The End of Full-Time Grandpa (And Other Things I’m Not Supposed to Admit)

I’m going to confess something, and I need you to hear it with some grace.

When I found out Ellie’s babysitting hours were getting cut roughly in half this summer, I felt something I wasn’t entirely prepared for. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t dread. It was approximately 30% relief — and somewhere between “pleased about it” and “absolutely horrified that I’m pleased about it.”

Here’s the thing about spending the better part of eight months as a near-full-time caregiver to a tiny human: you become incredibly important. You control what she eats. What she plays with. When she sleeps. You are, functionally, the benevolent overlord of her entire world — which sounds like a power trip until you realize the overlord is also cleaning up after every snack and quietly celebrating when she naps on schedule. The point is, Ellie is my buddy, my partner in crime. My best one right now, honestly. And I’m not entirely sure I’ll find her caliber of companionship roaming around in the wild.

But she is also, for the record, almost entirely dependent on me. Which makes it a healthy grandpa relationship. Not a control thing. I want to be clear on that.

The Alibi is Gone

For the past eight months, Ellie has served a dual purpose in my life that I didn’t fully clock until just recently: she was both my greatest joy and my best excuse.

Can’t make that thing? Babysitting. Can’t get to that list? Babysitting. Skipping the world’s least urgent errand? The baby. Sorry.

It worked because it was true. My schedule wasn’t my own — it was a rolling remix of my son-in-law’s class schedule and music lesson calendar, with occasional guest appearances from “early drop-off day” and “can you just grab her a couple extra hours?” Neither of which I ever once actually minded. Love my girl. But now that the schedule is loosening, the alibi evaporates with it.

And here’s the uncomfortable thing that emerges when the alibi goes away: I have to look directly at what semi-retirement actually is. No more buffer. No more built-in structure. Just me, a calendar with some new blank space in it, and the gnawing suspicion that “semi” is becoming less defensible by the week.

The identity crisis, it turns out, keeps scheduling follow-up appointments.

So, What Now?

I have been running through the options with the seriousness they deserve, which is to say I’ve been loosely rattling them around in my head between walks and online chess games.

There’s the bucket list route — though I’ve always been a little suspicious of people who pursue bucket lists “blindly.” Life tends to edit your bucket list for you whether you ask nicely or not.

There’s the T-shirt brand idea, which sounds ridiculous until I remember I occasionally hit a genuinely funny idea in what I can only describe as an elusive zen-sarcastic state. Mugs, maybe. Something.

There’s volunteering — the classic semi-retiree move that buys you grace, purpose, and a totally legitimate reason to defer the bigger decisions until your wife retires and the two of you can figure it out together. I’m not above this plan. I’m almost in favor of it.

What I’m not doing: more crypto. More forex. More anything that requires me to hand my optimism over to an algorithm and hope for the best. I made it to semi-retirement with most of my wits intact, and I’d like to keep that streak going.

What I am doing — and this one feels right — is leaning harder into the semi-autobiographical writing I’ve been circling for a while. There’s something in there worth saying. There are stories I’ve been carrying around waiting for someone to sit down and actually write them, and lately that someone keeps making eye contact with me in the mirror.

The Part That’s Easy

Here’s what I already know, even before I figure out the rest:

I want to be the grandpa who’s down on the floor. The one who pretends to sleep and gets “rudely” awakened by a curious toddler who thinks this is the funniest game ever invented. The one who’s genuinely present — not physically in the house but mentally somewhere else drafting a passive income strategy.

I missed parts of my kids’ childhoods that I can’t go back and retrieve. That’s just honest. But I get a second pass at this — not to rewrite anything, but to actually feel what I apparently drove past too fast the first time around.

If every project I consider from here on out has to fit around that commitment — being available to my kids, being present for my grandkids, staying on the floor — then that’s not a constraint. That’s the whole architecture.

If I never find anything more valuable than that, I’ll consider it a life well-lived. Ellie didn’t know she was giving me an eight-month tutorial in how to be that grandpa. But she was. The “semi” might be fading. The purpose is getting clearer.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Vote

I had a freshly minted Oklahoma driver’s license and a new voter ID card sitting in my wallet, and they were starting to feel impatient.

I wasn’t about to run a stop sign just to manufacture a reason to flash them at law enforcement. An election seemed like the safer route for everyone involved.

