I was going to have a laugh and blog about the children’s weekend sniffles, but now I don’t feel like it.
Isobel is in hospital with a temperature fluctuating between normal and 39.9C. She was admitted to A&E yesterday after throwing up twice in 12 hours – once at 12 midnight – and hasn’t slept for two nights. She was given Dioralyte at 11pm so medics could check her urine or poo for a possible infection (even though she has constipation), and this morning she was ear-marked for a chest x-ray and blood tests.
Miles is with Isobel, having taken her in the car, and has had to cancel work tomorrow. I’m not able to join them, as Ben is with me and neither of us wants him to catch anything from his big sister. Now today, of all days, is Father’s Day – when I should be making cakes and spoiling him rotten – so I want to dedicate this post to my husband.
As far as child-rearing is concerned I’m sure you agree that fathers get overlooked far too easily these days. If they’re the main breadwinner of the family, upon returning home they usually find their partners too whacked or irritable to discuss their day with them. Meanwhile stay-at-home-dads get a bollocking if they haven’t done the one crucial thing that would make our lives easier – be it wiping the kids’ noses properly, letting their poo get on the new sofa, or hoovering/dusting the bookshelves.
And if one child winds up seriously ill in hospital? The mother gets most of the sympathy – even when it’s the father breaking the news to the recipient.
Tempting though it might be, for us mums to think we work harder to support our children is unfair. Without Miles I really don’t think I could have held the family together so well. Of course, when a child gets diagnosed, it is all too easy for parents to start blaming each other, and we’ve been through enough tough times for me to know that Miles is as much my rock as I am his.
Yes, I get to deal with most of the bureaucracy that comes with parenting Isobel – all the forms, benefits, correspondence, appointments, and a lot of the boring mundane stuff that parents do: clearing away mountains of toys, packing the change bag, planning solids, stocking up on nappies/baby wipes/clean muslins, maintaining the children’s daily and weekly routines and of course the washing.
But Miles is the one with the job, the one who takes Isobel to PACE twice a week (being the sole car-driver in the household), the one to pick up urgent prescriptions for her from a late-night pharmacy, the one who does most of the cooking and the food shop. He’s the one who gets to drive us to wherever we need or want to go, loads the dishwasher, and scours eBay and other bargain-buy sites for home and travel essentials that will ensure a little more comfort for us, and a little more security for the children.
On the spur of the moment, Miles will even hoover and dust the house top to bottom without being asked – because he knows how much I already have to do, and he loves his home, his wife and his family enough to want to do his bit.
He is not, and never has been, one of those men who moan about their lives ending with marriage and children. Indeed, at ante-natal classes with me when I was expecting Isobel, Miles was the only man who saw nothing but positives in impending fatherhood – and he was exactly the same before Benedict arrived on the scene. You won’t see him down the pub on men-only nights playing pool and complaining about ‘the wife’, because it’s not his style.
Miles – or to give him his birth name, John Gregory Thomas – I humbly doff my cap to you. You deserve every accolade going this Father’s Day.
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