My husband and I have been married for eleven years. Eleven years is a long time to do anything. We’ve seen our share of ups and downs, and that is the understatement of the year. I am not the easiest woman to be married to, for any number of reasons. I am grossly insecure and particularly needy and excessively sensitive. He’s got his things, too, but this isn’t about him today, it’s about me. I’ve made him work for this relationship. I change the rules on him constantly and expect him to just keep up. Example: When he met me, I worked three jobs, 19 hours a day, 6 days a week. Now I stay home and let him go to work for at least 12 hours every single day while I fail in every way to so much as wash the dishes. He does this with a smile on his face, or so I assume; it’s not like I ever actually see his face anymore. I’d like to say that he at least gets to come home to a hot little body waiting for him in lingerie, but what he really comes home to is a snoring wife wearing his sweat pants hogging his side of the bed who used to be a size -0 and is now a solid 12.

I make few apologies for this. It’s not like I knocked myself up with a baby that decided to make me gain 105 pounds in nine months, after all.

However misguided my feelings on the subject, I do feel a little bad that the 98 pound girl with a D cup you could stack plates on that he signed up for a life with has now turned into a National Geographic centerfold. I feel bad enough, in fact, that I, on occasion, will buy him pistachios and roses and have them waiting for him when he comes home in the middle of the night after the umpteenth night straight at work.

He reciprocates occasionally, coming home late from work on the nights he’s due in early, bearing gifts for me, too.

That is a gym membership, brought home for me last week, because apparently he wants a divorce. You leave a man enough times and he’ll start double-dog daring you to do it again, all for the low low price of $31/month.

To his credit, he did include all-you-can-eat childcare in the package. So now I can’t bitch about being fat, having no where to go OR having no one to watch my kid while I go there anymore. It’s like he’s robbed me of everything, including my lovely lady lumps. Asshole.

But I’m determined to use it, partly because I do want to get the fuck out of this house occasionally, and I would like to do it sans-four-year-old, but mostly because I’m sick people congratulating me and asking me when the baby is due. The best answer to which is, “Four years, three months and eleven days ago; thanks for asking.” So I went last night to try this thing out. I got the four year old ready to go and the nine year old announced that he’d like to go as well. So I put my gym bag down, huffed a little, and called to see if I had a two-for-one daycare special. Which I do. I grabbed my bag, my two youngest, and headed out the door when my eleven year old ran down the stairs in full gym gear asking if he could come, too. You know, to work out with me.

Seriously, I just started being able to poop without company. Will there never be a moment’s rest from these people?

So I put everything down, again, and called the gym, again, huffed, AGAIN, and lied about his age, again, and found out that I could bring him. So off we all went. 45 minutes after I was planning on getting to the gym, we had two kids checked into daycare and one magically-turned twelve year old on an elliptical next to me. Who beat my fat fucking ass, hard. Every spanking this kid has ever received in his entire life was repaid last night, in full. He pwned me.

Vengeance is a dish best served sweaty, with burning quads.

It’s not like I can let me kid out-work me. If he does 50 crunches on the ab-thingy, I have to do 50, also. If he’s barely broken a sweat after 20 minutes on the elliptical, I have to grin and pray silently for god to strike us all dead and spare me this humiliating torture. If he gets through an entire circuit and asks to do it again, well, I just have to do it all again. Even if I can’t stand upright anymore. Even if I’ve sweated out every drop of moisture in my body and am now replacing that sweat with blood. Even if my legs are jello and I can’t recall where my arms used to be. Even if I just want so scream that THIS WAS MY PRESENT AND YOU ARE RUINING IT, SHORT PERSON. I can’t do that, now can I? We’re having a bonding moment, right? One of those fleeting mother-son moments that will be over the second this kid learns what a Playboy magazine is. Which, thanks to him, I may be able to appear in someday.

There are some things in our family’s lives that are just their father’s job.

I don’t mean that in the patriarchal, old school, “man job” sort of way, though I believe with all my heart that killing spiders and taking out the trash are never, should never be, and will never be a woman’s job. I am the one who has explained to my kids everything and anything Wienerschnitzel-related. I told them where babies come from. I laid out, with great detail and clarity, the Household Masturbatory Rules.

