It’s no surprise men and women are different. It’s not even a shock how different my husband can be from me. Perhaps it was at first, but over the years I simply have became accustomed to it. In fact, I consider it a blessing that we can mesh so wonderfully our differences to complete and complement the other. God knew what He was doing when He put us together, for sure. But some days I’m still like, wow, we are so different! Here’s just three I’ve noticed in the past 5 minutes.
1. He can ignore the kids easily.
Here’s the scenario. Two parents, same room. The kids will come to me. In fact, I can be in another room and they’ll still come to me. They will leave the room they are in with him where he’s just sitting there unoccupied, take a 12 mile hike to the next neighboring town where I’m plowing a field while loading the dishwasher and writing the next, great American novel, and they will ask me to open a Capri Sun for them.
Do they love me more or something? Nope. Is it that they think I’m more capable. Nope. It’s because I’ll stop in the middle of performing a delicate brain surgery to fulfill their request. My husband on the other hand will ignore them until they walk away, board an international flight, and make it through foreign customs to ask mom.
I must master this skill.
2. He can relax.
We have somewhere to be in five minutes and he’ll still be chilling. I’ll be running around packing snack bags and small containers of water in case we get stranded in the desert on the way to Walmart. He’ll be picking up a crumpled pair of shorts at the back of his closet at 36 seconds prior to leaving. I will have been getting dressed, with the clothes I laid out the night before, for the past hour, leaving me fifteen minutes remaining ahead of our schedule. I will spend these pacing around wanting to tell him to hurry up and get dressed already.
If there’s a day with nothing to do I will construct some project that I have been wanting to complete forever! It will end up being more than I bargained for and I’ll somehow turn a relaxing day into a frustrating, rushed one. He will watch me from across the room with eyes that say, I told you so.
3. He doesn’t worry.
If the answer is unknown I will worry. My husband will not. I will allow the uncertainty to frustrate me to the point I end up flipping out later over a page not loading when I search Google for something obscure to take my mind off it. He’ll play a game on his phone while I imagine the absolute worst-case scenario of all the things that have 0.02 percent chance of occurring. He’ll watch a show on Netflix while I search frantically on the Internet for a solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist yet. But it might, right? I mean, it could. Maybe. I heard of that happening once. I think I read it on Facebook.
He will nod off while we sit in bed together. He’ll sleep like a rock, snore even. I will take half a Benadryl so I can shut my mind off and hopefully get a solid six hours. I’ll snap awake early, before everyone else, and run around in my head how that acquaintance of mine from work may have possibly misunderstood me and now hates me. I’ll wonder if I might get fired for that mistake I almost made two months ago. My husband will sleep on.
*As I was writing this post he snaps to attention and comments back on a conversation we had over an hour ago.
“Why do you think it won’t work out?” He asks.
I answer, “He said he’d get back to me in a couple of hours, and that was at noon.” (It’s 5:30 pm).
“Not everyone is like you.” He reminds me. “A couple of hours can mean anything from 2-12 hours. For you, if you said a couple of hours you’d get back to them in exactly two hours and zero seconds. But me…”
He didn’t have to finish.