Oprah Makes Me Cry

I never thought I'd be one to DVR Oprah, but I have to confess that I do. Now, I don't watch every episode, and a lot of times I fast forward through them really quickly. But ... every once in a while, there will be an episode that steals my attention completely.

I had a hard time falling asleep last night, so I decided to go through the DVR queue. There was an episode of Oprah that had something to do with an overwhelmed mother's mistake. It ended up being about a mother who left her two-year-old daughter in the car for over eight hours on a hot August day. (http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/20080902_tows_moms_)

I must admit ... I was bawling and bawling my eyes out. The objective of the show was to give everyone a wake up call and to slow down in their lives. To really savor the moments you have with your children, you partners, each other. It was heartbreaking and devastating. The show was sprinkled with other mothers confessing incidents in their lives. None of them had the same tragic end that the main guest did. Her precious daughter died.

There was an interesting turn in the show when it began to talk about how these mothers needed to reach out to their partners/husbands more. Let them know they need help. I am extremely lucky ... my partner for life is a very caring and loving husband and father. I don't need to ask him to pitch in more or help out once in a while. Why? Because when he signed up for this marriage, he took it as a full partnership from the get-go. And now, as a father, he is an amazing man. Of course, it's not all him. We've made agreements at different stages of our relationship to make sure it always works out. I try to pass on these tips to other women out there. Especially new moms, because I do think that there is a tendency for women to try to take it all on and not want or expect their husbands to do anything. I know many women who will go out, with their husband and children at home. The man will call because a child won't quit crying ... and what does she do? She drops everything to go and "rescue" him. That would never happen in my marriage.

D is just as much a father as I am a mother. He doesn't babysit his child, he parents them. One of the things we are committed to doing for each other is giving each other a free day (or a few hours depending on what's available) where you can just have time for yourself. This might be simply a nap (for me). Or giving D the house to himself on a Sunday afternoon to watch football. We love and cherish our son, so we also enjoy when we get to have one-on-one time with him. And it gives the other partner time to refresh themselves. We split duties equally. Whoever cooks, the other one cleans up. I do laundry, he vacuums. I do bedtimes, he typically gets wake-up duty (on the weekends, it depends on who K calls into this bedroom ... or whichever one of us got to bed a littler earlier the night before).

I don't know if it's because I fell in love with a man who was much older than me, or if it was how he was raised (his father is very much a compassionate man who also believes in equal partnership -- even when he was a senior executive for a major company.) Every day I am grateful for finding him, falling in love and knowing that I am in a good place.

Of course, we have our arguments, and we don't always live a fairytale life. We have to deal with many issues that others deal with (money, traveling, our opinions on each others friends, work issues) but in the end, I think we know it's just us ... our family and that's what matters. So, Oprah, I want to thank you for making me realize, once again, in a waterfall of tears how grateful I am for my husband ... how much I love him (even during moments I might not like him) ... and just how blessed I really am. And of course, I did share all of this with D, too. That's the most important part of loving someone -- telling and showing them you love them.