I can just imagine how it will go down when he finally has to have some sort of sex talk with these kids, which I am guessing will come on their wedding night. Because that’ll be timely. “Now, son, I just want to make sure you know to always play 19 holes of golf.” And they’ll say, “Huh?” and look at him like they look at me all day, every day like he’s fucking nuts, and he’ll explain himself. “It’s crucial that you save your A Game *wink wink nudge nudge* and only whip it out after you go play golf. And then, bring it. Go all out. Be thoughtful, be sweet, be gentle, take your time and go for the Oscar. Do that every single time you go play. If you remember this one little thing, you’ll have a wife who thinks you’re so relaxed and appreciative of her understanding your need for alone time on the course, and manly, that she’ll let you…no, she’ll make you go play golf All. The. Time. And they’ll say, “Dad, does it really work? Could it be that simple?” and he’ll say, “Where the hell do you think all you kids came from?” and then they’ll throw up and wished they’d just come talk to me instead, even if I am hovering over them making sure they’re properly hydrated and have on clean underwear.

I hover. It’s a character flaw.

I wrap the sports injuries. I wrap the injuries that their father thinks are just bumps they need to shake off, and I wrap them in that adhesive sports tape that they use on the stupid UFC my husband makes me watch all the time and Ace bandages, and then they sit around the dining room table mocking me for my gross inability to wrap a child’s wrist and not leave him looking like he has three gimpy hook-fingers.

Now, their father wraps the sports injuries. He made his bed; I hope it’s comfy.

He does this sometimes. Either he doesn’t realize how good he’s got it, or he’s just keen on making his life harder. He creates these games with the kids, like Wrestle-Mania or The Claw, that there is no way in fucking hell I am going to play with them when he’s gone. When he gets home and wants to drink beer and watch gay porn UFC, he’s instead stuck letting 3 short people wage global-thermo-nuclear-war all over his butt while doing his best imitation of Steve Erwin. Before he died. Not much of an amusement, imitating him now.

I am also the one who puts them to bed, every single night, except the occasional rare night when I make him do it he takes over for me, like the night when he decided to walk our daughter through the process of dreaming. They laid in her bed when she couldn’t sleep and he talked to her about what she wanted to dream. Together, they created a fantastical story with fairies and Pokemons and chicken nuggets, or something. And then she wanted me to do it with her the next night.

I fancy myself I creative person, but I have the imagination of a doormat. I can tell you what happened to me, but dear god, don’t ask me to write fiction. I can mimic anything drawn in front of me, but there’s no way I could just paint a picture off the top of my head. The one children’s book I ever wrote, the one that would have made me a small fortune and had us sitting in the fable’s cat-bird’s seat for life had I not written it when I had a one year old who liked to chew on things, especially paper things…it was all about geometrically shaped monsters. It was creative, yes, but not imaginative.

I can’t make up bedtime stories. So when she lays all snug and cute in her bed and asks me about Chuck E Cheese, and I tell her, and then she asks me to dream it to her, well, that just means that daddy is missing the last quarter of the football game and momma gets to go take a bubble bath. Which is way more effective a way to get to tee off on that 19th green*, for the record.

*Also for the record: It’s not actually green. Metaphor, people.

Today, my husband and I fought in front of our children for the first time ever.

EVER.

Like, in 11 and a half years ever.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t ever fight because god knows we do. If you’ve ever dared to dip your toes in the murky waters that are my archives, you’ll know what I mean. And Christ, I met him when I was twenty. I’ve gone through no less than 10 variations of myself between then and now, and so has he. Our shit, it is hard sometimes. But coming from two spilt families, me with my history of domestic assault and him with his abandonment baggage, we’ve worked really hard to keep our crap between us.  Sure, we fight, but we don’t do it often and when we do, it’s over as soon as it starts.

Usually, I will start being an insane asshole and he’ll tell me to go take a five minute walk and sort it out. Or he’ll open a big, fat can of jerkface and I’ll tell him to check it before I am forced to wreck it and that ends it. We’re actually really good at mitigating each others mood-swings, and because of that, our kids have never once born witness to anything more than a long scowl or a stern, “Other room, NOW.”

It would seem that my Mercury was firmly lodged in his Uranus today or something, because while I was trying to get 2of3 to clean the damn bathroom, he decided that at that very second, 2of3 needed to take the vacuum to his brother. And I was so sick and tired of trying to get that kid upstairs to the bathroom, I told him no. And The Donor told him yes. So I told The Donor no, and he told me to fuck off and I told him to shove it up his ass and the threw the vacuum and I told him to get the fuck out.

