line across my ballot, and says, “I, need, pen! I! Need! Pen!”

I shake his hand off. “No, as a matter of fact, you don’t. I need the pen.”

They turn to the brochures on the adjacent table and start plotting ways to make messes. Fortunately, I’m finished, so I get up and call them to follow me.

I can’t remember where I’m supposed to return the pen, so I turn to the check-in judges, who look panicked–I guess you’re not supposed to talk to them after you get your ballot?–and point me to the far end of the church atrium, where another judge is guarding the ballot box. I hand her the pen. “I’ll take your ballot cover,” she says.

This is new. I’ve always taken the ballot cover off at the collection machine. I’ve never been asked to walk the ten feet to the machine without a cover on my ballot.

But what the hey, I don’t care if anybody sees my ballot. I hand her the sleeve and walk over to the machine.

Only the end of my ballot is a teeny bit bent, and the machine won’t take it. I’m starting to feel the time crunch. I fight the machine for a minute, and then I realize I don’t see any instructions for which direction, or even which side, has to go in first. So I flip it end over end and it goes in.

I turn to look for my children and meet instead the eyes of Ballot Box Judge. “Sticker!” she says, and I swear she’s scowling at me. I turn back to the box and see the stickers hanging off the side. I grab one for myself and turn around again.

Julianna is standing on the far side of the ballot box judge, the wrong way from the door. “Julianna! Do you want a sticker? Here!”

Election judge scowls bigger. “Ma’am! I need you to leave!”

What is she all bent out of shape about? She says something else and I register the line of three people standing waiting to insert their ballots. Then I see the box of blue tape on the floor, the one I’m standing inside, and I realize no one can come in until I leave it. Only my daughter is on the wrong side of the blue tape box from the door. I cannot get to my daughter without walking away from the exit. “Julianna! Come! Here!”

Julianna whimpers, crosses her arms in front of her body, and in her habitual Down-Syndrome-slow way, waits two seconds to take her first step.

“Ma’am!” Election Judge is really getting p.o.’d now.

Okay, enough already. “I have two children!” I say, in a light-but-pointed tone of voice. “I am working on it!“

At that moment, Julianna passes in front of Election Judge, who apparently realizes I’m not just being a diva. Or maybe pushing back was what made the difference. “You’re fine, you’re fine!” she says, with exaggerated friendliness, and Julianna crosses the blue line. I grab her hand and Michael’s and haul them both out of the Sacred Blue Box and over to the doors without looking back. I don’t really want to know who is or isn’t p.o.’d at me, and I don’t have time anyway.

Mental note: next time, revert to 6:05 a.m. voting time.

Enough

Every afternoon around 1:15 I put Michael down for bed. He’s really too big to be carried now–it’s hard to imagine, but he will soon be three years old, and getting him to do as I wish is no longer a matter of I’m-bigger-than-you force, but genuine leadership. I’ve learned that making nap time into a game will get him up the stairs, and the ritual of tucking in involves lots of giggles and nice kisses and big hugs and nice hugs, and raspberries, of course, can’t forget those–on the neck, on the tummy, on the palm of his hand. At the end, though, he reaches a point and he says, “Enough!” E-nuff. It’s amazing, for a child with significant speech delays, to have such a perfect grasp of that concept. Enough.

Because I don’t really have it figured out.

When I stop to take stock of my life, I see how amazing is:  having once believed that I had nothing to offer and no chance of finding a life partner, I have an amazing husband. Having once thought I could not bear children, I have a house full of them. And they’re all beautiful and well behaved and well adjusted. Having once been without a car, I now have three, I’m embarrassed to say, although the truck is only still around to haul things around town.

And yet I always feel dissatisfied. If only I had a quiet dishwasher, with a door that wasn’t broken. If only I had just a bit more style, like that friend or that acquaintance. A few more accessories. One of those hanging-pot things for the kitchen. Money to hire a cleaning service.

I also don’t seem to know how to say enough in my commitments. This fall I simply circled the wagons and decided I wasn’t going to volunteer for classroom parties, fundraisers or anything else, because I’m just stretched too thin. But even the obligations that remain are more than I really have time for–yet I don’t feel I can step back, because I haven’t been able to find anyone to replace me.

