“By giving you this, I hand you my heart and soul, I have not given in, I have given you a gift because I love you and want you to be happy.”

Ok, if you have not figured it out yet I am weird, if nothing else I am odd. I will call myself eccentric because it sounds better than both of the first two. When my brain is not fixated on my wife and kids I usually start wandering all over the spectrum with thoughts of why an artificially set wage rate would affect price and how that affect would affect demand and blah, blah, blah. If I am bored still I might wander off the reservation and start working on the blueprint in my brain for the electromagnetic engine I want to build and patent that would revolutionize the world. If I get tired of those kind of things I jump to my diesel/electric pontoon boat with electric pods like a big ship that I have designed in my head, that I will travel down the Mississippi on. Just me, the river and Mark Twain. Most of the time though I try to look inward at my relationships and see why for instance something is happening and if for some reason I am the cause. Ya, I just got weird again, I know. So, bare with my weirdness some more and keep reading, or don’t. It ok with me.

Many of you know that we have three older kids and one six years younger. I always get the look and the question when I tell someone I don’t know about the age gap between the last one. “Was he a mistake?” is always the question. I then proceed to tell them the story about how the oldest three were getting into Jr. High and how Tammy started freaking out because she realized that they were growing up and because they were all so close together in age they were all going to leave her in a short period of time. Then I proceed to tell them that I fought it for a while, I had everything planned out and was going to have all of the kids out of the house by forty-six and we would be free to do what ever we wanted. I then say, “I finally gave in and said that we could try.” This was always my story and I was sticking to it.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I started picking apart the saying “giving in” one day. I know, weird. I know that I always say, “I gave in”, when I talk about Tucker. I started to question, did I really give in, or was there some other reason I said ok. I started to look at other instances in our lives, whether it was with Tammy or the kids or whoever. I started to look at some of my decisions and put them to a test and see, did I really just give in or was is something else. As men especially, I think we have a stereotype that we are supposed to follow that says you are supposed to rule your roost with a heavy hand and make “the right” decisions for your family. Dave Ramsey would want to strangle me about right now, because he wants you to make your decision for the betterment of your future, and take all of the emotion out of it. I get that, most of the time I try to be rational, not emotional when it comes to those decisions. But, sometimes what is an extra couple of dollars in your 401k compared to someone’s smile.(sorry Dave got off topic there.) So as men, and sometimes women too, we are portrayed as weak, because we “gave in.” An example would be, you and the guys sitting around and one of them asks, “ Where is you wife at?” You sheepishly say, “oh, I finally gave in and said she could go with her girl friends for the weekend. The guys start ribbing you for being weak, and life goes on. Most of the time the ribbing is in good fun, because the other three guys did the same thing last weekend when their wives were gone. My question is, did I “give in,” or did I simply “give.” Some how we beat ourselves up because we made a conscious decision to give. Somehow we view ourselves to be weak when all we really have done is give someone we care about something that they really wanted. We didn’t “give in,”(something negative) we simply “gave,”(something positive). Now don’t get me wrong, there are limits. Just because my seventeen year old wants a Land Rover doesn’t mean that I can just give it to her, but maybe there is something that I can give her that is more important. Another example is that my eighteen year old son doesn’t like to fill up his car with gas for some reason. So sometimes he asks me to do it. If it fits in my schedule then I will do it. Tammy likes to give it to me all the time because I am “giving in” by filling it up for him. “He needs to be responsible for it himself,” Yes I get that, but sometimes I just want to give, for no other reason than its something I can do to help. It is something positive in Tanner and I’s relationship. He doesn’t have to fill up his car and he knows that I care enough about him to do it even if he is capable of doing it himself.

So back to Tucker, I actually told his story yesterday on the plane to Houston and I kind of felt guilty because I said I “gave in,” again. If I really look deep down I didn’t “give in.” I “gave” and I am really proud of that. If you know tucker then you couldn’t think of your life without him in it. Tucker has been very special in our lives. For Tammy and I it was special because it was a chance for us to have only one baby at a time. For the older kids it was a chance to have a sibling that wasn’t always fighting for the same resources because they were almost the same age. He was an expensive gift to my family, but definitely worth every penny.

If you happened to catch it a while back I posted a couple of lines about what love means. If you missed it here they are:

There is a flip side to this coin of giving in a relationship too. As the person who is receiving we have to be conscious of the cost to the one who gave, and also recognize the difference between “giving in” and “giving”. I could go on a week-long hunting trip with the boys and brag to them that I finally got her to give in and let me go. Or I could recognize what my being gone cost her, ie. taking care of kids activities, meals, etc. and be gracious and thank her verbally for doing all of that so that I was able to go. Anyway I am not telling you guys anything you don’t already know. For me I just wanted to verbalize it and tell someone, so the next time someone asks me if Tucker was a mistake I don’t give the standard line about giving in. I will say that I decided that I loved my wife enough that I wanted to give her that gift, and that I am so happy I did.