Category Archives: Family

Uncle!

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Growing up, that’s what I had to scream to get my older, more muscle-brained brother to temporarily stop pulverizing me. The other night, the youngest, the oldest-Betrothed, and I streamed an episode of Wonder Years. I said to youngest daughter, “Every time you watch Wayne, think Uncle D because they’re one and the same.” If you don’t know Wonder Years and aren’t familiar with Wayne, fix that.

One time, in my late elementary or junior high years, I frantically called my mom, a secretary, at work, “This time he means it! He’s really gonna kill me!” Her somewhat shaken co-worker said, “Aren’t you going to go home?” To which she replied, “No, he’ll be fine.” Yeah, if by “fine” you mean found unconscious in the fetal position on the kitchen floor. Once, when the most mad I had ever been, I remember “Wayne” saying to me, “If you hit me, you better knock me out, because if I get up I’m going to kill you.” What’s the statue of limitations on something like that?

Our last fight was when he was 19 or 20 and I was 16 or 17. All I remember is flying across the family room. My girlfriend was aghast. Everyone of the innumerable beatdowns will fuel me when racing Iron-person Canada in late August as I desperately try to level the score by beating Wayne’s time.

But I digress. My most recent reason for crying uncle has nothing to do with my knumbskull older brother. It has everything to do with this picture, taken while on the Eastern Sierra climbing trip I blogged about a month ago.

Living REALLY large

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been going through a transformation of sorts—a reordering of my life based upon an amalgam of ancient philosophy, minimalism, and discontent with mindless consumerism. All of that exhausting, status quo fighting non-sense is now in my RV rearview mirror, thanks to a reverse Paul of Tarsus-like conversion inspired by seeing this badass rig up close and personal.

Uncle! I give up on trying to live more simply so that others may more simply live. My new motto is “You only live once. Embrace the bling. Less is less, more is more.” Admittedly, a tad wordy, but in the spirit of my conversion, if some words are good, more are better!

My plan is to find a similarly equipped rig on Craigslist. Well, maybe a little bigger. If you know of one that has a flip down plasma t.v. built in so that I can watch Will Smith movies outdoors, holla’.

A smaller ecological footprint be damned. Greater energy independence be damned. As one of my friends says, “Only when we’ve used up all the carbon-based energy, will we have real incentive to find alternatives.”

If you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a lot of shopping to do for the inside of my new rig-to-be. And no bro, you can’t roadtrip with me. You should have considered the possibility I’d end up living really large when you were floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.

In Praise of Meghan Vogel

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All the news isn’t bad. And maybe today’s youth aren’t a lost cause after all.

Sick and tired of big time college and professional sports? Knuckleheads running afoul of the law, the commercialism, the cheating, the excesses of competition. Then take a few minutes and read about how Ohio high school trackster Meghan Vogel (on the right below) recently stopped to help a fallen competitor across the finish line near the very end of the 3,200 meter final.

Maybe it’s an especially touching story because we mistakenly think competition is an elixir for all that ails us. Vogel’s decision highlights the power of cooperation. Her compassion and humble response to her fifteen minutes of fame inspire me. And the surprising decision by the meet officials not to apply the letter of the law and disqualify the two student-athletes warrants praise.

[But of course, all the news isn’t good on the adolescent front.]

Vogel, “I just did what I knew was right.” Credit: AP Photo/The Daily Call, Mike Ullery

How Not to Ruin a Prodigy

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The title of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Missy Franklin’s swim coach, Todd Schmitz. It could have also been titled, “How to Piece Together a Rewarding and Successful Career.”

With Schmitz’s guidance, I expect Missy Franklin, 17, from Denver, to spend her last summer of high school collecting medals in London. At least I hope so. I admire her approach to the sport and life. A large part of her success is attributable to her laidback mom and dad, and Schmitz.

The Journal story, linked to above, praises Schmitz for his deft handling of Franklin, specifically, limiting her to ten to twelve hours of training a week, about half of what most elite swimmers do. “One recent week,” Matthew Futterman writes, “Schmitz told Franklin to skip practice to get ready for her boyfriend’s prom.” Franklin says balance is as important to her success as stroke improvement. When her parents were asked why they didn’t encourage her to move to California, Texas, or Florida to swim with a much more prestigious club her father said, “Why would we? We have a kid who is happy and who keeps swimming faster.”

But there’s an at least as interesting a story within the story. And that’s the story of Schmitz’s coaching career. Within that story there are lessons for new college grads or anyone looking to jumpstart their work life.

