by David Finch
That’s how Kristen handles things. She doesn’t look backward, only forward. In doing so, she had committed the ultimate act of going with the flow. It was a perfect model for me to follow, but of course, I failed to make that connection. And for years, I kept failing. She constantly had to remind me to chill out. The other cars got a green arrow and I didn’t: “Relax, Dave. It happened four hours ago. You can’t let it ruin the whole day.” Emily ate a candle: “This isn’t the end of the world, Dave. No, you don’t need to fly home from Italy, she’s fine.” Both of our children proved to be terrified of people in costumes after we waited in line to buy tickets at Six Flags Great America: “Dave, oh well. Let’s find something else they’ll enjoy.” “Okay,” I would say. But how?
Sometimes I argued with her. “Going with the flow is for hobos and douchebags. It’s for people without goals or vision. People with nothing to accomplish. Me, I’d rather accomplish things.” She would insist that going with the flow wasn’t about complacency or letting the tide carry you along. “People like you especially need to learn how to adapt,” she’d tell me. “You do have your own vision, you do have goals to pursue. But life throws punches and if you don’t roll with them, you’ll get knocked down and you won’t accomplish anything.” For the longest time, her point failed to sink in, even when she put it bluntly: “I don’t like being around you when you’re flipping out over stupid stuff. Knock it off.”
Her message finally clicked for me in the fall of 2008. I was sitting on the floor in our family room, trying to make good on my most recent Best Practice: folding laundry. I had a meeting with my sales director the following morning, and I was watching SportsCenter on ESPN in preparation for his inevitable sports banter—sort of like cramming for an exam. The show’s anchor made a reference to one of the greatest tennis champions of all time, Roger Federer, and as I squared up a pair of boxers, I took a moment to wonder what it must be like to be the best at something: This Federer can’t lose—he just wins all the time. Well, not all the time. I guess he can’t win every point. He doesn’t win every game, actually, or even every match. But he’s the best—I like that. Federer knows what he needs to do and he doesn’t let a bad call or a loss bring him down and . . . OHHHH!
I scrambled up the steps and into our bedroom, waking Kristen to share my epiphany:
“I was watching sports highlights and it all makes perfect sense now! Go with the flow! Pick the battles! Let things slide! I don’t, so every day we’re putting out some big drama fire. I wish I would have realized this years ago!”
“Sports highlights taught you this?” she asked. “Really, Dave?”
“I know you’ve told me this six million times, but it’s so clear to me now! I think I’m onto something!”
“That’s great,” she mumbled. “I’m happy for you.”
That was the most enthusiasm I was going to rally from Kristen given the time of night, so I grabbed my notebook from my nightstand drawer and—in a manner of speaking—teed off. A highlight reel of my journal entry that evening might look something like this:
Go with the flow.
Purpose—Flexibility is an essential social skill, like communication. Being inflexible prevents me from experiencing joy which is right in front me. It stresses me out. My failure to adapt has driven a wedge between Kristen and me. It’s making me a bad role model for my kids.
Payoff—If I can learn to go with the flow, then I will be a more stable husband and father. I won’t have to live in a constant state of agitation. I may start enjoying things!
Process—Start by learning to pick the battles. Learn the difference between critical and favorable outcomes. Emily and Parker never, ever coloring on the walls with crayon would be favorable. Raising kids who don’t flip out every time something goes wrong—leading by example—is critical. If necessary, ask Kristen to help define what’s important.
The storm of ideas and dot-connecting finally let up around two A.M., and rather than finishing the laundry, I went back to the beginning of my entry and thought about what I’d written. Going with the flow was shaping up to be an essential behavioral goal, on a par with Be her friend, first and always. Which worried me, because going with the flow was clearly against my nature. Then again, if I were relying solely on Best Instincts, there would be nothing to practice.
I can do this, I thought. There are so many areas in my life that will improve by going with the flow. There’s no telling how much of a game changer this is going to be.
Chapter 7
When necessary, redefine perfection.