It is most obvious, though, in my professional life. I’ve published religious books. Won an award for a column I never even in my wildest dreams would have considered asking for; it was simply offered to me. I have published short stories, music for the Church, and instrumental music, some of which still blows me away when I play it; I can hardly believe I actually wrote it.

But it’s never enough. I always want more. More, more, more. And I think, in defiance of my own reason and experience, that if only I could reach that next plateau I would be satisfied. If only I had a better wardrobe. Enough jewelry. More time to get things done. More volunteers. More, more, more. When will it ever be enough? Never.

This, to me, is one of the most profound proofs of the existence of God. Because we always feel incomplete. Built into the human psyche is a longing for something greater, something beyond what our eyes can see and our skin can feel. We try to fill it with a million things tangible and intangible in the world, but it’s never, ever enough.

St. Augustine’s prayer is so true: our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in You.

Medical Drama and Other QTs

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This was two weeks ago and she was already sick, it was just low grade.

It has been a week of medical drama. Julianna has had a cold for two weeks, which didn’t really process until her cough got worse Monday night. I don’t worry about her health very often anymore, but for some reason this time I worried. I took her to the doctor to make sure she didn’t have pneumonia, and it turned out she did. X rays, pulsox, the whole works. Her oxygen saturation was 92-93%, which has always sounded fine to me, but between Julianna and Michael I’ve been around enough pulsox monitors to know you’re supposed to be 95%. The doctor said she was borderline for going to the hospital. Five years ago the doctors told us that pneumonia can hang around being not too bad for a while and then get dangerous in just a few hours. I think we caught her right before the downward plunge, and I’m just grateful that Julianna’s health issues only warrant one Quick Take now, instead of two weeks of hospital posts.

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I have my own medical drama this week, unfortunately. I’ve had pain in my feet for several weeks, but I could barely walk on Monday evening, so I also went to the doctor on Tuesday. I came out with a diagnosis of planter fasciitis. Which means I am not exercising for two to three weeks at least, and I’m wearing my Danskos and wrapping duct tape around my socks to compress the arch of my foot. I have never before realized the ordinary blessing of being able to stand up and make dinner or do dishes without pain. And I really don’t like not exercising. It’s hard to hold a calorie count without exercise. Boo. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying the extra time to write, clean house, and run errands. I’ll focus on that, and pray that this resolves instead of becoming chronic.

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Image by the girl who owns the world, via Flickr

Parts of the writing process are deeply energizing. Others are deeply intimidating. I have been outlining a new novel this week. And procrastinating it. But accountability wins again: I am planning a NaNoWriMo run beginning tomorrow, and to succeed I have to have a very clear idea where I am going. I used to think I could be a pantser, but I should have known better. I am German. Hear me roar. It sounds like this: OUTLINE OUTLINE OUTLINE OUTLINE OUTLINE!

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Thursdays mornings my aunt has been watching Michael for me. Last week I went shopping, but most weeks I just write. Usually I go to church and park myself at the piano. We have a 6.5-foot Yamaha grand there, and as Jeanne Cotter once said about another instrument, “There’s music in that piano.” It’s different from being at home on the studio upright. I serenade the church cleaners with sixty repetitions at breakneck turtle pace (the only way I can play a real piano part), stopping every few notes to scribble, erase, and rewrite on staff paper.

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Speaking of writing music, I want to put an observation out there, and then I’ll have done. Many times in writing music–perhaps even most–the magic comes from a wrong note. I put my fingers down intending to play one thing and I hit something completely different, and I go, “Wait a minute! That works! And it’s not the same old same old!” I don’t know how people do it when they actually are good enough at piano to play the right notes.

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I downloaded music and burned a new CD of pop music last week. I know, I’m really in the stone ages, but I’m doing just fine without a smart phone or ipod; I neither need nor want to have music in a universally portable format. Silence = mind rest. Anyway, I’ve been collecting the list ever since last year’s bulk purchase. It’s a process. The music at Jazzercise plays so loudly that you actually can’t hear the words, so when I like a song the first thing I have to do is go home and Google it to make sure it’s something I can play in the car with my kids along. That weeds out about a third of it right there. But there are some gems in there nonetheless.

