My girls are on an overnight field trip.
Every year the upper grades at their school dress as Russian settlers and go an hour up the coast to Fort Ross, CA,
a Russian settler encampment,
where they spend a couple of days living as those settlers did.
They have aprons.
They have fake money.
They have fake names.
But the best part of all is that
what they also have is
my husband.
From the moment the girls brought the paperwork home explaining about this trip they were begging him to be a chaperone.
The man who hates dressing up.
He said he would try to get the time off,
and I was pleasantly surprised when he actually did;
But, as the day of the trip grew closer,
he seemed more and more resistant to going on the trip at all.
“I just really don’t want to,” he told me on more than one occasion, but when I asked him about why, he just said he didn’t know.
Until yesterday,
when he finally confided that he thought the real reason was because of the costume he’d been given and told to wear for the entirety of the trip.
The costume he had been the last one to pull together from the bottom of the costume bag.
He said he was given all the scraps.
Having not seen the outfit in question,
I asked him to go put it on.
After all, how bad could it really be?
Friends,
I am here to tell you that when he emerged from our bedroom 2 minutes later wearing it,
I laughed so hard at him that all the kids got scared and the dogs ran outside.
I was seeing stars as I bent in half over the sink;
Tears dripping down my face.
I had to take two Tylenol.
Because, though his expression was silent and bitter, refusing to make eye contact,
all I could see while looking was that he was currently living some kind of hilarious pay-back for every little thing that I’ve been through over the years due to motherhood.
This costume was exactly the kind of Spouse Dunk-Tank I needed.
This one scene with him standing there in the hall was enough to make up for all the nights I was ever up cleaning throw-up while he peacefully slept.
Enough to overlook all the times the kids have walked right past him, sitting on the couch, to ask me to do something for them while I’m clearly busy and elbow deep in raw chicken breasts.
This outfit on his body for two solid days leveled him up in my mind with all the childbirths, and all the mesh postpartum underwear wearing that those births entail.
For two days he will he referred to as “Chickanique” (Cheek-a-neek),
a name I will definitely be calling him into the golden years of our lives.
Chloe later put the icing on top of it all by telling me that he would be required to go on a day hike along the coastal cliffs while wearing it.
Seagulls circling that black, fuzzy hat.
It just kept getting better.
The image of this kind of tiny silhouette trudging along the coastline cliffs…
Oh…
This outfit feels like everything.
And I know some wives would be much more “Poor baby,”
but for me, the thought of him stirring a pot of something sludgy over a campfire high up on a cliff looking like this is giving me life right now, and if it was me I know he would be laughing, too.
Because no matter how much you love each other, if you’ve been married long enough,
I think we can all admit –
We kind of need to see the other person as a Chickanique.
A few moments where we just need them dressed in a robe that looks like it has burp cloths that are poorly attached.
He can do these two days.
Days my girls will never forget.
Days I pray to God that my friend remembers to stealthily photograph like I asked her to.
No husbands will be harmed in the making of my joy.
He can wear a hat that already has bits of bark, and someone else’s hair stuck in it.
He can wear a shirt that he says he
“feels vulnerable” in for 48 hours;
Because in doing so,
it will provide me with the gift of the visual of it forever,
and that visual may be all I ever actually need to get through whatever Chickanique days are coming for me next.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