Lesson one—Plan ahead. Futterman writes: Schmitz’s work ethic and passion for coaching were apparent when he swam at Metro State, where after practice he hung around to write down that day’s routine and ask about the philosophy behind it. “That’s rare,” said Andy Lehner, ex-coach of Metro State’s now-defunct swim team. “Most kids after practice are pretty focused on what their next meal is going to be.”

Ask high schoolers what the purpose of high school is and most will say to have fun. That mindset is evident in college to. I’m not anti-fun, but young people in high school and college need to balance having fun and strategizing about the future. Schmitz’s post practice routine nicely illustrates that.

Lesson two—Figure out what brings the most joy. Again Futterman: Before joining the Colorado Stars, Schmitz tended bar, waited tables and ran a lawn-mowing business. A business major, he became a junior executive with a national restaurant chain. But corporate success was less appealing to him than a career beside the pool, and a year after college he accepted a full-time job as the under-8 coach of the Colorado Stars, a club with about 130 young swimmers. Schmitz’s dad said he wasn’t surprised when Todd quit his corporate job to coach full-time. “It was obvious when he was dealing with kids how excited he was about it. It became real apparent that this was where he was getting his joy.”

Lesson three—Put in the time. No shortcuts. Futterman writes, “Schmitz arrives at the pool around 5 each morning and during the school year leaves most evenings at 7.”

Lesson four—Make other’s lives better. “Colleges eager to conscript Franklin,” Futterman explains, “could offer Schmitz a coaching job—a recruiting strategy that is not unprecedented in cases involving a huge star.” But Schmitz says the Stars club is big-time enough. His dream is to gain funding sufficient to build the club a pool.

I predict that Schmitz, with Franklin’s help, will get a pool built for the club. That will be a nice legacy. Schmitz’s work is worth emulating.

Missy the Missle

Driving Hate Underground and the Illusion of Progress

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I need help in the form of divine intervention, a Pentecostal moving of the Holy Spirit, to feel any kind of Christian brotherhood with Sean Harris, senior pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Here’s an excerpt from one of Harris’s recent sermons:

So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign [sic] her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.'”

Hearing the hate in his voice makes it twice as troubling. Take two minutes to listen to it here.

I saw Harris interviewed about his sermon on CNN. He didn’t apologize. Instead he backpedaled on some of the words he used, like “punch” by which he meant “shove”. Oh, okay Harris, all is well as long as parents are just shoving their young children for not conforming to your homophobic conception of traditional gender roles.

Harris’s “sermon” has gone viral and he says he’s received tons of negative press including death threats. Responding violently to Harris’s violence makes no sense from either a Christian, Constitutional, or common sense perspective. The best response would be for everyone to stop attending his church, but the most troubling aspect of this saga may be the congregation’s seemingly unconditional support for Harris. They laugh and cheer throughout the sermon and have come to his defense following the media backlash. Are these the only couple hundred of people in the country without a gay or lesbian family member or friend?

Harris presents an interesting case study of hate. Hate crimes obviously have to prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but what about hateful thinking and speech? Once Harris’s semi-private thoughts and words were made public, he felt a need to temper his hate by offering up a series of synonyms in the hope that some combination of them would appease the media and public so that they’d move on to the next story and leave him alone to pastor his church.

The key question is how do we create public spaces—whether school or church classrooms, community centers, work conference rooms, or public media—where the Harris’s of the world can articulate their fear, anger, and even unadulterated hate without the fear of being tarred and feathered? Because until we shine the light of civic discourse on hateful thinking and hate speech, it will fester, increase, and intensify.

The current way of dealing with hateful thinking and speech is to silence the perpetrators through what often takes the form of “counter hateful thinking and speech”. Instead of leaning more heavily on the First Amendment, we opt for public shaming. Expose them on YouTube and compete to see who can damn them to hell most quickly, creatively, and persuasively. As a result, no one ever learns anything about the underlying causes of the perps’ fear, anger, and hate. And we delude ourselves to think we’re making progress. All we’re doing is driving hate farther underground where it festers, increases, and intensifies.

The CNN interviewer who interviewed Harris looked like he was quite proud of himself. Post interview he was probably thinking, “Boy, I really held his feet to the fire, taught him what is and isn’t acceptable, and caused him to feel at least a little remorse.”