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One of those iconic pictures of a child that captures their personality and thus will get used ad nauseam…

How about a kid funny to end the post? Nicholas has taken to saying random letter combinations and asking what they spell. “What does C-N-F-T-B spell?” he asked Alex the other night.

“Nothing.”

“What does it spell in Spanish?”

“I don’t know Spanish!” said Alex, aggravated. “I only know a couple words!”

Silence.

“Mommy? What does it spell in Spanish?”

“I only know a few Spanish words, too, Nicholas, but that doesn’t spell anything at all.”

Another pause. Then he said tentatively, “French?”

Happy Halloween, All Saints and All Souls!

Julianna’s First Crush

Bonus post for today, as it’s not a day I usually blog. But it’s the penultimate day of Down Syndrome Awareness month, and I have a story to tell.

Because my daughter is having her first movie star crush.

Mine was Luke Skywalker. Julianna’s? Julianna’s is a boy fairy.

She’s been sick this week, and so I tried to keep her asleep as long as possible this morning. When I went in and gathered her up for a morning snuggle, she whimpered and buried her face in my chest. “Mommy, I–miss–Terence!”

“Oh?” I said, smiling. “Would you like it if I came in and woke you up saying ‘Nickety knock’?”

“Yes!” she said.

Forty minutes later, as I force-fed her 10mL of amoxicillin and 2.5 mL of azithromycin, one painful mL at a time, she whimpered, “I need Terence! I want to give Terence a hug!”

Ah. First love.

Soul Searching My Way To A Better Relationship With My Strong-Willed Child

It was inevitable, I suppose, that my struggles with my strong-willed child were eventually going to reach the point where I had to do something. And since I’ve been a parent long enough to know that I have to take the lead on pretty much everything, I also knew the change was going to have to start with me.

Last spring I sat down with a friend and family member who has walked this path before me. She shared some of her stories and boiled down parenting a strong-willed child this way:

Pick your battles.
Battles chosen MUST be won.
Do. Not. Get. Angry.
They are far more sensitive than they appear based on their let-me-tap-dance-on-the-line-in-the-sand habits.
They will not always choose rightly or wisely, but they must always experience the consequences.

She gave me a book called Aaron’s Way: the journey of a strong-willed child. But the truth is, some of her stories intimidated me so thoroughly, I stuck the book on the shelf to await a time when I felt I had the emotional stamina to address it.

I uncovered it a couple of weeks ago, and I knew it was time.

Life with Nicholas had been pretty rough. He was doing things like hitting the kid who rides in our carpool. Kicking his brother’s seat–repeatedly, for the entire trip home, as the escalating reactions from his brother and his mother demonstrated his power and control.

Those after school hours are the worst. He crashes, as if he’s spent the whole day being good–and he’s very good at school–and now he has to let the demon ride. And it’s a hell of a demon, let me tell you.

I didn’t even like him. How do you think kind of admission makes a mother feel?

I read Kendra Smiley’s book and realized, first, that my child is not nearly as strong-willed as hers. And secondly, that although I can see that a well-formed strong-willed child will become a adult who can safely navigate a world full of pitfalls, I cannot consider myself “blessed with a strong willed child.” I just can’t.

I was kind of hoping for a step-by-step plan, and I was disappointed to find that was not the purpose of the book. In the end, it boiled down to those same lessons imparted by my friend and family member last spring:

Pick your battles.
Battles chosen MUST be won.
Do. Not. Get. Angry.
They are far more sensitive than they appear.
They will not always choose wisely, but they must always experience the consequences.

What the book did, however, was tell stories from different families that illustrated the success and failure of adhering to or failing to adhere to these principles.

A few weeks ago, I told the boys to clean the bathrooms before the family literacy night at school. Nicholas really wanted to go. But he was not going to do that cleaning. Organic consequence: if you don’t do your work, you will not go to the literacy night.

The situation escalated predictably, and two hours later, with dinner on the table, he still hadn’t lifted a finger. In fact, he had spent the entire two hours lying on the living room floor repeating that he wasn’t going to clean a bathroom.

Two. Hours. He gave up two hours of his life to avoid a job that would take twenty minutes. If that doesn’t illustrate the mindset of a strong willed child, nothing will.

I was simmering, folks. But I was trying really hard not to boil over.

