Guest Post From Puck:
My wife had her first spontaneous crying episode last Friday when she picked me up from work. I asked her why she was upset and, with her eyes full of tears and her lower lip quivering, she replied, “Because you washed all the glasses last night.”
It sounds irrational and hilarious.
I admit this is not what a guy typically expects from a weepy-eyed wife when she arrives to take him home from work. Still, I was ready for spontaneous crying to happen during the pregnancy so it didn’t bother me and later I gently teased her about it.
What is missing from the amusing surface story is the deeper narrative. Understanding the full tale behind the emotion takes some of the randomness out of it and provides a more Mary-specific context.
Puck’s Busy Thursdays
Thursday nights I’m in a serious hurry. I rush home grab a bite to eat and then bolt out the door driving through traffic into downtown Sacramento to teach my fencing class. When I get home I’m tired and sweaty and ready to sleep.
Part of the recent feed-the-pregnant-lady campaign has been about calcium and specifically drinking milk. When Mary drinks water, she typically re-uses a single glass but with her drinking glass after glass of milk, we accumulate a good number of glasses needing manly attention. (You really don’t want to re-use a milk glass.)
On any other night, I prep a mommy-snack and then putter around the kitchen getting dinner ready and washing up dishes. Thursdays are my busy days and Mary had wanted to wash up the dishes despite my insistent declarations that she take care of her own work and leave the other stuff to me. With a limited energy budget each day, she poops out very quickly and teaching, prepping her lesson plans, and grading is plenty already.
When I got home from my class, I sent her off to chat on the phone in the bedroom and then quickly washed up the dishes while she was otherwise occupied. It was a bait-and-switch ninja-style dish-washing which resulted in a fresh crop of clean and milk-ready drinking glasses.
A clean glass by any other name…
From an outsider’s perspective she’s crying over clean dishes.
What actually moves her is the gratitude and love she feels when a tired husband comes home and washes the dishes in his fencing knickers. She’s sublimating some of her own desires to help and freedom to do and eat the things she wants into motherhood. Her role as a pregnant mother limits her ability to help with household work. We’re both working towards a greater goal, and along the way, we show our affection for each other in different ways.
Mary feels gratitude strongly from the inside out and with all the love and support she’s been getting from friends and family it finally surfaced in a parking lot as we were getting ready to drive home.
The strong emotion is not about the dishes, but rather the full range of emotions. The deeper narrative is the message of love, marriage, motherhood, and our lifelong friendship and respect for each other. These are not silly or random tears but perhaps instead an entirely aware and rational joy for where we are in our lives, how we feel for each other, the support of loved ones, and how we feel for our two little ones waiting to be born.
~P.
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