Our author has three children at home. She got two, and married one. Unfortunately, there are only two child benefits.
I have to admit: I knew it. On the first date I had misunderstood the snowball fight as a Hollywood romance, but at the latest when he told me on the second date that he liked to watch Spongebob, it was clear to me: the guy I'm into is only physically adult. Its insides level every minute between 3 and 40 as a random principle. When do you get which version of him? Hit and miss. For a long time I found it very sweet, how consistently he had preserved the inner child.
Then our sons came.
Can't you even be an adult?
When there are two of us, everything is good so far. Of course, he still has those slightly childish traits that take the form of third grader jokes or laundry on the floor, but that's really fine. It gets interesting when the children get involved. I'll put it this way: I'm a team then. The boys and my husband form the second team. The three most important lessons I have learned by now: 1. Never let a father with two children and a credit card enter a toy store. 2. The sentence "Putsch but the children don't open up" seems to be a secret code that only women understand and 3. Being a single parent is sometimes quite difficult.
Is he perhaps smarter than me?
Sometimes I wonder which of us made the other what they are now. Did he have to work against a fun brake? Am I just holding back the fun because otherwise everything would have gotten out of hand? I really do not know it. Is that egg-and-hen thing, I suppose. Still, I'm a little jealous of his Peter Pan life. In twenty years, he will definitely have more laugh lines than me if this continues.
It's all a question of attitude
Ever since I've been thinking about the smile lines (that's really a good motivation!), I've turned the tables. I no longer try to make my husband grow up. It won't work anyway. Instead, I try my best to learn about the laugh lines future from him. I practice looking at sofa cushions on the floor as a floor-is-lava playing field rather than a mess. I try not to take bedtime so seriously when we are in a good mood at 8 p.m. And I think more about the fun kator and less about meaningful pedagogy. If at some point our sons find us a little childish, let them do it. I will then giggle at them with my laugh lines and suggest that they apply for child benefit. "It's like care allowance. Just funnier," I say. And I am sure that I will be happy.