Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [90]
I would do better tomorrow, I told myself. Again, I lied.
The next day, there was soccer for the girls. Now being a good father (usually), I had agreed to (assistant) coach Harper’s team this year. This was my third year doing so. That, one would think, would not be a problem. Indeed, my wife supports the idea wholeheartedly. It does, however, cut into couple time. But so long as it is in the pursuit of our children’s happiness, I would not notch this down as a transgression on the Chastity table.
However.
Taking the girls for an ice cream after soccer and coming home almost two hours postbedtime with two tired, cranky, sugar-filled youngsters did nothing to endear me to my wife. She offered the ultimate rebuke when we returned home: “You know better than that.”
{ Marriage is the most natural state of man, and . . . the state in which you will find solid happiness.}
Scolded like a child, I wondered if I could redeem the week. Could I dust off the recriminations that had been justifiably heaped on me and surprise my wife again? Not likely. Perhaps it is my nature to be a devoted father, but a not-so-devoted husband. Where was the romantic who frolicked beside waterfalls, who rowed canoes through the midnight waters of an ancient river, who read poetry by candlelight?
At the moment that I was asking myself these questions, he was watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Where had I gone wrong? Of all the weeks, given what was at stake, why could I not rise above my infuriating ability to muck things up and truly be virtuous? My attempts to change that were coming to naught—I was blowing it. I was allowing the very things that had hampered me in the past be anchors on my voyage of virtue.
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
As I struggled through the last days of Chastity, I tried, in vain, to up my game. I took on household chores that I might normally avoid like an influenza outbreak, I did yard work for my mother-in-law (actually, I got to use a big saw doing the yard work, so that was really more for me), and I even assisted an accident victim (all right, that had nothing to do with Chastity, but I was grasping here). Despite these efforts, I could not replicate the early success of the week. The fates, soccer schedules, work, and a poor imagination all conspired against me. Finally, by Friday of the week of Chastity, I’d had enough.
Maybe the problem, I reasoned, was that I was in this thing alone. A relationship is, after all, a two-person dance. If only one person knows that the steps have changed, there are bound to be a few toes stepped on.
On Friday morning I called Michelle about some household renovations we had been discussing. During the course of the conversation I decided that it was time to let my dance partner in on the new tune.
“Did you know,” I inquired gingerly, “that this week was Chastity in my Ben Franklin virtue course?” When she replied in the negative, I explained my plan for the week.
“I decided that I would take you seriously when you said that I was not always dedicated to being a good husband. So this week I decided to work on being a better husband.”
“Really,” she replied, “I hadn’t noticed.”
I gathered myself and, with as much dignity as I could muster, asked, “Didn’t you notice the calls to tell you that I love you, the extra chores, the email telling you what a great wife you are?”
“I wondered what that was all about,” she said. “I thought you wanted something.”
I had! I had wanted to become a better husband. I had wanted to make this virtue about fixing one of the most concerning aspects of my precourse preparations. I wanted my wife to think of me in the same way that my children think of me. I wanted to be Superman to my wife.
Instead, I felt more like Clark Kent adjusting his clunky glasses. Virtuously speaking, I was clearly no superhero. The most my efforts had produced was suspicion from my wife. Not affection, not appreciation, not romance,