Springtime in Oklahoma usually means there’s a primary or some hyper-local issue pulling citizens to the polls. Moore was holding one — a single item on the ballot: permission to raise the sales tax a full percentage point. Effectively, a quarter more every time someone off I-35 feeds their family at the Chick-fil-A. The city thought they made a compelling case. A tax is a tax, and I rarely play along with these schemes.

My polling place turned out to be a church connected to the walking track I use most mornings. Despite my brave outward appearance, I am a fragile creature held together by avoidance and minimum human exposure — which is why I walk the track instead of the neighborhoods, where barking dogs and leaf blowers would require constant earbud adjustments, and I’d arrive home worse than I left. But this felt elegant: leave the path mid-walk, vote, return home on foot. Zero carbon emissions. Maximum civic righteousness. Superior plan.

The church was a ghost town.

The only sign of life was a janitor with LED spelunking gear strapped to his forehead. Because Oklahomans are terminally friendly, he didn’t just tell me the poll workers hadn’t shown up — he shared his entire political manifesto. Didn’t see any signs when he came in, which told him everything. Votes absentee. Not a fan of tax increases. Voted against it himself. Since this was a City of Moore issue, he suggested I contact them directly.

Back home, I worked through the list of alternate polling locations. When clarity remained elusive, I called. The receptionist needed some convincing that an election was actually happening today. Once she accepted the premise, she reflected, “I did see a few extra people around.” A few questions later, I had my answer: my zip code says Moore, but my street address only piggybacks on it. I live in the county. Not a Moore resident.

My credentials never left my wallet.

New working theory: if I’m voting on anything state or national, the church on the walking track is my spot. If the ballot involves Moore taxing out-of-towners — well, the measure failed 56 to 44. They didn’t need me. The chicken sandwich survived.

The Knight Takes a Different Street

If you read last week’s post, you know I wandered into two strangers’ yard, dispensed unsolicited landscaping advice, and left feeling like I’d done something useful. I also gave them hockey tickets, because apparently I was in a generous mood and hadn’t yet learned my lesson.

The tickets didn’t work out.

I was at the grocery store Saturday afternoon when she called. Their HOA had issued an ultimatum — something involving condemnation proceedings, HOA jail, or possibly being forced to live in their dispensary. I’m fuzzy on the exact bylaws. The panic, however, was real, and the solution was an emergency run to Tulsa for a trailer full of sod. She felt terrible about the tickets and wanted to make sure it was okay if someone else used them. I told her, of course, and that she was being more conscientious about free tickets than I ever would have been. Her guilt was running at a much deeper level than the situation required.

Knowing one of them has a bad back, a sod run sounded like a terrible idea. But they had a plan, and me adding unsolicited opinions to their plate wasn’t going to serve any purpose. Good on them for having a plan at all.

What I didn’t know was that the universe had already logged my next move.

Easter evening, I went for a walk — solo, audiobook loaded, no agenda. My son and his fiancée went a different direction. I made a small adjustment to my route. I now understand this as my first mistake.

I turned onto their street just as they were staring down the second of two pallets in the trailer. Four pallets total, two days of work — this was just a fraction of the pain, and they were already operating on fumes. I had options. A tactical retreat was available. Reversing my path before eye contact was made remained technically possible.

I did not take my options.

“I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I left you to finish this by yourself.” They tried to wave me off. I borrowed some gloves and got to work.

The first several rows went fine. I loaded the hand cart; they wheeled it over and unloaded; and then, I grabbed a couple of loose rolls in the meantime. We chatted. I asked if their friends ended up liking the game. They didn’t go either. The tickets had now failed two sets of people in one evening, which felt like a record. They kept thanking me, and since the only adequate response was to actually finish the pallet, I stayed focused on that.

Sod operates on a cruel law of physics. The pallets used a standard Lego stacking principle — two rows of five left to right, two rows of five up and down — and the lower I went, the heavier each roll became. This may have been the physics. It may have been me. I didn’t investigate too closely. The trailer walls felt like they were narrowing. The ceiling felt lower than it had been. I was taking longer breaths between rolls, doing a controlled squat my knees were filing complaints about, and wrestling each roll into position so it wouldn’t unravel on me before I could get a grip.

By the last two rows, I’d stopped pretending to be efficient. I just shoved them to the back lip of the trailer so they’d be easier to reach. I told myself this was strategy. I let that stand.

When the last roll came out, it about killed me. The good kind, I think.

