The Today Show did this thing on the little white lies that go on in a marriage. Sandbagging, as its known in poker, is the same thing as being a pool shark. You pretend to be a lousy player for a couple of games, and then you kill it and win all the money. On the Today Show, it's husbands and wives pretending to the other that their life is one big slave fest (yeah, I don't really follow the analogy either, but it was a Meredith piece...).
Apparently this is something that stay-at-home moms (assuming they were career women before baby) fall prey to, where the minute their husband gets home, they complain about every intricate detail of the hard work they did that day: vaccuuming up the massive amounts of pet hair, the insurmountable Mount Laundry, the kids' bad behavior. Although it might seem like staying at home with the kid is easy, it's a tremendous amount of work, never ending.
What they don't tell their husband is how they had a really wonderful morning, because it was 75 degrees in November, so they took the baby and the dog on a lovely hike on Mount Sanitas, and it was great exercise, and the baby loved it and they sang "You are my sunshine" the whole way.
Because the hike isn't "work," it's not part of the "job" of being a mom. It sounds an awful lot like playing hookey while the hubby is off slaving away in an office for 10 hours a day.
And vice versa. Husbands on business trips to exotic places like Tokyo will phone home and, when their wife asks how Tokyo is, they'll say: I just wish I was home with you and the kids. And the wife knows that's a bunch of baloney; she just wishes for a little bit of adult conversation, a bit of, "Oh, you should see the streets and taste the food and talk to the people...."
The Today Show fear-mongering spin, of course, is that these little "sandbagging" white lies will lead to fractured relationships and infidelity, but really it just reminds me to always tell my husband the good parts of the day first -- the way the baby held onto the coffee table to stand up, and I barely had to hold him; the way we took some extra time on our morning walk to talk to the neighbors; the way our puppy has become little Mama Maggie, always close to the baby. It reminds me to tell him how much I love being a mom, how grateful I am that I get to stay home.
This is an excellent post and I am thrilled to have found your site while looking for illustrations of sandbagging. Mentioned you in my own sandbagging admission and will keep checking back for more.
--Megan
Posted by: Velveteen Mind | April 12, 2007 at 12:25 AM