Wrong. I suspect Harris’s only take-away was “I have to be more mindful of the media’s reach.” Worse than not feeling remorseful, I suspect Harris’s fear, anger, and hate towards homosexuals is now coupled with amped up anger and hate towards the mainstream media. Whether Harris likes the media is less important than whether we create public spaces where a wide range of challenging, even hateful ideas can be discussed openly and honestly in the hope that the pockets of hate that prevent the church from fulfilling it’s mission and limit the potential of our democracy can be chipped away at.

We have a very long way to go.

Data Driven Parenting

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There’s a new religion in town. Data collection. And unlike mainstream Protestantism, the number of adherents is growing rapidly.

In the Atlantic, Mya Frazier asks whether statistical analytics make for healthier, happier babies—or more anxious adults.

The answer Mya is more anxious adults. The data driven gospel continues to gain momentum and data skeptics like me are getting our asses whupped. As a fraternity brother said to John Belushi in one of the best movies ever made in Eugene, Oregon, “The war is over man.”

Frazier writes:

THE DAY THEIR SON was born, Monica Rogati and her husband began obsessively plotting his life via thousands of bits of data they punched into the smartphone app Baby Connect. They called the data “baby I/O,” a reference to the computing expression input/output and the kind of “geeky joke,” as Rogati puts it, that you might expect from a pair of professional data crunchers with doctorates from Carnegie Mellon. With the baby’s feedings (input), diapers (output), sleep sessions, and other accomplishments duly registered, he generated 300 data points each month.

This may sound like a lot of information for a very small person, but it’s typical grist for apps designed to tally a baby’s every blink and burp and sniffle, in hopes of charting his development over time. Among Baby Connect’s competitors are Total Baby, Baby Log, iBabyLog, Evoz, and the new Bedtime app from Johnson’s Baby, as well as Web-based programs such as Trixie Tracker (which an enterprising stay-at-home dad named after his daughter). Since Baby Connect launched, in 2009, Rogati and 100,000 other users have logged 47 million “events,” including 10 million diaper changes (with annotations in exacting and unmentionable detail).

The goal of these apps is to make parenthood “a more quantifiable, science-based endeavor.” The statistical analytics or “crowdsourcing” will provide an early-warning system to help parents determine what is and isn’t out of the ordinary: “He’s in the 50th percentile, he is perfectly normal.” Or “This is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe this is not normal.” It will be a way, Monica Rogati says, “to debug your baby for problems.”

Yikes, as they’re studying the spreadsheets, crawl kid! As fast as you can.

Well wait, before criticizing these apps, I have to confess, I’m a hypocrite. I like me some fitness data. I wear a watch that reads satellites so I know how far I’ve run, my time for every mile, how much elevation I’ve gained, and approximately how many calories I’ve burned. Despite my interest in some data that the Rogatis might find overkill, these baby apps strike me as super-superfluous. I understand parents want to know “what’s normal”, but that’s where conversation with grandparents, friends, and written references has served us well through the centuries.

Are the Rogatis leading us down a path to being more smart-phone dependent, and thereby, less likely to lean on family and friends? Is the passing down of wisdom from grandparent to parent passe´? Are we officially throwing in the towel on interpersonal conversation and community? And this classic?

I should probably just zip it and step to the side so I don’t get trampled upon as the masses storm the iTunes store for the latest and greatest app.

What is the world coming to?

Notes from the College Search

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Spent Friday with the Good Wife and Sixteen visiting a private liberal arts college in Spokane, Washington—not the one with the very good Division 1 basketball team. The one with a very good Division 3 basketball team.

My main objective was not to embarrass Second Born by not saying or doing anything to bring myself attention. I was doing really well until mid-day. Early on we learned about the “Three Littles” that every student strives to accomplish. . . 1) get hit by a frisbee; 2) accidentally break a dish in the cafeteria; and 3) catch a “virgin” pine cone—meaning one that hasn’t hit the ground. In the middle of the campus tour, I faked catching a pine cone by droping to the rear, picking one up of the ground, then exclaiming to a few peeps around me, “Look, I did it. I caught a virgin pine cone.” Turned out more than a few people heard. Everyone liked my head fake except Golden Locks.

Thought one. A prediction. Higher education, like every other institution, is changing and will continue to change. However, the pace of change will be slower than the “experts” anticipate. Online “education”, or the cynic in me prefers, “internet coursework”, will continue to challenge the traditional “brick and mortar” model of schooling. Hybrid programs will become more common. But based on Friday’s sample of one, private, read pricey, residential liberal arts education is alive and well. “Spokane” University is thriving despite a relatively small endowment. It’s becoming more selective, it’s improving its already nice facilities, and it feels like there is a lot of positive momentum.

