Grant

If there are any single moms out there who think that men don't know what it's like to have to "do it all" I'd like to tell them, my husband, Grant, does. For about one month out of each of my pregnancies he is Super Man. Yesterday he came home to a house that was about 40 degrees (because his wife couldn't deal with keeping up the fire), a starving 14 month old (because his mother couldn't deal with feeding him all day) and a wife who was curled up in a ball on the sofa, where she'd been for at least the past 3 hours, sobbing. The backdrop to this scenario was a house where practically nothing was residing in cupboards or closets. He had the fire going in no time, the kids organized into picking up the house, ran to the store and whipped up dinner, rented a movie for the kids, changed the baby and put him to bed, then finally did his own chores. All this after having been up since 3:30am that morning to get a report done for work. This is a scene that will be repeated multiple times in the next four weeks and has been repeated ad nauseum in the past. He does it efficiently and cheerfully and I cannot express how grateful I am to him. He has been known to complain and shirk household responsibility in times when I am well, but I can and always will forgive him for those times because of how he is during these times. In a previous journal entry written in a previous pregnancy I wrote, "If I ever feel I have occasion in the future to speak ill of my husband I hope I can remember this time when it is almost entirely him who is keeping this family from falling apart completely." Other people help out also, and I appreciate them, but it is Grant who gets me through emotionally, keeps me from constantly daydreaming about death. I don't want to sound morbid or scare anyone, but it's that bad and if you haven't seen my husband as a Hero before, please see him that way now.