Jason M. Jones

Pregaming for Mother’s Day, my wife opened a bottle of red wine last night and we sat together and watched An Affair to Remember. It’s been a while since we sat down and watched a movie together. Last time was when we took advantage of the daycare’s kid’s night out and check Spectre out of the library. My wife was circling around Affair mainly because Cary Grant and the preview which shows him and Deborah Kerr jaunting through Europe and landing in New York City. Any interest in watching, she asked. And of course, at this point, any excuse to sit close to her for two hours without the kids between us is good enough for me. My wife had a rough few days, and I wanted to relax with her, and we did. She wasn’t sure about the runtime of the movie. It’s two hours, but as I pointed out, oftentimes when we start looking for something shorter, we end up wasting fifteen minutes and watch nothing because the time has ticked away. The wine was good, and for the time Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr were on the boat, the movie was enjoyable too. “It’s a weepy melodrama from what I’ve heard,” I told my wife. “I think it’s the movie they based Sleepless in Seattle on.” And as soon as they left the boat, it turned from comedy into the weepy melodrama part, but we finished.

Naturally, our son chose then to wake up. It was rough putting him down for the night, and there was obviously something wrong, though what that something was wasn’t obvious. He cried, but wasn’t running a fever and didn’t seem gassy. He didn’t want to eat, so we chalked it up to growing pains or teething. We took turns trying to get him down, and then my wife took over and fed him. It was about an hour before he went to sleep and my wife came in. For two hours we slept, and then the boy woke us again. Since he was fed and there was something else wrong my wife asked me to go in and try to quiet him, which I did. Then our daughter woke up, and my wife went in and I came down the hall and stood outside the door and heard, “…something up my nose.” I had assumed she woke because she peed the bed. She hadn’t done that since switching out of diapers, and I thought as I went into the bathroom and handed my wife tissues to help our daughter blow her nose that maybe we should have her use the bathroom, but it was two a.m. I wasn’t following through on sensible decisions like these, and twenty minutes later, she was up again, and she’d wet the bed.

My wife, on occasion, has pointed out that I don’t write about her in my work. To this, I’ve always responded, “It’s because you’re not dramatic.” I recognized that this was a personality trait early on in knowing her, and it was one of her most attractive traits to me. She didn’t make more of an event than it was worth. If there was someone in her life acting the fool, she walked away, didn’t engage. Of course when I give her cards on her birthday or on Mother’s Day, I write a message of appreciation in the card, but I’ve never written a song or a poem or a story about her. It’s a shame because she’s more deserving of these things than are the dramatic people about whom I might have written in the past. It’s just difficult to make the mundane problems you struggle with day-to-day when you get along 99% of the time interesting on the page. So I suppose now that it’s Mother’s Day that I should take a moment and give her some public appreciation.

First, I suppose I should point out that my involvement in late-night affairs after watching the movie is not entirely representative of the balance of late-night attention to our kids in the relationship. While I’ll get up for my daughter if I hear her and go in and take care of whatever she needs, my wife seems more attuned to hearing her. My wife decided to breastfeed with both our children, and so she’s withstood countless late nights with their best interest at heart. I’ve said thank you to her on countless occasions, but I’m not sure I’ve ever made it clear how impressive I find this. To wake at three or four a.m. every night for eighteen months to ensure our children’s immune systems get the advantages of breast milk is an act that requires her to put aside the need for sleep and sacrifice her own energy and mood throughout the day. And I’m thankful. She selflessly loves our kids.

Then there are other things, the way she goes out of her way to bake oatmeal muffins and make pancakes and cinnamon raisin bread so that our daughter is going to preschool with homemade meals and not just getting store-bought pre-packaged meals because they’re easier.  She makes sure to get the kids out of the house on the days when she’s home alone with them. Take them to the library for story time or the arboretum to get some fresh air and exercise. I do try to say thank you for this, but I know that it’s rough, and thank you doesn’t always heal the stress or take away the heartache when she slips up. Because like every parent, sometimes she snaps. She’ll lose her temper with our daughter and feel like she hasn’t adhered to what she expects of herself. And at those times, I’m not sure what to do, how to help. Sometimes, there’s nothing I can do but sit and listen, try to make tiny adjustments in my behavior to make life easier for her, or simply keep the kids out of her hair for a bit while she recuperates.

To some extent, I learned this from watching my parents. The way to keep drama from a relationship is recognizing that the other person isn’t working against you, that you both have the same goal in mind, the same end, and you talk about things and work them out. This morning, I took my wife to brunch at a restaurant called Flora. The food was underwhelming, but we asked my mom to watch our kids (my mom is deserving of her own post and one day I’ll write one dedicated to her), and we sat together in peace and quiet, enjoying a meal. It was perhaps too little to show just how much what she does for our kids means, but there’s really nothing material that can convey just how much I appreciate what she does. Really, in typing this, I realize there are no words either. I caught myself one of the best when I caught her.