Thought two. A paradox. Many private liberal arts colleges offer financial aid packages that average 30-40% of the tuition and room and board “list price”. This coupled with Washington State’s public universities having to increase tuition 15% annually into the foreseeable future, means many families of high achieving students will find privates more affordable going forward. “Spokane” University has four merit-based scholarship tiers. The higher your grade point average and SAT or ACT score, the greater your financial aid. The second tier is a 3.7 and 1880 on the SAT if I remember correctly. That’s worth something like $15,000 each year. Any high schooler planning on going to college should think long and hard about taking any part-time job that might negatively impact their grades. You’d have to scoop ice-cream part-time at Baskin Robins for five years to make $15,000.

Thought three. Confirmation of a core belief. I believe economic anxiety explains most behavior these days. Especially, but not exclusively, middle and upper middle class parents of K-12 students. One of the day’s events was a panel discussion with four “Spokane” University students answering questions. Of the dozen or so questions asked during the hour, eleven were asked by parents. The only explanation I could think of for that was deep seated anxiety about their children’s futures. I wanted to tell the lady with red hair, who asked a few different questions, to “shut the hell up,” but I had already embarrassed TSwift once. Incredibly aggravating. Free parenting advice—at least try letting your son, who looked like a grown man to me, find his own way.

I took one picture. No, not of the beavers I saw on my run along the edge of the over flowing Spokane River, not of the baby ducklings, and not of the loquacious woman with red hair.

Dig the smart mix-use design

Finally, most importantly, make sure whatever college you decide to attend has plexiglass backboards.

Teaching Grit Continued

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[Editors note: Please notice that in the right-hand margin I’ve moved my twitter feed up. My tweeting is just too genius to reside anywhere else.]

Thanks to last week’s comments, I’ve continued thinking about teaching and grit. The two primary questions I’ve been grapping with are: 1) What is grit? And 2) Should it be taught in public schools?

1) What is grit? We think it consists of courageous acts in the face of opposition. For example, a hiker survives for six days after an 800 pound boulder pins his arm. Eventually, he uses his pocket knife to self amputate his arm and somehow he survives the ordeal. The height of grittiness right? Or the marathoner who withstands 80+ degree temps and a series of surges to hang on and win.

But Duckworth and her colleagues define grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” The hiker wasn’t thinking long-term, he wanted to live to see the following week. The marathoner’s performance probably doesn’t qualify as gritty as his months and years of race prep. Is it possible that the elderly couple who have stayed married for sixty years despite personality differences, debilitating illnesses, and financial hardships are especially poignant examples of grit? Or the baseball player who breaks into the “bigs” in his mid 20’s after years of honing his craft in single, double, and triple A?

Or the alcoholic who has been sober for several months, years, or decades?

Or Jim Abbot, the one-handed former professional baseball player who I heard interviewed on a Seattle radio station this week. Abbot pitched at the University of Michigan, and in the 1988 Olympics, and in the “bigs” for a decade. His “grit quotient” has to be off the charts.

Or just read the opening of Michael J. Fox’s most recent book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, about what it’s like to get out of bed, shower, shave, and get dressed with advanced Parkinsons. Fox’s resolve in the face of daily challenges is inspiring, but I’m not sure it constitues grit since it doesn’t involve long-term goals. Clearly though, his grit is evident in the foundation he’s spent years building, a foundation that has radically improved the pace and prospects of Parkinsons research.

If my “grit quotient” was higher, I’d have published a book or two by now.

2) Should it be taught in public schools? Not as simple a question as it first appears. Seymour Sarason, in The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform, contrasts teachers with docs. Docs he says have been honest about how difficult it will be to cure cancer. He argues they’ve done a great job of managing expectations. They continually remind the public that there are genetic and environmental variables (like smoking and nutrition) that are outside their control. They repeatedly say any progress will be slow. As a result, the public appreciates the real progress that is being made.

On the other hand, teachers, too altruistic for their own good maybe, have taken on more and more intractable social problems—like hunger and poverty, teen pregnancy, racial reconciliation, and most recently, childhood obesity. And let’s not forget that business leaders, journalists, and politicians like Bill Gates, Tom Friedman, Arne Duncan, and President Obama routinely, if somewhat indirectly, blame teachers for our slowing economy, for letting our lead slip in the global economy, and for our declining standard of living.