I asked if they needed help with the pallet itself. They did not. They thanked me at a volume and sincerity level that was probably appropriate to the situation and possibly flattering to my ego. I started the walk home.

My clothes were dirtier than an Easter stroll should produce. My gait had become something I’d describe as a waddle, which my “muss-kulls” — what I call my muscles when they’re tired, overused, and acting thick — were working to correct one awkward step at a time.

Judy looked at my socks when I came in. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I told her none of it was blood. I told her I’d rather be known as someone who helps than someone who watches. I believe that. I also believe there’s a line between good neighbor and slightly creepy yard stalker. Unloading sod for people I’ve shaken hands with exactly once is, at minimum, unusual.

Their landscaping nightmare isn’t close to finished. They still have to till the dead grass, put down topsoil, grade the whole thing, and actually lay the sod. But my work in their yard is done. I know a route adjustment that’ll save me considerable time and laundry. Should the knight in me feel the pull to rescue the maidens again, I’ll choose a different street — just to remove the temptation.

A man has to know his limits. Especially on Easter.

The Shortest Tech Support Call We Never Made

What damage can a ten-month-old do to your TV setup? More than we realized. More than seems physically possible, actually.

It started innocently enough. Ellie got hold of one of the remotes, turned the TV on, and we assumed it was harmless. Baby presses button, TV turns on — fine.

Here’s the thing about feeding Ellie: she flaps her hands behind her head while she’s taking her bottle, blindly dragging anything in reach into her orbit. Grandpa holds the bottle — this is established — so during feeding I move the remotes to the drink holder, safely out of range. System works. Problem solved.

What the system did not account for was afterward. Bottle done, burping complete, Ellie back on the floor. I drift into the kitchen or pull out my phone, and the remotes are still sitting in the drink holder — perfectly accessible to a child willing to pull herself up and attack from the front. Which she was.

After Friday night’s hockey game, we settled in to watch something. Standard process: TV on, navigate to Apple TV, enjoy the evening. Except nothing came up on Apple TV. Just the screen saver, sitting there, completely indifferent to the remote we were pointing at it. The remote and the TV had apparently reached an impasse while we weren’t looking, and nobody had informed us.

We tried everything. Recharging the remote. Restarting things. Staring at it with quiet fury. Eventually we surrendered, opened the Amazon app built into the TV, and watched something we hadn’t planned to watch. It was fine. We were not fine.

By Saturday afternoon, I had mentally written off the Apple TV entirely. Ten-month-olds: 1, Apple ecosystem: 0. I started logging into streaming services directly through the TV, which meant hunting down passwords, discovering some apps weren’t available, and arriving at the outer edges of my patience faster than I expected. Judy, after 35 years, recognized the signs immediately. Her internet search took about four minutes and produced a fix I hadn’t found in two hours of frustration.

A few steps, a reboot, some waiting we were impatient about, and the remote and Apple TV were talking again. Reconciled. Like nothing happened.

Do I think Ellie deliberately sabotaged our Friday night entertainment to demand more attention? No. She’s ten months old. But through sheer persistence and an impressive run of luck, she managed to decouple our remote from our streaming device, hold our evening hostage, and escape without consequence — because timeout is not yet in the toolkit.

The list is growing. Gates for the stairs. Cabinet locks. And now, apparently, a secure location for remotes that does not rely on our optimistic assessment of what she can reach.

She seems very pleased with herself. She always does.

Amateurs

We hit every red light on the way home from the last regular-season hockey game. Every single one. It was nearly 10:00 on a Saturday night, and the lights had not gotten the memo

My wife, in a tone that does not brook dissent: “What incompetent traffic engineers.”

This is not an unusual comment from her. We both share the impulse, actually. I come at it with sarcasm. She comes at it with how she would fix the problem. Neither approach accomplishes much, but both get to the root of who we are. I default to humor. She sees a problem and intuitively knows how to solve it.

If she could clone herself, she’d dispatch a copy to every corner of society plagued by inefficiency. We’ve had car-ride conversations where she single-handedly fixed healthcare, immigration, and the tax code before we reached the driveway. I realize the world is a lesser place for having only one of her — but if there were an army of her fixing the planet, I’d still only be married to the original. I can barely keep up as it is.

So I couldn’t let her traffic comment go without a small test. “We’re good at making brisket in the oven but not on the smoker,” I said. “Does that make us incompetent?”

Her reply, patient and obvious: “No, dear husband. We are smoking amateurs. We are not incompetent.”

