The miracle

A miracle happened at my house this week.  It isn’t the sort that will bestow sainthood on anyone, but it is just slightly shy of utterly life-changing.

It started with this book.  My dear friends sent it to us for Christmas, and wow, do they ever know us.  The book is called Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard.

It is amazing, seriously.  Following its advice, in one day my husband and I managed to solve several problems that we have spent the past three and a half years arguing about.  Years.

The main problem:  My husband almost never gets home on time.  It takes repeated reminders, an actual appointment that I’ll be late to if he doesn’t, and occasionally even another phone call just to get him to skate in, a minute after I have to leave.  Most days I don’t have anywhere to be, so he just comes home whenever.  This is good for no one, as he often walks into a hornet’s nest of a bedtime in which the toddler is screaming and the preschooler is shouting and I am running up and down the stairs between their bedrooms trying to get just one of them to go to freaking sleep already so I can deal with the other.

Or he comes in and I have already handled everything, so he sits down to eat his late dinner and tries to ignore the glares I am shooting at him because he gets to eat in peace without anyone throwing anything or demanding anything or saying Why? or No! the entire time.  Our whole evening would get off to a bad start or at best a late start, and the stress of dealing with two kids, a part-time job, and now an online class that involves a ton of homework was really getting to me.

I was pretty sure I had already tried everything to change this pattern.  I had tried basically shoving him out the door earlier in the morning so he would come home earlier.  He would still come home late, which meant I was just shortchanged an hour of help every morning.  Awesome.

I had tried changing myself and not him: taking my time and enjoying my morning and accepting that he would miss bedtime.  I ended up bitter and resentful anyway, and my evenings never went the way I wanted them to.

I had tried explaining that he would never treat a day care or school like this.  I had tried reasoning, yelling, crying, negotiating.  Nothing worked for more than a day or two.  He understood and he meant well, but there was always something that prevented his coming home.  I began to despise his job and his colleagues and the traffic and anything else that was standing in the way of my having an equal partner at home.

Then I read Switch.  It talks about finding “bright spots” (when do things go well?) instead of focusing on the problem.  It advises trying three strategies.  First, come up with an appealing goal that is easy to understand. Second, give the people (in this case my husband and me) a few clear strategies that will help reach the goal.  Third, smooth the path to the goal to eliminate some of the roadblocks that often keep us from getting there.

So here’s how the miracle happened…

1) Set the Goal

Thinking about when things went well in our marriage and in our everyday lives led me to this appealing goal:

Be Home for Dinner.

That was it.  I knew that asking him to “be home by 6” didn’t work, or to “be home by bedtime” or to “be home at a reasonable hour.”  All of those were too nebulous and frankly pretty uninspiring. I mean, wouldn’t you rather come home to a quiet house where someone else has already put the kids to bed?  Me, too.

We both feel family meals are important, but I’d been feeding the boys between 5 and 5:30, which was far too early to expect him to be home given his commute.  I’d given up on family dinner and tried for family breakfast.  Even that didn’t work consistently as I now leave for work before breakfast twice a week.  But I knew from weekends that family dinners made our evenings go more smoothly.  So now that I had my goal, I could move on to number two.

2) Give clear directions

If I wanted to have family dinners again, I knew I needed to get my husband home earlier and make dinners a bit later.  So I proposed the goal and then some strategies.  He would leave a bit earlier in the morning.  I would have the kids help make dinner, eating a bit of it along the way, which would make the dinners later.  If he would be home for dinner and bedtime, we’d both spend an hour or two of our evening working so he could finish up on anything that wasn’t quite done when he left early.

To my husband’s infinite credit, he agreed to try it right away.  The goal was so compelling, you see, that we both really wanted to see if it could work.

3) Shape the path

In order to make this happen, I had to be diligent about getting him out the door on time in the morning, rather than taking an extra ten minutes to do chores or ask him to do something on his way to work.  I had to make dinner at a time that he could manage, and let him know that we were waiting for him so he would have a real reason to leave (hungry children) and an easy explanation for any colleagues who might want to detain him for one more question.  “Sorry, gotta go so I can be home in time for dinner with my family,” is so much better than saying, “I have to go so I can be home by 6,” right?

4) The Results

We had dinner all together every day this week.  This is completely unprecedented outside of vacations.  The kids helped me cook and snacked on the vegetables (which I cleverly made first every day) if they got hungry while waiting.  They love to help cook, so I should’ve been doing this more often anyway. See?

making their own dinner while waiting for Daddy

We had conversations about our day over dinner, and one person cleaned up while the other did bath time.  The boys each loved having one of us to himself for bedtime.  By the time they went to sleep, the chores were already done for the day, and we settled down by our fireplace to work away in cozy togetherness.  We got a ton done, and we didn’t fight all week.

In other words, it was a miracle.

So my unasked-for advice to all of you who might have a nagging problem is to start by thinking about when it ISN’T a problem, and figure out how to replicate that.  I hope you can find your miracle, too.