To the cunning husband, my wife's dinner might have suggested a special occasion: my favorite Époisses cheese followed by grilled monkfish with roasted brussels sprouts, all served with a crisp Sancerre. Sometime during dessert, after the kids had been released to the playroom, she mentioned that she had business on the West Coast the following month, and she and her girlfriends were talking about parlaying it into a college-roommate reunion. She was a bit hazy on details: exact number of days, spa treatments, etc. She asked it as a sort of offhand question: Would it be okay?
I—her well-fed male animal, swooning from a bellyful of good food and therefore irrationally happy—was full of accommodation. Whatever she had just said, I just agreed, without any reservation. I laid down my spoon and said: "Jeez, hon, you really don't have to ask." A one-night reunion with the gals just down the road, sometime in 2012? Could I handle our wonderful, docile kids? Oh, ha-ha-ha, by then they'd practically be taking care of themselves: Yes!
We ended the meal pleased, satiated. Washing the dishes, I went over and over the dinner in my mind: Was this our anniversary or something?
Thirty days passed, and she pulled out a suitcase from the closet and began to pack her favorite, most comfortable elf pajamas. And that's when it dawned on me, that thing she'd said at dinner and sort of reconfirmed one night while we were blearily watching The Office: She was going to be gone for eight days, the better part of two weekends and the five days in between known as the work week. I could hear our children somewhere in the house, playing peaceably. "When are you coming home, exactly?" I asked.
"Next Sunday night," she said. "Probably after you're all asleep."
Make that nine days.
That's when the involuntary twitch in my right eye started acting up, like the chief inspector's in the Pink Panther movies. "You said it'd be fine, right?" she said.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "It's just that ... I ... didn't ... you know ... remember." She gave me one of those gentle whose-fault-is-that? expressions, one of pity and perhaps slight pleasure. She had a sudden bounce in her step. Meanwhile, I had no bright ideas, no list of meals, no groceries even, no playdates or distractions on the agenda. I had visions of our three beautiful youngsters turning into little warmongering huns the minute she left, and then all coming down with the flu. One on three is still a mismatch in our house, especially when the lineup features our oldest son (age 9), a.k.a. the Verbalator, who's never met a gray area he hasn't exploited with the force of relentless speech; our daughter (age 6), a.k.a. the Emo-Bomb, capable of vast emotional destruction in only a second's time; and our youngest son (age 3), a.k.a. Stitches, often found launching himself from couches, stairs, and tables, and friend to emergency-room doctors everywhere.
What first flitted through my mind, as I stood there watching my wife zip up her suitcase, was self-pity: Why hast thou forsaken me? And then: Why couldn't thou be a little more like Pierre's wife? When she goes out of town, she leaves a precooked stack of meals in the freezer and a highly detailed itinerary of practices, lessons, and possible events and playdates, as well as prearranged babysitter blocks to give Pierre scheduled downtime. I believe she even includes his allotted martini on there, likely already mixed and chilled. So where was Pierre's wife now, in my hour of need?
Of course, every couple have their way of doing things, an allocation of chore-doing and breadwinning that finds its balance. Our brand of chaotic socialism consists of taking equal responsibility for everything, while splitting all chores more or less evenly. Everything rotates: I cook; she recycles; I do dump runs; she does dump runs. My wife travels a little bit for work, as do I. So even our single parenting evens out. Which is why she felt no compunction about not preparing for our week in her absence, just as I've never prepared for her week when I've gone out of town. Given that I should have been an old hand at this, then, why did it feel like the first time all over again?
But the pattern was familiar, with my panic slowly giving way to a sudden, very clear epiphany: Wait, said the brain's lightbulb, wasn't this actually going to be great? More room in the bed, no 5:30 a.m. alarm, no complaints about the volume at which I enjoy munching popcorn or cranking Lightnin' Hopkins's "Shaggy Dad" to start the day. As much as I love that person, my wife, it was possible we'd manage just fine without her for a week, right? With new sheriff Daddy calling the shots, we would dirty the house a little more, leave more dishes in the sink, stay in character as Jedi warriors for an entire Saturday, joyously eat meat without that one quietly reproachful plate of root vegetables. It meant a cornucopia of attention and hugs directed solely at me, the sheriff—and awe and respect for my all-powerful word when the Verbalator asked questions like, "Why are old people so weird?"
Short an actual blueprint like that constructed by Pierre's wife, I went to my playbook of strategies, one honed on the run, in a pinch, on the fly—an entirely improvisational, gunslinging construct I call the Game Plan. It begins with this dictate:
Next Page: When Mother is gone, Father shall say yes as often as possible.
