Take That, Mom's Yard!

Yesterday proceeded much as my post indicated all the way through late in the evening. In fact, by the end of the evening, I had come as close to coming unglued as I have in ten years. Usually, I'm very calm and level, but Clueless and Belligerent spending almost the entire day expounding on how incredibly better it would be if we offered significantly different parenting situations (that essentially always let her do whatever she wanted and always fed her only her favorite foods, etc.). Some treatise she was babbling about last night about how it would be better if we completely ignored her because she could then do whatever she wanted to do finally made me come undone. We had been at my mom's house, and I had to stay outside for over an hour (until almost midnight) before I could come in, and then I was still furious. It took me until this morning to calm down. Thus, my wife and I decided that it would be best if I spent the afternoon at my mom's house again, leaving right before the kids came home from school.

I came over here (I'm here for another hour, in fact) and quickly became rather bored, devoid of my usual methods of entertainment. That made me decide to do something nice for good ol' Mom, even though she was taking the child's side yesterday. I mowed her yard.

This event is significant because I've never done it before. Usually, my mom, who likes to spend money, donates to the funds of the neighborhood teenagers and lets them mow it for cash. When I was younger, we lived on a hill that was crazy hard/dangerous to mow, and so until I was significantly older, I wasn't supposed to mow. Then, when I was old enough, my parents had given up entirely and were already paying someone to mow it. Through whatever combination of my resistance and luck and fate, I had actually never mowed a yard until this year, taking over the job from my wife (who likes the exercise and had done it primarily for that reason before) because she was about to have a minor surgery and wouldn't be able to for longer than it could go. To make this long, boring story short, I took up the mower, found it wasn't that bad, and now try to get to it to spare my wife (and now my mom, apparently) the effort, although if my wife decides she wants the workout, she's welcome to it until she gets sick of it, at which point I'll take over.

So, in the midst of feeling rather like I'm doing a poor job of being a good man (I think I'm being a good man for not intentionally ruining the child's day/life right now), I found and took and opportunity to step up. At least my conscience feels a little lighter now!