I am a stay-at-home dad of a six-year-old and two-year-old twins.
Let me say that again.
I am a stay-at-home dad of a six-year-old and two-year-old twins.
There are many of you who know instantly how my days are. Plenty of you stay home with your own kids, and an astonishing number of you have twins or more. This post is not for you.
Instead, this post is for those who, upon reading that first sentence, did not feel the cold shudder of fear, did not notice the goosebumps up their back, did not run screaming from the room, promising to their makers that they would live a wholesome life forevermore as long as they never, ever had to ponder the meaning of those words again. Because really, that's what you should do. When you read the words, "stay-at-home dad of a six-year-old and two-year-old twins," your eyes should roll back into your head, you body should writhe with convulsions, and you should flop around the floor like a fish, mouth opening and closing in a silent pantomime of screaming death.
But some of you don't. And God help you if you meet me, because I've already let one of your kind live this weekend, and I don't think the second will get off so easily.
She was a friend of a friend, a working mother of two. When I introduced myself, she asked me what I did, and when I told her, she did not react appropriately. Her knees they didn't buckle, her eyes they didn't widen, her mouth it didn't froth. No. Instead, she said, "A stay-at-home dad, huh? Well, good for you! Of course, I could never do that. I'm a worker." A worker. She said that last word with a kind of self-effacing shrug, as if to say, "Oh silly me, I just love to work. Nope, no staying at home for me, not with my kind of work ethic. Just not enough to do, raising kids, you see. Not for a worker like me."
And Sweet Mother of Jesus, my hands stayed at my sides. I didn't reach out and pinch her neck until her eyeballs rolled around on the floor before me.
Sure, I could have, but, you know, it just seemed like too much work.
From the oft-forgotten files of the Weekend Weblink, because it never occurs to me that some of you might have more free time than me.