It's a very standard question I'm sure, standard world wide. "What do you want for dinner?" And of course worldwide the standard answer is usually "I don't have a clue, hadn't given it any thought." Or words to that effect. Until recently I'd always been the second voice. Truth be told I was telling the truth, dinner was six or eight or twelve hours down the road, and between now and then there were dragons to deal with, of one sort or the other and shucks, I wasn't spending any thought on what I was going to eat for dinner, I was worried about not becoming dinner. Food would be preferable to motor oil or ETBBA, but that was about as far as my thoughts went. Generally by the time I made it to dinner I was really to tired to care. But that was then, and this is now. Now I'm the one asking, and compelled to a wry chuckle at myself (and others of my gender/role) for finding a bit of a "hmmmphhhh…" at the stock answer coming back at me. Karma, particularly the instant variety, can be a bitch. Oh well, food it is.
I'm now give or take two weeks into this "Mr. Mom" gig, and finding it an interesting comparison to the other things I've used to fill my days. Name a trade and I've probably worked in that world for at least a few weeks, I used to change jobs every ninety days just to keep life interesting, back in the BC days when I was the only one I had to look out for, before the factory took me into isolation for a quarter of a century. You can learn an awful lot bouncing crew to crew being strong back labor and a set of extra hands for the journeymen. The gypsy days of my misspent and totally enjoyed youth when adventure was the unsung standard and boredom the enemy don't you know. I'm coming to realize I covered a lot of turf in those days, I really did. Only in my later years have I've realized just how much ground I did cover, and this Mr. Mom gig is tapping from virtually all of it.
Yea, the last bolt is tight (hopefully), there's oil in the pan, gas in the tank, all the odds and ends are clear of the rotating parts and someone says "contact!" The starter kicks in, things start to turn. A few seconds later there's a cough, things speed up, slow back down, two, then three coughs in a row, things are waking up… talk to me sweetheart, bring it to life… the guy on the throttle risks a bit of a pump shot, the guy under the hood brings the timing forward a bit to match… anyone who's ever brought one back up from a rebuild knows the scenario. You don't want it to idle, you want it to roar, snap up to three grand or so and run in all those new parts before they have time to revolt and break. You break 'em in like you want 'em to run.
That's about where I am with the Mr. Mom gig right now, except it's not new steel getting acquainted with old iron, it's a 14 year old child's old attitudes getting acquainted with new ways of doing things. It's a rebuild on attitudes and expectations, attitudes on the world and attitudes about herself, her expectations about herself that I'm working on. You look for different things, listen for different things when the job is turn a house into a home, turn a headstrong feral child in the general direction of a lady. But hey, the idea is the same… bring it up quick, clean, don't let the old patterns linger on, seat it quick and solid. Don't tell 'em, don't even show 'em, let 'em live the truth of the old saying "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
Sometimes in my abortive marriage, I would be the one to ask the stock question and receive the stock answer. Now, in most circumstances, I see the "stock" answer as a license to make whatever I want that I figure won't totally gross the others out--but of course, by the time I got the stuff in the oven, someone would often say, "I don't want THAT!" *laugh* Too late! You turned me loose, and this is what you get whether you like it or not.
ReplyDelete*chuckle* Yup.
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