My husband and I just celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. I'd say we have a great marriage. There's no one I trust more, no one else I'd rather talk to, and no one who makes me laugh harder.
But that doesn't mean I don't get furious at him from time to time.
Once, when I was dangling at the end of my rope, I insisted he go to the doctor for a hearing test. I was quite certain the man was deaf. How else, for instance, could he have taken my grandma's books to Goodwill instead of the antique-book dealer, as I'd asked when he was cleaning out the basement?
Just as I'd gotten used to the idea of the man I love with hearing aids, the news came in from the doctor. My husband's ears work fine. Better than mine, actually.
I know I'm not the only one who gets Mad at Dad. Whenever I see the phone number of a certain close friend on the caller ID, I know she needs my understanding ear because her husband has dropped a wad of cash on electronics while telling her she can't have someone in every other week to help clean, or because he let the kids eat junk food and play video games while she was running errands, and now they're glassy-eyed and glued to the ceiling. Meanwhile, his whiskers are in the sink and his boxers are on the floor, making her feel like she's married to nothing more than a hairy man-child.
These are the kinds of things we see parodied on TV sitcoms, where bumbling husbands get laughs for feeding the kids frosting sandwiches and sending them to school in scuba gear. These are the kinds of things we moan and groan about when we get together with our other mom friends, often playing our irritations for laughs. Honestly, though, it's not that funny. None of us signed up to live in a sitcom.
Life for women may be better in many ways than it's ever been, but we're far from whistling show tunes. According to Parenting's nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 mothers on MomConnection, an online panel of moms, the majority of us confess to feeling anger at surprising levels. We love our husbands -- but we're mad that we spend more mental energy on the details of parenting. We're mad that having children has turned our lives upside down much more than theirs. We're mad that these guys, who can manage businesses or keep track of thousands of pieces of sports trivia, can be clueless when it comes to what our kids are eating and what supplies they need for school. And more than anything else, we're mad that they get more time to themselves than we do.
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