When the Primary Parent Is Dad
I am not less of a mother because Clay is more of a father.
When I went looking for photos of Clay for Father’s Day, I realized something right away.
It is almost impossible to find a photo of him without one or both of our children in his arms.
It’s almost like he became a dad and became himself.
I don’t really know how else to say it.
For almost 4 years, Clay has been the primary parent in our family.
And I still feel weird saying that out loud sometimes.
Not because it feels weird in our house. In our house, it feels normal. It feels like us. It feels like the life we built.
But what about out in the world?!
At preschool drop-off, at the doctor’s office, sometimes I wonder what people think when Clay shows up towing both kids and there is no mother in sight.
Like… do they think I’m dead?!
Honestly, that is where my brain goes…
And then I remember…
Oh right. This is the power of what we are doing. This is the power of what we are showing our kids.
That love can look like earning..
Love can look like being the one they cry for.
And in our family, Clay is the one they usually cry for.
That is the honest truth.
And I could pretend that has never hurt my feelings. I am their mother after all. I grew them in my body & I have rearranged every cell of my life for them.
So yes, sometimes there is a little sting but mostly it makes me feel like the luckiest woman alive.
Because I love how much they need him & I love how much he needs them.
I love that my children are growing up with a father who is not peripheral to their lives. He is home. He is their rhythm.
This was not modeled for him. And yet, somehow, Clay became this.
Or maybe he always was this, and fatherhood just gave him somewhere to put it.
I could be Nancy.
When Clay and I first started dating over a decade ago, there was a special on the news about Nancy Reagan. She had just died maybe? and they were talking about how much she loved Ronald Reagan. How devoted she was to him. How, in many ways, she was the force behind the force.
The way a woman could love a man & also be powerful beside him - that was my takeaway.
I remember watching it and thinking: I want to love someone like that.
I want to be Clay’s Nancy someday.
And then, because life is funny and never does things in the order you expect, I became the one out front first.
A Gemini’s Journal
A Gemini’s old journal is a crime scene of playlists, poems, inappropriate crushes, big feelings & delusional clarity.
But recently I found one of my old journals from when I was living in Aruba. I was post-breakup & the future was just starting to feel bright again.
In this journal in particular, I was writing about the life I wanted.
In my dream life I was living on a boat.
I wrote about wanting a family & babies. A girl and a boy.
I wrote about wanting a husband who wanted an unconventional life like I did.
I wrote about wanting to live on the water, sail around the world, raise kids in this wild, beautiful, off-the-beaten-path way.
I also wrote about work.
I wasn’t clear what I would be doing exactly, but it was clear there was this other version of me. The one who gets on planes. The one who walks into rooms. The one who builds something big, takes up space & has something to say.
I had this very clear image of leaving my husband and children on the boat, getting on a plane, flying over the ocean, and changing into my work clothes in the bathroom.
And in the journal, I wrote that I could do that because my husband would be “all in with the kids.”
That was the phrase. All in with the kids.
I wrote that about a year before I met Clay.
Enter Clay Ripma, age 24
Wanted to sail around the world? Check.
So hot? Check.
Incredible sailor? Check.
Could cook? Check.
Grounded? Check.
Everything I did not know I needed? Check.
And on one of our first dates, he said, “I love how ambitious you are.”
Then he said, “I could be a stay-at-home dad.”
At the time, it was sexy.
A man who was not threatened by my ambition? A man who could imagine a life where my work mattered too? A man who didn’t need me to shrink so he could feel big?
Yes. Thank you. Ten out of ten. Yes.
But I don’t think either of us really understood what that sentence would become.
