When you get home after a long day at work, please don’t expect a home cooked meal, a clean house, AND well-behaved kiddos. Pick two. Appear grateful. If the kids are going crazy and your wife looks defeated, be the good guy with your children. The last thing anyone needs is for you to enter your home with guns blazing ready to hand out punishments and lay down the law. Chances are, she’s handled enough irrational emotions for a lifetime by this point and doesn’t have an ounce of energy or patience left to coddle yours. You had a quiet drive home, after all. She most likely hasn’t had a moment to herself all day.
Bear in mind guys, that many of you are returning home around 6 or 7 at night. It’s a fact that all humans, aged birth to adolescence, are programmed to lose their cool at this genetically predetermined hour. It’s called a witching hour for babies. But the truth is all kids experience it. By dinner time, they’ve reached their daily limit for impulse and self-control and internally, all hell has broken loose. No one is their best self in your house right now. Your family needs you to be the calm in the chaos.
Likewise, we’d appreciate if you didn’t arrive home, take in the scene, and scoff. So what if we pitched a tent in the dining room, the kids are staring quietly at devices with no pants on, and everyone is eating goldfish 15 minutes before dinner? It’s called survival. Need a snow shovel to get through the toys in the living room? So be it. We were busy making memories. And lord forbid you have the audacity to mention your wife’s disheveled appearance or not so innocently ask what exactly she’s done all day. Newsflash, she’s met two out of the three previously discussed criteria. Kids are happy, check! Your wife was, therefore, able to prepare a meal, check! Compliment her success.
I can say in my house, we’re at a point in the year where polar vortexes and endless snow days have pulverized any sense of structure and decorum that previously existed. The kids are wild. They’re bored. They’re as sick of the inside of this house as I am and they are acting like bipedal caged animals. They see the sun shining, a beacon in the sky that spring is near, yet are still pent up inside because our yard is a filthy mud hole. Cut your family some slack.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not trying to make anyone look like the bad guy here. Your heart is in the right place after all. I’m sure you see a frazzled wife who appears to have given up and you want to help. And we appreciate that, however misguided it might be. We appreciate the fruits of your labor and I’m acknowledging that on behalf of wives everywhere. Never does my husband look like more of a superhero to me than he does with a vacuum in his hand or his sleeves rolled up as he washes piles of laundry and carpet when a stomach bug has ravaged our family. He’s never batted an eye at the condition of our house. He’s helpful and involved. I can’t take that away.
However, we need all of you to take a deep breath outside the door before stepping into our evening mayhem. In your heavy-handed attempt to restore order, you are instead adding to the frenzy. By the time we see you coming down the road, we’re hanging on by a thread. We’ve been the bad guy off and on all day and at this point, the kids need a friendly face. Please walk through the door with a smile, however forced, kiss your wife, and be the good guy with the kids. Maybe even get them the heck out of sight long enough for her to finish dinner.
