Sunday, October 19, 2008

giving up the upper hand

It's funny, you know. When we were younger and I wanted Miguel to do more things around the house, and he just wouldn't, I did them myself. Painted rooms, took up carpet, unclogged drains, dug gardens, mowed lawns. Now that we're older and presumably wiser, he is more likely to do the sort of manly things that I previously would have loved him to do. Some of our friends that have only known him since we moved up here, have commented that I'm lucky that he's handy.

But there's an uncharitable part of me that remembers stripping wallpaper when I was 6 months pregnant, planting vegetable gardens and painting fences and all that stuff for years, plus all the cooking and housework, and I want to say to them, "He hasn't always been like that. It's a recent thing."

But I don't tell them. I wonder how much of what he's doing here is motivated by the sheer danger that surrounds us so much of the time, the cold could kill us if we allowed our house to deteriorate, and maybe that's the difference here, I don't know.

What I do know is that relinquishing up the upper hand is hard. If I'm being honest (which I am) I have to say that it's difficult for me to give him credit for these endeavours. I always thought that it was what I wanted, for him to help around the house, but maybe the reality is that I became used to the paradigm that featured me having the moral high ground.

And the irony (maybe that's too global, I always tell the kids that coincidences and unfortunate turns of events aren't per se ironic) is that now that he's doing these things, I can't be happy for his personal growth because nobody in our lives at the moment can see that he's had a free ride up til now....... Although really, what does it matter.