I told him it was dinner time, so he’d stay home and clean with Daddy instead of going to the literacy night.

When he realized I was serious, that child flew up the stairs and cleaned the bathroom. Did a pretty decent job of it, too. He chose to forgo dinner instead of the literacy night.

Well, he did the cleaning, so we let him go.

A few nights later I read a story in Smiley’s book that paralleled this one almost exactly. “Mistakenly, I thought I won the battle,” the mother wrote. “And then I realized that my three-year-old won, because she did exactly what she wanted to do when she wanted to do it and not when I asked her to do it. I actually lost the battle.”

How illuminating.

I feel guilty if I require Nicholas to experience the pain of the natural consequences of his choices.

No wonder he’s so good at pushing my buttons.

In the past two weeks, I shut down all my buttons. The angry buttons, and the guilty buttons. And you know what? He realized on the spot that something had changed, and his behavior shifted on the spot, too. He’s not compliant by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s also not straining at the line in the sand as long or as hard as he was.

I’m not delusional enough to think my struggles with my strong-willed child are over. But I don’t feel helpless anymore. I don’t feel like a leaky rowboat trying to ride out a hurricane. And I’ve actually been able to enjoy most of the time I’ve spent with him…which is a good thing for both of us.

There is hope. Thank God.

News Flash: It’s All Junk

How I feel living in a house with 4 kids who get party bags and swag wherever they go. Thank God for Flickr and the Storm Trooper guys. They never fail to have a good image for me. Photo by Jim Bauer, via Flickr.

I think I’m going to have to swear off parades.

For one thing, people are so rude. We get there 40 minutes before parade start time, which is over an hour before the parade reaches us, in order to make sure we have the kids in the front. Five minutes before the parade shows up, other, bigger kids come in and weave through the crowd and plop down in the front. They stand up, pushing the rope forward and crowding the parade to make sure they can see everything, which means my kids cannot, and get as much candy as possible, which means my kids get almost none, because they’re, yanno, polite. What a concept. And when my husband says something to the offenders–very politely, I might add–they go running to their parents, who light into my husband for being so presumptuous as to think that their children should have any consideration for anyone other than themselves.

And then there’s the sheer volume of trash left on the streets afterward. What is the matter with people? I made my kids go up and down the street picking up candy wrappers after the parade, in the hopes that people would see kids cleaning up their mess and feel shamed into better behavior in the future. A slim hope, but worth a try.

Plus, the parades are just not that interesting anymore. Why bother putting time and energy into a float that’s interesting to look at when you can stick a sign on the side of a truck and play really, really loud music? And surely everyone is breathless from waiting to be handed yet another plastic cup with your business name on the side. Better yet, a three-inch foam football! Hurrah! I just love having more useless junk around my house, destined to strain the earth’s resources both in its unnecessary production and at the inevitable “File 13″ end. Because God forbid you at least make your useless junk recyclable!

Oh, look! I’m so glad this business decided to stick an air cannon in the back of their undecorated truck and shoot T shirts instead. Because no one in America has enough t shirts in their drawers, and we are all dying to be walking advertisements for car dealerships and beer distributors.

Not.

While we’re on the t shirt topic, what is it with the compulsion to hand out a t shirt for every event on the planet? T shirts for charity runs. T shirts for school read-a-thons and summer camps and Bible school. T shirts for summer school. T shirts for every home game. T shirts for freebies at the ballpark.

Who wears these things? Surely I’m not the only person whose house is overflowing with t shirts that never, ever get worn because the kids have their favorite “Creepers gonna creep” t shirt that they wear every single day. But that must be the case even for the people who fly straight to the T shirt makers and order t shirts for the next occasion. Why?

And then there are those stupid party bags that people hand out at birthday parties and school Halloween parties. The bags filled with absolute, complete junk like “pinball” machines and “mazes” that no human being can manipulate successfully, let alone a child. Plus, they break in about one second anyway. Key chains meant to last for one day before they snap. Plastic clappers. Paddleball toys that break with one good tug on the bouncy ball.

Why?

Why, why, why?

