It’s been a long day at the office and you’re exhausted. You walk in the front door, and your son (or daughter) is on you. “Mummy, I hurt my foot at school. Can you make it better?”. “Mummy, Bobby teased me.”. You didn’t even get a chance to take your shoes off, and you have a million and one problems to solve before dinner.
You check with his father, and he knows nothing of these problems. It’s not that he doesn’t care, if he’s anything like me he does. The thing is, your little one sees you as the problem solver and has been storing up his problems and anxieties until you got home.
In our house, this tends to get exacerbated. I usually get home first and, even though I try talking to Jay about his day and try to find out if he has any issues that I can help with, he almost always waits until Mummy is home before he’ll spill the beans. Even with something as mundane as doing his homework, he’ll put it off until SO is home.
So, what’s happening? Why doesn’t he turn to me for help? Especially on those occasions when he knows SO won’t get home until after his bed time.
It seems to me, we’ve fallen into specific roles when it comes to dealing with him. I tend to be the fun one, the one he turns to when he wants to play games and have fun. Although, with my Torticollis, SO does do a lot of fun things with him so that I can rest my neck. But even still, when it comes to video games, I seem to be the one he wants to play with most.
SO, on the other hand, is the problem solver, the caring one. Maybe it’s my fault too, maybe I should stop telling him to punch people who tease or bully him.
How did this happen? We spent most of the last 8 years training him to be like this. How do we change it? I guess if we really wanted to, we could spend the next 8 years trying to modify his thinking.
But I think what will really happen, is that we’ll continue doing it this way, and just deal with it. Daddy will continue to be the playmate, and Mummy will be the nurturing one.
The real question is, could we have done it differently? Could we have gone against the stereotypes and reversed roles? I think I could have done quite a good job as the primary nurturer, even if my suggestion of this makes SO laugh. But I think this isn’t an option in our household anymore. The roles are set, and even if we started with another one, it would be an uphill battle to redefine our roles within the family unit.