What should families be responsible for? What should “the community writ large” be responsible for, whether non-profits, religious youth groups, or civic associations? I anticipate one loyal PressingPause reader, a school counselor in a poor community, to protest, “But if families aren’t teaching grit, what are we supposed to do, just sit back and watch their children not accomplish meaningful long-term goals?” Fair question that highlights this is a real dilemma.

Back when Obama was smoking dope at Occidental (belated and weak 4/20 reference), and Nineteen was about to start kindergarten, the Good Wife and I had a meeting with her two teachers who wanted to know what we most wanted her to learn during the year. I suspect my answer was different than most. Growing up in a reading intensive home with two experienced educators as parents, I wasn’t worried about basic literacy. “I’d really appreciate if you’d help her develop a social conscience,” I said. “I want her to be in touch with her privilege and to be an empathetic person.”

That was a private Quaker kindergarten which I grant is a little different animal, but one wonders, should public schools teachers be held responsible for young people who don’t have a social conscience? Do public school teachers set themselves up for failure by taking on way more than literacy and numeracy? Does their seeming willingness to take on a never-ending list of social problems partially explain why the “powers that be” are so dissatisfied with their performance and are pressing to evaluate and pay them based upon their students’ test scores even though the problems with those proposals are painfully obvious?

Despite Sarason’s insight, I believe the study of grit, it’s absence and presence, can most definitely be taught in the context of reading and writing instruction. Student have to read and write about something. Why use innocuous, fictional reading material when they could be introduced to stories that prompt discussion about perseverance, long-term goals, and grit? If Sarason were still alive I wonder if he’d see any harm in that.

If a grit curriculum doesn't fire you up, what about a grits curriculum?

Can Grit Be Taught?

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Angela Lee Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychology prof, studies “grit” which she defines as  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals“. In this 18 minute-long TED talk titled, “True Grit: Can perseverance be taught?” she summarizes her research without really answering the question.

Her premise, I assume, jives with most everyone’s life experience—achievement involves far more than natural intelligence. An impassioned, focused, single-minded person who perseveres in the face of obstacles almost always accomplishes more than the really smart person who switches from project to project and quits when things don’t go smoothly.

From wikipedia: Individuals high in grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods of time despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs. Essentially, the grittier person is focused on winning the marathon, not the sprint.

I think “resilience” is synonymous with “grit”. So can resilience or grit be taught? If not, why not? If so, how?

A lot of especially resilient or gritty people seem to have tough childhoods in common. Yet, there are a lot of people who had tough childhoods who aren’t particularly resilient or gritty. So does genetics or “nature” play a part? Probably, but that doesn’t mean one’s environment is irrelevant. I suspect one’s environment is more influential than one’s DNA.

So what kind of environments cultivate resilience or grit? This recent essay titled “Even Happiness Has a Downside” provides insight into family settings that are unlikely to cultivate resilience or grit—most contemporary ones where the parenting default is to remove obstacles from children’s lives. An excerpt: “. . . being happy, being satisfied, saps the will to strive, to create. It’s why we don’t usually expect trust-fund babies to be cracker-jack entrepreneurs. For all our happiness talk, we actually cultivate dissatisfaction. We don’t want to hog-wallow in the useless sort of contentment that H.L. Mencken derided as “the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard.” 

Of the cuff, in her TED talk, Duckworth uses a  related phrase that may be the ultimate target for those interested in cultivating resilience or grit—”intestinal fortitude”. Related question. If a young person is to learn “intestinal fortitude” are they more likely to learn it in school, through a curriculum designed to cultivate it or at home or in their community by observing adults who model it? I would enjoy the opportunity to design a resilience, grit, or intestinal fortitude curriculum, but when it comes to cultivating those things in young people, outside of school modeling probably holds far more promise.

Young people are unlikely to develop resilience, grit, or intestinal fortitude given the extreme child-centeredness that characterizes contemporary parenting. That doesn’t mean families should intentionally accentuate dysfunction, but they shouldn’t shield their children from the inevitable headwinds every family faces either.

I’ve enjoyed coaching girls high school swimming from time-to-time the last few years. The swimmers are wonderful young people, but few of them show much resilience or grittiness. When practice is most difficult they suddenly have to go to the bathroom or stretch their shoulders. They’re unaccustomed to being truly fatigued and they’re mentally unable to push through temporary physical pain. They have a lot of great personal attributes, but for most of them, intestinal fortitude is not among them.