Are we really this addicted to Stuff, that we feel this compulsion to have gimme gimmes at every possible opportunity? Why do we buy into this, people? It’s time to stand up and do something about it. Say no to the t shirts, no to the junk bags, no to the useless swag. It’s time we do our celebrating with an eye to the parts of the world where the money spent on this crap (pardon my French), which is destined only for the landfill, could feed people for a week. Maybe then our celebrations could actually do some good in the world, instead of feeding our own vices.

Notes From the My-Kids-Are-Geniuses Files and Other Quick Takes

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Last night, I came home from swim lessons to find Christian doing dishes and watching Casino Royale. “You know,” he said, “I think Nicholas is James Bond.”

??? I said.

“Yeah–he gets the job done, he charms all the ladies, but when he gets back ‘home’ he’s a maverick who won’t cooperate with the rules. And the head lady loves him even though he drives her crazy.”

Touché.

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Genius Files #1: Yesterday afternoon, Nicholas started playing around with a ball of yarn he found. He was tying it to the spindles of the stairs, and he asked Alex to help him tie it to the pantry door handle ten feet away. Three minutes later he was wailing because Alex wouldn’t let him “help.” Sigh.

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“Michael,” Christian warned, “stop jumping on the couch. You’re going to hurt yourself!” Cue child launching himself into space and the sound of hard head meeting hard glider rocker. Followed by the sound of a wail. Geniuses, I’m telling you.

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RAnn, the book blogger who hosts Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival, is doing a giveaway of The “Lily” books. I’ve read most of these books because they center around a person with Down syndrome. The first one made me laugh so hard I cried. And then I cried just because I was crying. That first one in particular is just about as vivid a picture of raising a child with DS as you can possibly get. Head on over to check out RAnn’s post!

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I’m soul searching this week, and it makes me moody and unhappy with myself. The thing about soul searching is it won’t contain itself to one area of life. It has to reach fingers out into all areas. No part of the soul is safe. It’s good for you, but it’s no fun at all.

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In ten days I find out the “verdict” on Michael and early childhood Sped. They sent me an enrollment packet this week, so that seems like a good sign.

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I’m so moody and blank, I think I’m quitting.

Detours

I hit a detour this week. I had a vision for how I wanted things to go in a certain area of my life. I knew there were a lot of variables, and I was prepared for some bumps, traffic jams and the like. I was not prepared for a full-on detour.

But after I moped around for about a day I took hold of myself and started to look for some perspective. The truth is, life is detours. Not “full of” detours. Is detours. Every truism on the topic–You plan, God laughs; Life is what happens while you’re making other plans–became a cliché for a reason. You can fight it, you can rage at the inevitable, or you can roll with the punches and see what direction you’re pointed in now. Sometimes you’re headed to the same place, just by a more circuitous route. Sometimes you’re running parallel to the route you set out on. And a lot of times, it turns out you’re exactly where you were supposed to be all along, you just didn’t know it.

In the meantime, I’m also having to admit how myopically focused I have been lately on the things that are not the most important. It is very difficult for me to quiet my mind and live in the moment. That’s what I need to do with my detour right now. Find my way back into the moment.

These moments.

Accountability

Photo by poppalina, via Flickr

Two weeks ago, our bathroom scales broke.

I don’t know if you have ever had the opportunity to learn how scales work. Digital scales contain four sensors, one in each “foot,” and as long as the cap on the feet remains undisturbed, the scales works.

Whoever came up with this design, however, was not factoring in four rapscallions who like to chase each other in circles around the upstairs, wrestle, and fight over bathroom rights. Floor-bound objects are always in danger. And that’s not even including the times the kids decide to use them for Frisbee practice.

As you might have intuited, given the explanation above, our scales has been on the fritz for a while now. But I could always get it working again, until Saturday it didn’t bother to turn on at all.

And just to add to the fun, my Polar heart monitor stopped working on the same day.

Now, I’m one of those people who does what you’re told not to do: I weigh every day. This is considered a no-no because, since weight varies, it’s too easy to flip out inappropriately.

That hasn’t been my experience, however. Weight variation is not random. It’s connected to cyclic hormones and–gasp–how many net calories I consume from day to day. What a concept, right?

So for me, meticulous calorie counting + meticulous weight tracking = sustained weight loss.

In other words, accountability works.