One night not long after my SportsCenter epiphany, life handed me a test. Looking back, it was more of a pop quiz with one question: So, you think you can go with the flow? Kristen and I were visiting our friends Andy and his wife, Mary, who live next door to us. Andy and I are polar opposites. He is muscular, laid-back, and has a nose stolen from a Roman statue, while I am skinny, neurotic, and have a nose that sometimes whistles when I make out. But we’ve been close friends since kindergarten, when we both witnessed a girl eat a handful of pumpkin seeds during a pumpkin-carving project and immediately throw them back up. We were the only kids who cheered; everybody else freaked out. In high school, I wrote poems about mathematics and dreamed up marching band configurations while Andy played team sports and made new friends. That’s when he met Mary, and they’ve been together ever since, more than half of their lives.
Kristen and Mary were both pregnant when we all decided to build houses right next to each other, in a new subdivision situated on what used to be a vast piece of cropland. (I had driven plows through a patch of soil not far from where our houses now stand, so I have to laugh when my neighbors refer to their riding lawn mowers as “tractors.”) The developer planted some scrawny saplings along each street, which ought to look pretty nice in about fifty years. But for now, the absence of real trees only draws attention to the homogeneity of our neighborhood. Everything looks the same from the outside—two-story houses with tan vinyl siding or brick facades and cedar fences. It’s all very cookie-cutter. Andy and Mary went with siding, Kristen and I chose brick, and our floor plans differ somewhat. But in terms of looks, that’s where dissimilarity ends. Our floors, countertops, kitchen cabinets, and bathrooms all look identical, which makes it easy for me to feel comfortable when I’m in their house.
Unlike certain other of my living arrangements, moving next door to Andy and Mary proved to be a great idea. We were guaranteed a good neighbor, for one thing, but living side by side also made it fantastically easy to visit them.
It was Andy’s birthday and Mary had planned a quiet little get-together for him that evening. Just his parents, his family, and our family celebrating the occasion over ice cream and an impressive homemade layer cake with chocolate frosting in the middle.
Mary was handing me my plate when Kristen took a bite and cried out, “Oh my God, this cake is amazing!” Andy nodded, his frosting-smeared mouth too full to say anything, while his parents agreed: “It’s really good, Mary.”
“You made this, Mary?” Kristen asked. “Dave, try some.”
I took a bite and rolled my eyes. “This is what all other cakes should strive to be.”
Mary had spent a good portion of the day making the cake and Andy’s favorite dinner, pork tenderloin, but according to Andy she didn’t let that interfere with her normal routine of cleaning the house, playing with their kids, and working out.
Kristen chuckled from across the room. “Poor Dave. He never gets pork tenderloin and cake on his birthday. Not unless we go to his parents’ house. Sorry, hon.” Everyone laughed but me. I chewed my lip, trying not to compare Andy’s typical day with mine—the housework he wasn’t obligated to help with, the amazing meals he got to eat, the buttons sewn back onto his shirts for free. Kristen winked at me, and rather than playing along, I helped myself to another serving of Mary’s cake. I might have found Kristen’s little joke amusing had we not eaten cold cereal for lunch that day.
Kristen and I returned home to our day’s messes—the dishes piled high in the sink, the random books and magazines sitting on the couch next to a flashlight and an empty box, the kids’ toys scattered across every room. Good lord. Kristen took the kids upstairs for bed while I straightened up a bit. Mary had sent us home with cake, and I was searching our dirty, crowded refrigerator for someplace to put it when Kristen came downstairs and asked me why I was being so crabby.
I didn’t want to get involved in an argument, so I lied, saying that I wasn’t being crabby at all, I was just looking for a goddamn place to set the cake down in our disgusting pit of a refrigerator. “That’s all.”
“Come on, Dave,” she said. “Use your words.”
Fine. I removed some cartons of leftover Thai food to make room for our miracle cake and shut the door. Let’s have some words.