Because we’re five, that’s why.

Meanwhile, my nine year old was just standing there watching this whole parade of lunacy unfold before him and as soon as dad walked out of the room, he started to cry.

Because we’re fantastic parents, that’s why.

And he told me he was scared, and I held him and told him that he fights worse than that with his brother every day and reminded him that I am a pain in the ass and his dad is an overbearing know-it-all and we’ve lived together for 14 long, long years and told him that of course we fight sometimes.

And now I don’t know if I’m sad that my kid had to see us acting like three year olds or if I’m secretly a little glad that he witnesses an argument that resolved itself within ten minutes with a big hug and two unprompted and very sincere apologies that I made sure happened right in front of that kid and then ice cream, because ice cream cures all evils. Am I wrong to think that I should be teaching him that it’s okay to have conflicts and that the world doesn’t end when you have them? Because I lived thirty years thinking one raised voice meant the End Of Civilization as we know it, and I never learned how to fight and get over it until I had to learn the hard way.

There’s really no point to this at all. I just worry sometimes that they think their parent’s marriage is the perfect, happy go lucky thing and because of that, when their time comes, they will have no clue how to deal with the reality of marriage and the reality of marriage is that bitches, on occasion, be crazy, and you love them through it anyway.

Right?

We hardly ever get to see The Donor around these parts.  We see him get ready for work in the morning, and if we’re really really lucky, we might see him come home at night. But only if it’s all-nighter-zombie-movie-night.  We get him every Sunday, and we get him for dinner on Mondays, and that’s it.  As in, it.

And that’s why we stole him away this week. We missed him. It’s weird missing someone who technically lives in your house, but we do, all of the time. And he needed it, to be honest. Sure, I work all day, too, but I don’t do it in a tux and on my feet. I deal with three children under 5 feet, he deals with 40 children over 5 feet. His days, they suck. So for Father’s Day, we gave him all the day, none of the suck. And instead of just seeing him blowdry his hair and chug his coffee, instead of seeing him walk in the door and collapse onto the couch 14 hours later, this weekend we got to see him relax.

We got to see him enjoy the small things.

And revel in the big things.

And we got to let him be someone’s dad, too.

He got new shoes, and he got to use them. Twice.

He got to share his favorite thing in the world with his sons.

And they got to share their favorite thing with him.

But best of all, I got to see my husband, he got to see his wife, and our kids got to see their mom and dad. At the same time.

And no one was getting stitches.

I found you in 1996 and I lost you in 2006. It was your fault, it was my fault, it was everyone’s fault and no one’s fault. None of it matters anymore, except that all of it matters still. Because without that, with none of it, we wouldn’t have any of this.

Today you’ll celebrate your 11th fathers day with your children. We’re not giving you ties and we didn’t make you clay mugs and we won’t cook you breakfast in bed. What we’re giving you is us. We’re taking you away from the things of man, and we’re just going to be with you. We’re leaving the messages on the phone and the dishes still piled up in the sink and the sand that is all over the goddamn laundry room floor; we’re running away from all of it to remember each other. To remember you. To celebrate you.

But I’m not just celebrating you, and maybe that’s wrong on the day Hallmark tells us should be all about you, but you think I can write better than Hallmark so for today, we’ll make our own rules. Today I’m celebrating that everything we have was torn asunder, that it was stripped down to the studs and once we could see everything under the surface, once we really knew what we were up against, we started laying new bricks, one by one, together.

It was two years ago on Father’s Day that we laid that first brick.  It was two years ago on Father’s Day that we chose to accept it all without condition, without judgement, for all that it was and everything it wasn’t, and just build it back up.  We gave each other all that we knew, which turned out to be a hell of a lot less than we thought, and together we’ve built new walls and figured out how to make this house stand.

You’re still very much this alien thing to me, and our relationship floats through the universe like a satellite in orbit, occasionally going way out there, out of our orbit, but always coming back in again. I can see that satellite every time feel a little rain and look up to realize that there are still so many holes in the roof of us yet to be patched.  I think we need to be able to see it. I think we need that rain to remind us that we have to keep working. I think we need that rain to force us to look up, to remember that sometimes it goes and sometimes it comes and we don’t have it all figured out and that we don’t have to.  That you can be an alien, and I can be an alien, and it will still be beautiful rain.