images.jpgThe “wives” requests have it! (don’t worry, I’ll get to all the rest eventually)

So, last week I was away for a measly five and a half days and at certain points during my trip it didn’t seem as if the Family Back Home was going to survive. I couldn’t understand it.  My kids are so much older now, one seemingly on the verge of independence (note use of “seemingly”) and the other almost in high school.

Six years ago, I received a residency at the idyllic writers’ colony, Hedgebrook.  They offer you a period of two to eight weeks which you can accept or decline.  They offered me eight. The thing about Hedgebrook that makes it different than other colonies is that, in order to make it available to the most women possible, you can only go once in your life.  I felt like I had to take advantage of the full period. I accepted the eight weeks. Eight weeks! That is two months! Looking back on it now, I am incredulous.

My girls were then seven and eleven years old. It was the summertime, and they were enrolled in various day camps.  My mother was still able to drive a car then. She was able to go to the grocery store, shop and put a meal together.   So she drove them to and from the camps, and did the shopping and much of the cooking.  It worked, because she sort of seamlessly slipped into the Wife role, and things went on pretty smoothly. The girls were not experiencing situations that were particularly complex or challenging. They weren’t really little, nor were they yet teenagers. It was kind of the perfect storm, the perfect time of everyone’s life when I actually COULD take those eight weeks.  They all – spouse, kids and mom- came up to visit me for a kind of reverse Parents’ Weekend, at the halfway mark.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast place nearby, had a wonderful visit. I cried when they left, but I don’t think they did. When I was there, I thought, wow, by the time they are teenagers, this will be a piece of CAKE.

But they are now teenagers, and that is not the case. At all. I did not apply for any colonies last year, knowing that this year was going to be a huge complicated process of searching for high school and college. I’m not applying for next year either, because I think the transition of older girl going to college is going to be challenging enough for my mom and younger girl. And who knows what the year after that will bring?

This past week when I was gone, there was no Wife figure to slip in and take over.  I had to rely on a veritable army of friends-of-parents to help out with younger girl, and she was happy to have a weekful of sleepovers and school-night playdates. But there was nobody to make dinner on schedule in the manner that my mother and older daughter, the hardworking and starving athlete, have come to need and expect.  My mother can’t drive anymore.  She can help me if I’m cooking dinner, but she has no way to grocery shop and can’t plan or implement a full meal.  My spouse had one of the most emergency-filled weeks of the entire year, and he couldn’t do it either. Let me just say that it was difficult all the way around.

I have recently had the very new and amazing experience of having what feels like a Wife, one day a week.  My husband has begun taking many Wednesdays off. Since that is the day that I drive the school carpool, it is also the day that I work at the office all day (it is down the street from school). So that day, I am fully involved in work, as he is most of the time, and he is home to basically run errands and accomplish a lot of little annoying things that nobody wants to do. He might have an extra leisurely period to exercise, but other than that, he is getting a tire on the van replaced, or making phone calls to deal with stupid petty stuff that needs dealing with, or returning stuff, or waiting for the refrigerator repair guy.  In other words, the Wife stuff.

Maybe it is really unfeministy of me to put it in these terms, but I really believe that the Wife job is the stuff that needs to be done around the house.  For me, it comes down to cooking and driving, waiting on lines, and making tedious phone calls to various bureacracies.  And I see the Husband job as the one that is Too Important for Interruptions or Distractions. I get to be the Husband on Wednesdays. I have to say, I kind of like it.

I think that when we do not have Dependents in the house, those roles will fall away. We will be more like partners again. Of course, the appliances will still need to be repaired and the car will need more tires, but I think we’ll be able to divvy those things up more or less equally. But right now I’m kind of in shock and awe on Wednesday mornings when my Wife writes up his to-do list, and asks what needs to be done.