“You know what, Kristen? A few weeks ago, I thought that I had come to terms with my expectations for you as a homemaker. I thought I had all that shit figured out—it’s not your job to do that stuff, it’s everyone’s responsibility to pitch in. So I’ve been helping with the laundry and I’ve been feeling okay. Then, tonight, we go next door and I see every one of my expectations for you being realized at every turn with someone else. Mary’s cooking up pork and baking a cake and vacuuming and God knows what else they’re up to over there. I thought I had this shit under control two weeks ago, but apparently, I don’t. I don’t. I’m admitting it right now, and it’s ugly, and it’s not fair to you, and it makes me feel like a real asshole, but there it is.”
She could have stormed out. She could have agreed and called me an asshole. Instead, she nodded the way she does when I’m telling her something she already knows.
“So, you want me to be just like Mary?”
Do I? I paused, wondering. Part of me wanted to say yes, but another part of me wanted to be happy with what we had. Kristen and I weren’t complete failures when it came to running a household. It wasn’t as if our house was filthy, it just wasn’t always “company-ready,” as my mom would say. Our house was always clean enough—no more, no less. Same with meals. Kristen made sure the kids ate healthy foods for meals and snacks, and when she wasn’t at work she kept them on a loose but reliable schedule: breakfast, lunch, and dinner served at the usual times, with snacks in between. But we never ate together as a family. Most nights, I had no idea when I’d be home from work. Plus, Kristen and I found that we could enjoy our dinners in peace if we waited until after the kids were asleep. One of us would usually start cooking something simple—pasta, tacos, that sort of thing—at around eight thirty. But that was purely for my sake. Kristen made it clear that she would have been perfectly content to eat olives right out of the can for dinner, but I insisted on hot food, served on a plate. “Like real people,” I told her.
Because she wasn’t in the habit of planning meals, Kristen rarely took care of the grocery shopping. We’d start making tacos and realize halfway into the process that we had no cheese or taco shells, and so I’d find myself driving to the grocery store at nine or later—when it seems very few decent people are out shopping. I’d return from the store, we’d finally eat dinner, and then she would turn on her computer and work until she couldn’t stay awake any longer. Reports had to be written, invoices had to be submitted, questions from her husband like “Aren’t you going to do the dishes?” had to be graciously ignored. She allocated little bandwidth to domestic greatness because bandwidth was scarce and necessarily limited to domestic functionalism. It was perfectly understandable, but I had been raised to expect that a home would be managed better than that.
“You know that being a homemaker isn’t my highest priority,” Kristen told me, reaching into the refrigerator and plucking a smidgen of frosting from the miracle cake. “For some women, like Mary, it is. And God bless them for it, because it is a lot of work. But I’ve got you to put up with—that takes most of my energy right there.”
“I don’t want you to suddenly turn into Mary,” I said. “But I expected that you would naturally be like her, and it’s still messing me up.”
“I get that, but let’s face it: You’re saying Mary’s perfect, right?”
I hesitated to comment, although there was plenty of evidence to support Kristen’s statement. For as long as I’ve known Mary, she has seemed perfect. In high school she graduated third in our class, was a fantastic swimmer, remembered birthdays, and was nice to everybody. In college, she was a perfect straight-A student, still remembered birthdays, and was still nice to everybody. After college, she couldn’t wait to start her life with Andy—she was excited to be his perfect wife. Now, as an adult with children of her own, Mary is the perfect stay-at-home mom. She keeps their house immaculate and every time I’m there it smells like whatever new, fabulous meal she’s been preparing from scratch.
Mary does more than take care of her own family. In addition to her own kids, she also takes care of ours and a few others from around the neighborhood. Yet she never looks tired or frazzled. When we pick up our kids in the afternoon, Mary hands us an activity sheet that chronicles their day: what the kids ate for morning snack, what they ate for lunch, what they ate for afternoon snack, how long they napped, when they had diaper changes and trips to the potty. Everything’s on the sheet, including what they did for fun: We read books and played dress-up all morning. At noon, the weather was nice so we went on a picnic at the park. Afterward, we sang songs, made alphabet letters out of bread dough, and rode bikes.
