My house was a disaster area.  I’m not talking about messy, but starting to border on unlivable.  My wife has been tied up with a number of things and hasn’t been able to do much of anything.  My daughter is visiting a friend in Japan, and my son has taken ill and as such is sleeping around the clock.  I’ve been trying to get into a rhythm and that left pretty much nobody when usually there are multiple contingencies for pitching in and getting things cleaned up.

For over thirty years, I was the stay-at-home dad and since my wife was working very long, hard hours at an extremely high-pressure job I made sure that she never had to do anything when she came home.  She often told our friends that she felt like a “husband of the fifties” arriving home with dinner on the table and no cares for the evening except maybe unwinding watching some television.

Once my wife quit her day job, the roles have started to reverse themselves.  It hasn’t been easy for Robin, she’s been pampered for a long time so we’ve shared the various household tasks. But nowadays she wants to keep me writing (and since that’s what I want to do it works out well).

So, yesterday, I came down and plugged in my iphone to the speakers, an indication I was about to roll up my sleeves when my wife stopped me.  She was in the middle of doing a final review of the copy edits for the Rose and Thorn, highlighting areas that I needed to address and accepting/rejecting the “easy stuff.  She told me to go write, that I’d have the file to edit in a few hours, ad then she would be cleaning up.

Not having to ask me twice, I went to my office and started back at Chapter 4.  I decided to add a new (unscheduled section) to it because the first section was more or less a “setup” for the excitement of the last section but I didn’t want them to go back to back.  I had no idea what I was going to put there, so a walk through the woods got that going.

With the morning dedicated to writing new stuff, I had the afternoon to go over the edits for The Rose and Thorn.  Between my exceptional copy editor at Orbit, and the groundwork my wife did, it was easy to  go through.  While I made my way through the file my wife swept, dusted, and scrubbed my office and adjoining bathroom, then moved on to other areas of the house.  From time to time I’d call her in to ask a question.  Evening game and she had a baked chicken dinner waiting for me.  Hmmmm I thought, this seemed vaguely familiar…and nice.

I now find myself in the position that when I start to “do things around the house” my wife shoos me away.  Considering my writing (for my books, blogs, and online sites)  is what I like to to the best, I’m pretty happy with that arrangement.

So I’m now starting to feel like the pampered one…not such a bad thing.  Well that’s it for now. Chapter 4 section 3 is calling to me.  For all the writers out there I hope you have a “significant other” in your life that likes reading your stuff so much that they try to chain you to your desk.  It’s a briar patch I highly recommend being thrown into.