It occurs to me that deadlines do the same thing for my writing. Amorphous goals (write a novel! Submit more short stories! Send more magazine queries!) are great for visioning, but sooner or later they have to mesh with the reality in which I have to take kids to speech therapy, swim lessons, piano lessons, and scouts all on the same day.

Amorphous goals make it easy to procrastinate whatever I don’t want to work on. I can drag my feet, roll my eyes, complain, tell myself how injured I am because source-won’t-get-back to me or I’m not getting the material I wanted. But then Deadline comes within visual range, and it’s amazing. All that goes away. That project I didn’t feel like working on suddenly becomes the most interesting thing on my agenda. Creative solutions appear.

Accountability is not a sexy concept. We aren’t fond of limits in this day and place. Limits = ball and chain.

But I find limits to be liberating. One of my favorite quotes of all time–and one I don’t live up to often enough–comes from Stravinsky:

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit. (From The Poetics of Music)

I always heard this summed up as “The greater the limitations, the greater the art.”

People are always telling me they don’t know how I do it all. This is how. Accountability.

We brought a new scales home on Friday afternoon, and Saturday morning I stepped on, holding my breath to see what two weeks of nebulous data had done to the number on the scale.  It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but when the number came up on the screen, my insides relaxed. At least now I know what comes next. I’m no longer shooting in the dark.

In Which Writing and Reading Makes Me Appreciate My Marriage

I’ve been outlining a new novel lately–no, outlining is too glamorous a word. I’ve been brainstorming a character and a scenario to try to make them unique and interesting enough to be marketable.

At the same time, I’ve been reading a lot: epic fantasy, nonfiction, women’s fiction. Reading is different now than it once was. I analyze word constructions and the use of italics. I pause to appreciate beautiful phrases, well-executed, and to roll my eyes at lackluster prose. And I bristle when characters make choices that make no sense to me.

Spouses who are feeling sad about a lack of connection to their “other” are particularly annoying to me. There’s a literary device I’ll call the Rhett-and-Scarlett: two people desire closeness to their partner, but they refuse to talk to each other about it, and so the relationship falls apart.

To me it feels like a contrivance to propel the book’s conflict. I mean, the whole point of marriage is that you have a relationship of trust that allows you to address issues like these–right?

I frequently have to remind myself just how blessed I am in my marriage, and in my marriage partner in particular. We have had our share of emotional inner conflict that we feared to talk about, but the crucible of anxiety (which we’ve both dealt with, though I’ve only talked about my own), infertility, and learning to be open to loving a child with special needs forced us to confront the tough stuff.

We grew up a lot, individually and as a couple, because of those crises. We are able and willing to call each other down for inappropriate behaviors, to fight our way through the really ugly moments and even to admit the awkward things like I-had-a-moment-of-attraction-to-someone-else. (On that last topic, confession is an amazing thing. It robs something big and threatening of virtually all its power.)

It’s not uncommon for me, in the course of ordinary life, to express that I need to check with my husband before I X, or to say I can’t doY because my husband would not go for it. At those times, I always feel a certain feminist guilt. I think people are passing judgment on me for being a good little wifey who doesn’t stand on her own opinions.

But the fact is that my husband gets you’re so whupped, man looks for saying the same things about me.

That’s called mutual respect. And it’s a good thing, not something we should be feeling guilty about. In fact, I would go so far as to say that choosing not to consider a spouse’s preferences in decision-making is a sign that a marriage is not as strong as it should be. The marriage–not the kids, not the career–is the primary relationship. You prioritize each other, and that leads to unshakable trust. And unshakable trust allows you to help each other figure out all the rest of it–the kids, the career, and whatever else life throws your way.

So I have trouble sympathizing with fictional characters whose relationships suffer because they are afraid to say “I want you to want me.” Or “I know you’re tired after work, but so am I. I need your help with the kids.” Or “I’m feeling distance between us. Can we just sit down and talk?” The solution is so obvious, it’s hard to sympathize when characters seem so oblivious to it.

But then, too, I know that not all husbands are as open to such conversations as mine is. And this whole argument rests on the assumption that both spouses are equally “all in.”

So whenever I read a conflict like this in a book, I pause for a moment of gratitude, and then I go on with the business of daily life.

Which today includes mowing the lawn. Over and out.