Things always run according to plan in Andy and Mary’s house. Meals, for instance, are served promptly at seven thirty, noon, and six o’clock, and they all eat together. On Mary’s pristine kitchen countertop, next to the tidy stacks of incoming and outgoing mail, lies her meticulous family schedule.
Tuesday 1:00 P.M.—Clothes shopping for kids *Note: sale at Carter’s, bring coupons
Tuesday 2:00 P.M.—Drive home *Note: be home by 2:50 to defrost meat
Tuesday 3:00 P.M.—Defrost meat / Clean toy room
If you were to exit through Andy and Mary’s front door, turn right, and walk a hundred feet to our house, you’d find just the opposite. We’re not the sort of people who have a schedule or even a to-do list, but if we were, you might find it scrawled across a takeout napkin, and it would include such things as Fish cell phone out of garbage disposal. Figure out where the car seats went. Pay water bill, ask city to turn water back on.
“I’m saying Mary’s an ideal homemaker,” I said. “But I’m not asking you to become a domestic goddess—that’s not my point. My point is that I don’t want to expect that from you anymore. I’m trying to change myself here, not you. Tonight was just a setback.”
“Whatever,” Kristen said, leaning in for a kiss. “It’s fine. Good night.”
She yawned and headed upstairs for bed, while I stayed in the kitchen and helped myself to yet another piece of Mary’s cake.
The next morning, I awoke to Kristen kissing me on the forehead, telling me she had to go to work. “The kids are ready to go to Mary’s. Can you take them?”
I nodded into my pillow, blinded by the sunlight streaming in through our bedroom windows.
“Thanks,” she said. “I love you.”
“Love you, too.” Okay—last night was a setback. That’s all. Time to get back on track.
I navigated through the usual morning chaos with the kids—more cereal please; not that kind of cereal; more water please; I meant juice; look, my pants are on my head; my shoes were in Mommy’s purse so can I wear my rain boots—and at eight thirty, we headed next door.
“Is Kristen working early this morning?” Mary asked as she helped me to remove the kids’ shoes and jackets.
“Yeah, and I did not sleep well last night.”
“How come?”
I hugged the kids and they ran off into Mary’s toy room, which was clean and organized and filled wall-to-wall with books and games and crafts. The house already smelled like
pot roast, and Mary—who looks so much like Kristen that they’re sometimes mistaken for sisters—looked as fresh and relaxed as ever.
“Who knows,” I said.
Mary laughed and asked if it was because I’d eaten so much cake the night before, and then she abruptly marched into the kitchen, saying: “Wait here a second. I have something for you guys.”
I stood in the foyer while she continued talking to me from the kitchen, and I noticed how few decorations they had in their entryway compared with the rest of their house. There were pictures and mementos scattered throughout the other rooms, and the one that stood out was a hand-painted rendition of a poem that Andy’s sister had written for them as a wedding gift. The words escape me, but the gist was that their love shades the path of their life, like trees growing over a road. Something like that. It was heartfelt and affecting, and when Kristen and I weren’t getting along, any thought of that poem aggravated me. There were some trees painted in the background and the entire work was framed and displayed above their formal living room love seat.
The closest thing we had to a handmade emblem of our love was a torn sticker on Kristen’s rearview mirror. It read PRINCESS, KRISTEN. When we were dating I had printed this on a label maker at work. The original sticker read THE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT PRINCESS, KRISTEN. I’d created it in response to a label she had given to me after I’d gotten emotional talking about how happy I was to be with her. YOU ARE SUCH A GIRL, it read. My first response read YOU ARE SUCH A BITCH. I tossed that in the trash. Too risky. Then I made the princess label. When I gave it to her, she tore off the part she liked best and stuck it on her mirror. No frame. No trees. Just pure label-maker romance.