Rooty-tooty-toot!

Nope, genuinely no idea

It is time to blow my own trumpet.

Today saw the culmination of several years of hard work and preparation.  My son started primary school and he was completely and totally fine.

This may not seem like such a big thing, but there's a backstory, some issues to explore and ultimately it becomes an example of the kind of marriage I'm hoping to achieve with Furiosa.

Bits of this have only really crystallised over the past couple of weeks, but I'll be taking you all the way back to my son's birth to get a good run-up on this morning's resounding success.

Are you sitting comfortably..?



I really love babies.  I love anybody's babies, not just my own.  I think babies are great.  Furiosa only really likes her own baby, quite likes babies related to her, and tolerates other people's babies when they're not being too noisy.  When our son was born, we shared childcare duties as equally as we could for the first year or so, as much as my job would allow, but we had very different experiences of it.  I found great fulfilment that she simply didn't, and I appeared to be completely free from the huge weight of society's expectations that sat so heavily and obviously on Furiosa.

Yep, that's my wife

Then she goes back to work, and a career that she loves.  It's worth mentioning at this point that she is much better at working than I am.  We both work in more or less the same field, so it's easy to make comparisons.  In terms of aptitude, we're probably about the same, and we're equally qualified.  Where she excels is where I fail; she goes to work and she does her work.  She doesn't mess around with spreadsheets or dice games or any of my sexual fantasy stuff.  I can work hard, and work well, but it's very intermittent and tends to be last-minute and slapdash.  She goes to work and she does her work.

So childcare becomes an issue.  We eventually got it sorted when I started taking him with me to work in the mornings, putting him in the preschool at the end of the car-park.  It's about an hour's drive once you factor in the traffic.  It's a long way, but it was preferable to what came before.  There were 6 horrible months when Furiosa took him to the preschool at her work, which was a horrible place and neither of them were ready for the separation.  Tears every day, from both of them, and it was incredibly hard for Furiosa to get her work-head on in the time it took for her to walk across the car park.

Then we found a childminder in the village who came to our house every day to look after the small one.  None too bright, but give her a child to look after and she was amazing.  It always felt a bit weird coming home to a strange person in your house, though.  I know we were paying her, but there was weirdness.  It didn't help that she used to be a student at the College where I used to work, and we used to travel in on the same bus.  Weirdness.

Then she moved away and we had to look at preschool places again.  Here's where I start getting assertive and offering to completely take responsibility for childcare so that Furiosa can focus on her career.  This arrangement never even occurred to her, as I'm sure it doesn't occur to most people.  I wasn't being particularly submissive or kinky in this offer, but it was clear that this was something that she needed to have done for her.  I found a place, sorted out logistics, went for a look round and made all the arrangements.

And it was horrible for the first week.  He'd been to nursery before, had bad experiences before, and had lots of negative emotions to deal with.  There was a lot of cling, and tears in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon too.  It was also an early start for both of us, out of the house by 7:15 at the latest.  That took some getting used to.  It was much better for Furiosa, of course, as that left her with about half an hour at home with the space and the peace to get ready for work in her own time.  She was much happier, and I knowingly concealed some of the tears from her in order not to worry her.  I'm not proud of that bit, but it worked.

This, this is not me

And I start working on my son.  An hour's drive is a long time, and I quickly become skilled at chatting him down from his floods of tears, steering him round to the idea of playing at preschool and formulating plans of who and what he was going to play with as soon as he arrived.  After 3 weeks he was more or less tear-free, and I was starting to build a really strong relationship with him, something which has come in handy this morning.

We were worried that there'd be some tears and cling again at the transition from Preschool to Big School, and we'd have to have more psychodynamic chats as we leave the happy and comfortable place where he's one of the big kids and go to a weird, new place where he'll start to become suitably institutionalised.  Furiosa has been cranking herself up for a huge panic over this day, pretty much since our son was born, so it was agreed, around the time when letters started to arrive, that I would be the one who handled all the School Stuff.

And so I did.  I took responsibility.  I booked places, went for open days, arranged the uniform, ordered the PE kit and book bag, and pretty much did everything I needed to do to ease my son into the new school.  The school have been wonderful, and have had a couple of settling-in mornings so it's not completely baffling.  He's been to the classroom a couple of times with me, and a couple of times without, and when he started showing some signs of cling there, I stepped things up a bit.  One morning, we just walked up to the school gates at 8:30am, with the hordes of people, and then came home again.  No reason, other than to get to the school, say it's his new school, and then come home again.  Another time we went to take down the yurt with a posse of parents.  I got myself roped into that on purpose, as it would be another chance to visit the school.  Another walk up the road, a view of the playgrounds and the field around the back, and a generally positive time connecting with the buildings and the people.

So this morning, absolutely fine.  No cling, no tears, just a happy little boy in his new uniform walking up the road again.  I actually lost him inside the classroom for a bit, because I had to go back and fish his water bottle out of his bag.  Kids and parents everywhere at this point, and some who were starting to crank up with the separation anxiety.  There he was, though, on the carpet, sitting nicely, completely ready to go.  I indicated that I was putting the water bottle over here, we exchanged a few hand gestures (thumbs up, victory sign, even a salute) and I was off.

Did I mention I find classical musicians sexy?

Rooty-toot-toot.  That's my own trumpet that I'm blowing.

And that's the thing.  I've achieved that over the past 5 years of building that relationship with my son and over the past 2 years being primarily responsible for the childcare situation.  I had to work reasonably hard to get Furiosa to let me do it, and then work hard to convince her that she wasn't a terrible mother for letting me do it.  For her part, she's been much happier at work since childcare has been off her plate, and I can't imagine what this past week would have been like if she had felt more reponsible for the first day of school.  As it is, she's now back on Facebook after a self-imposed ban, asking me to change her password for her about a week ago.  She also had a lot of prosecco last night and went to bed early.  One phone call at 9am this morning, to tell her everything was fine, and she's free to excel in her career, which is what she wants to do.

As for me, I've taken this week off.  It's a pretty bad time of the year to do it, because we're supposed to be enrolling new students, but I'm making a conscious choice to put my career second and Furiosa's first.  In taking responsibility for this, I'm liberating her.  It could be viewed in terms of female-led relationships and submission, but for me it's more about feminism.  As I said before, she's much better at working than I am, so it makes sense to promote her career as much as possible, as that's what currently supporting our family.  I contribute from my part-time stuff, of course, but it's become clear since having a child that our skill-sets lie in different areas, and those areas are in opposition of traditional gender roles.

So, in my continuing mission to be a good wife, I will aim to take responsibility for more things around the house.  This is how I can put Furiosa first and support her in using her brains and her education to improve the world by working in it.  It doesn't involve whips and chains, and there's minimal dressing up involved, but the fewer things she has to worry about, the better she will be at her job, which is what she wants to do.  I don't really want to do a job.  It's okay, but I don't get anywhere near as much out of it as she does.  I much prefer my family and home life.  I like babies, and I like my son.  I'm also really good at regulating him and managing his worries around difficult transitions.  It makes so much more sense this way round, and I'm currently feeling enormous fulfilment knowing that expressing my submission in this way has resulted in good times for the people I care about.  My family is winning.

ȹ