Captain’s Prerogative Number One

Youngest daughter came home looking like she had just done a heavyweight boxing title defense. She wasn’t in a fight, but she’s clearly had some fabulous allergic reactions to mosquito bites on her face, under her right eye and on her neck. Face is all puffy, airway is all good so not a 911 deal. Phew.

Stupid ass teachers though, how do they not notice this?

Anyway… a quiet evening home watching the Benadryl do it’s thing and tomorrow is 50/50 about needing another round of Benadryl to finish the job. Jennifer has a couple of important meetings tomorrow, one of which she is running, so I am a little too gleefully hoping youngest needs to stay home from school. That would mean I would just have to stay home as well – you can’t load up a middle schooler with Benadryl and wish her the best of luck lol.

So anyway – the official perspective on why the Captain stays home and not the First Officer…

(1) We both actually have real jobs that are fairly important in terms of the organization we work for.

(2) Tomorrow I have routine work that I would be doing, but nothing critical that I can’t miss or do another day.

(3) She has two important tasks at work tomorrow, one of which very much depends on her.

So for tomorrow at least, it is a reasonable request that I be the one to stay home and watch youngest. It’s not a Fitness Test on Jennifer’s part. I’m not being a weak-minded Beta by offering to stay home either. The team has a problem to fix, and I’m the one that is going to be least put out by fixing it. As I said, it’s a reasonable request that I be the one to stay home.

Now if we both had serious stuff we couldn’t miss, we’d probably do some sort of juggling thing where one of us worked early, and one of us worked late and switch off in the middle of the day, and/or use Grandma or Jennifer’s sister for kid watching duties.

If we were totally tapped out on options to cover it, and say we both had to be somewhere important at 1pm and there’s no hope of family coverage… it would fall to Jennifer to do it. I could probably kick-start my Avoidance Weasel to come up with a bunch of reasons why that is… “I have a nursing license, I simply can’t just abandon my patients and put my license at jeopardy… you have more PTO built up than I do, if I take today off, that’s one less day we can spend together as a family this summer…”. But I’m not going to reach for that stuff as an excuse.

The simple truth is Jennifer wants to play the good mommy card and be with the sick kid, and I wouldn’t want to miss an important work thing for a sick kid. Push come to shove, she’d be at work feeling guilty, I’d be home feeling a little pissed off. So as sexist as it sounds, when we actually default to the stereotypical sex roles, we’re both happier for it. We don’t actually want to be perfectly equal.

But it doesn’t really get as far as KIDCON2 for us very often. So hopefully tomorrow I get to stay home on a beautiful sunny day, miss some mundane stuff at the job, relax with a little TV or a good book, and lovingly drug youngest into a long nap.

Fuck yeah!

I mean… “Captain’s Prerogative Number One. I’ll handle this, report to your usual assignment.”