Father’s Day

My husband is one of those guys who makes rejecting all sympathy into an art form. While he lies on the couch today after dinner, looking exhausted, I sympathetically ask, “Tired?”

“No, I’m just lying here because I’m full of energy and can’t wait to get up and do something else.”

Nothing kills sympathy like sarcasm, unfortunately he is very sarcastic, in a dry sort of ironic way that I like, except when he turns it on me in a cranky moment.

I think a mother may have thought of Father’s Day. It’s a day that you can with cultural justification tell your workaholic husband that he needs to take at least one day off, he hasn’t in the past three months, and hang out with his kids. It’s also a day that you can tell him to stay at the pool and play with them for crying out loud and go back to the house and make dinner in peace and quiet. In other words, while mother’s day ought to be known as mom’s day off, Father’s Day ought to be known as dad’s day on, with presents and amateur homemade cards as well. It’s not like he’s not a great dad, and he works his tail off to take care of us, and his parent’s home reno, they just have started to miss him.

One day last week after he left at 5:45am the Boy, who had awakened to see him off stood at the gate saying, “BYE DAD, Bye, Bye dad.” Long after he was gone. This woke up the Girl, sleeping peacefully near me. She runs out of the bedroom panicked yelling, “I want a hug from daddy.”

When she got to the gate and realized he was already gone she screamed in a piercing, desperate, angry little voice, “I WANT A HUG FROM DADDY, I WANT TO SAY GOODBYE TO DADDY” over and over again until I dragged her inside imagining all of the neighbors cursing us as the 6:30 quiet is shattered by her hysterics.

The Boy wanted to go shopping with daddy today instead of swimming at the pool, that is a daddy hungry boy.

So I’m thankful for Father’s Day because for whatever reason, my kids got to spend a day with their dad and they needed it.