Today I am sharing a guest post with you, written by the amazing Kelly Exeter.
Kel is one of the hundreds of bloggers who will be hitting the Gold Coast next week as part of the biggest Blogging Conferences in Australia, the annual Problogger Training Event.
Mr Woog said he could not think of anything worse. A room full of men and women talking about blogging. Which is fine by me, as I leave him to kid wrangle.
Although, we did have a conversation, similar to the one below....
The fight started, as they always do, about three days
earlier.
“I can’t wait to get on that plane to the Gold Coast. Ah,
four days all to myself.” I said.
My husband’s response – a non-committal harrumph – was not
exactly what I was looking for.
But you know, he was staring out the window at the time,
mind clearly occupied. So three days later I gave him another shot.
“Ahhh, two weeks and three days till I’m off to the Gold
Coast for that conference.” Being a fair person I even inserted a helpful prompt:
“And that mental break I so desperately
need.”
It quickly became clear that my husband (let’s call him Mr
X) had a death wish as he replied with a barely audible mutter of “Yeah, leaving me to look after two kids all by
myself”.
Wrong answer!
Of course I took the high ground and muttered back “Hey, don’t you play the point scoring game with me because you’ll never win that
one”(which didn’t really make any sense) and then proceeded to fume for two
hours.
In every family there’s one person who takes on the mental
load for the household. The person whose brain never switches off because
keeping a house running smoothly is a 24/7 job.
The person who notices ‘We’re running low on detergent’ so
adds it to the weekly shopping list.
The one who remembers... "We’re going to Mum’s for lunch on the
weekend and I’ve been told to bring a salad but we don’t have any salad stuff
in the house and I won’t have time on Saturday morning to go to the shops so
I’ll need to do that on Friday afternoon."
The one who keeps track of school enrolments and day care
dress up days and knows that if we spend all weekend out of the house we’ll all
have a meltdown on Monday morning so I’d better ring Melissa and let her know
we’re not going to be able to make afternoon tea on Sunday.
The one who knows that "You need to make sure you leave work
by 3.30pm on Thursday because you need to be home by 4.10pm so we can be on
time for that 4.30pm appointment which is only 10 minutes away but it always
takes you 10 minutes to get in the house, get changed and be ready to go again."
In most households it’s usually the wife that does this job
and certainly in our household it is me.
Don’t get me wrong – Mr X does his fair share. He doesn’t come home
from work, put his feet up and say "Darl, what’s for dinner?"
Does anyone
actually still do that? *editors note - Only if he wants a swift kick to the groin.
No, our afternoons are a study in tag teaming as we throw a
toddler and baby back and forth; juggling walks in the pram with showers,
dinner, washing of dishes and finding time to play with a Mr 4 who hasn’t seen
us all day.
Speaking of Mr 4, it was lucky he was there to mediate at
the point where I stopped fuming and decided to try and explain to Mr X where
he went wrong.
"Mummy and
daddy stop fighting."
"Oh buddy,
we’re not fighting, we’re having a discussion."
"But you are
talking that way. Daddy say sorry.
You are wrong and mummy is right"
Happily, Mr 4’s interruption acted as a circuit breaker because
we’d just reached the point in our discussion
where we’d been round and round in circles about eight times and were swiftly heading
towards an afternoon of no speakies.
"Look honey. In every house there is one
person who takes care of all the logistics. The one who shoulders the thinking
load. The one who tells everyone what to do. In our house that is me and that
is fine. But every so often I get a day where I am just so tired. And while I
know it’s not realistic, on those days I just want someone to say to me ‘Look
Kel. I can see you’re tired. Today, you don’t have to think about anything. I’ll do all the thinking, you just have to do
what I tell you"
Him: Ok. I get that. I do.
And that, my friends, is pretty much all we want.
Right?
Mother, runner, writer, blogger. Serial over-committer. Kelly believes that a busy life doesn't need to be a stressful life and if she can learn to live a life less frantic, then ANYONE can. She blogs here at A Life Less Frantic and if you're that way inclined, you can find her on the twitters here and on Facebook here.
Blog link: http://www.kellyexeter.com.au
The twitters: https://twitter.com/kellyexeter
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kellyexeter