At dinner tonight (Sunday the 15th), the Good Wife suggested we watch Mad Men tonight after it airs (to avoid commercials) instead of Monday or Tuesday night as has been our recent habit. Why? So that Sixteen can watch her show uninterrupted Monday night. Some context. Sixteen is a great kid, works exceptionally hard at school, and looks forward to chilling in front of the t.v. for an hour at the end of several hours of homework (with some Facebook mixed in for good measure). The Good Wife’s intentions are understandable, it’s a well deserved dessert, but I ask you Dear Reader, how gritty is our next generation likely to be if they’re not even expected to share a television from time to time?

[Postscript—Thanks Kris for the Duckworth link.]

The Great Recalibrating

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Three years ago, back when Peyton Manning was a Colt and Tim Tebow a Gator, things were groovy at work and home.

I was enjoying bringing home the bacon and the GalPal was cool cooking it. She’d cook Mondays-Thursdays, I was Fridays and Saturdays which was great because we’d usually go out one of those nights, and we’d wait each other out on Sundays. Culinary homeostasis.

Actually, domestic homeostasis. She was laundry, me lawn. Her household maintenance, me financial planning. Her labradoodle, me cars. Her school paperwork, me taxes. Her hippy food co-op, me Costco. Her hardwood floors, me carpets. Her weeds, me edging and fall leaves.

And then things started to go south at work. I haven’t written much about that because everything is relative, I’m a tenured professor in a tough economy, and a lot of people would love to have my “first world” work problems. Long story short, I’ve been reorienting, tweaking my interests and identity so that both are less work-centric. I’m still committed to teaching well and doing right by my students, but I’m blogging instead of writing academic papers, sidestepping University Committees, not teaching summer school, and spending less time on campus.

The transition hasn’t been easy in part because deemphasizing work is tough to talk about with my friends who are in the prime of the careers and mostly enjoying working long hours. Doubt they’d understand my desire to strike a different work-life balance, to live more simply, to relish more than normal time alone, and to not be busy.

And while I’ve been striking a different work-life balance, my Betrothed has been too, but in the exact opposite way. She’s tired of taking care of the children and the house. She wants to be challenged in new ways, to broaden her identity, and to be of service to more than her family and house.

So right as I’m resigned to accepting the world as it is, she’s intent on changing it—by teaching adolescents to be bilingual.

Our different orientations present challenges on the homefront. Challenges that have resulted in some conflict. I’d like to used some of my freed up work time to hang out and travel with her, and she’d like that too, but her work schedule is a limiter. And she wants me to take on more domestic responsibilities. At first, when I objected to doing more around the house, she didn’t think I supported her desire to work. Through lots of discussion, she realizes I do. I dig her ambition and I’m glad she’s isn’t as cynical as me. I like that she still has a lot of fight in her.

One outcome of our talks has been a change-up in the kitchen. I’ve been “promoted” to Chief Cook and Grocery Shopper. Now I cook dinner Mondays-Thursdays and Sundays. While I work my “magic” in the kitchen, foreign language teacher lesson plans.

Some bumps have formed in the “dinner-prep” road. First, my repertoire is limited—all things breakfast, wraps, pasta, sandwiches and soup, pizza, all things breakfast, wraps, you get the idea. Second, I now appreciate more fully what the foreign language teacher has said sporadically in the past—the hardest part is deciding what to prepare. Of course, bumps one and two are related. Third, we’re always running low on some ingredient or we’re running low on some key staple—fruit, milk, eggs, etc. What I’d give for a close “one-stop” shopping store.

I hereby offer a belated, but heartfelt “thank you” to all the women who have played Chief Cook and Grocery Shopper at different times in my life—The foreign language teacher, mother-dear, big sister-dear, mother-in-law-dear. If you’re a woman who wishes the men in your life were a wee bit more appreciative, figure out how to get them to take over the grocery shopping, the cooking, and the kitchen detail for two weeks. That’s all it will take.

Our marriage, like most I suspect, works best when we pay at least as much attention to the other person’s needs as our own. The problem is selfishness comes more naturally and easily than selflessness. After 25 years, it’s time to think more about what I can do to help The Good Wife achieve her professional goals than how I can succeed in my own career. She’s always been supportive of my career and I’m indebted to her for that. It’s time to repay the favor. Here’s hoping she doesn’t get too sick of my cooking too soon.