This is the woman I love. Her humor is surgical. It doesn’t land with the same splash as mine, but it challenges me every time — and it’s a daily reminder that I don’t have a corner on wit in this household.

She had also handed both of us an escape hatch before Easter Sunday arrived.

We’ve attempted brisket on the smoker three or more times this hockey season. None of them were shoe leather exactly, but they involved more chewing than I prefer. Yesterday we swallowed our pride, pulled out the oven bag, and went with the hard-to-fail method. Six-plus hours, then a little time in the crockpot while we’re at church.

We may be amateurs in the backyard. At the table today, we’re professionals.

Oklahoma Hockey (and Other Natural Disasters)

Oklahoma weather forecasters don’t give you a report — they give you a threat assessment. A full week out. Not “bring an umbrella.” More like “settle your affairs and consider your roof a temporary situation.” We’re talking atmospheric tantrums that halt air travel, reroute rivers, and occasionally redecorate entire zip codes. I’ve lived in the South long enough that Ohio has some catching up to do, but Oklahoma still plays in its own division — the one where the meteorologists have agents.

Friday night was billet appreciation night at the Warriors game. It was exactly that. It just came with an unscheduled intermission.

The evening started with a charcuterie spread and adult beverages — a social event, not a meal, which is a distinction that matters when you’re trying to justify the brie. Judy and I were mostly there to spend time with the mother of our age-out boys. The year a player turns 21 is the end of his junior hockey career — and the end of his time with whatever family took him in. Crowds aren’t really my preferred operating environment, and I didn’t know most of the people there, which meant I got to perfect my “engaged bystander” expression for the better part of an hour.

The Warriors came out and went up 2-0. As the last team to squeeze into the postseason, this was not how anyone expected them to play. The backup goalie was in net. Nobody cared. The lead was everything.

Between the first and second periods, all the billet families walked out onto the ice. The boys skated over to whoever feeds them and does their laundry, a photographer snapped pictures, and each family received a personalized engraving — “Gruenbaum” was the name etched into our Warriors billet family keepsake. Genuinely lovely gesture. Also, not the reason anyone is doing this. Nobody stands in their guest room — the one now permanently scented with hockey equipment and teenage ambition — and thinks, you know what would make this worth it? A tasteful engraving. The season tickets and monthly stipend do the actual persuading. The engraving is the cherry on top of the “I have a teenager living in my guest room” sundae. A very nice cherry. But still.

The second period had good hockey. Our boys were competing.

Somewhere between the second and third periods, while the crowd watched chuck-a-puck, my phone buzzed. Tornado warning. My first instinct was purely structural: we’re in a large, well-constructed building, they’ll just keep playing. This is what years of Oklahoma meteorology does to a person — they scream wolf so enthusiastically, so consistently, that eventually you stop flinching and start quietly rooting for the wolf just to see how it plays out.

Then our son called. He’d forgotten we were at the game, but since he was near our house, he wanted to use our storm shelter. Permission granted. Good kid. Efficient crisis management.

The arena announcer — who normally delivers commentary at a frequency only retrievers can decode — was suddenly, remarkably, comprehensible. “Leave your seats now and make your way under the bleachers. This is not a test.” The crowd moved efficiently, calmly, without drama. In Oklahoma, a tornado warning is less an emergency and more a scheduling inconvenience.

Judy had more urgency than most. She was ahead of me almost immediately, and by the time we reached the concourse I’d lost her in the crowd. I checked the rooms along the hallway under the bleachers, doing a quick inventory of the available Judys, which came up short.

Under the bleachers, the true Oklahoma spirit revealed itself. Someone nearby announced, loud enough for several people to hear: “I hope the tornado doesn’t mess up my Amazon delivery.”

Cell signal was rough, so anyone who had it became an involuntary broadcaster — announcing radar updates to whoever was standing close enough to hear. The murmuring started: How long would they keep us down here? Would they wait out the full watch? Would the game even finish? Then a guy who had clearly aced every weather-related exam Oklahoma had ever administered worked his way through the crowd and told everyone to head back to their seats. No report on what happened to the west. No update on what occurred to the east. The information was: go sit down.

The Warriors finished the night with a W. The tornado moved on to inconvenience someone else. And somewhere nearby, a Ring camera confirmed that a package survived the whole ordeal without incident.

The Pudding Aisle

My daughter and I had a cooking project last Tuesday. She went through my “make these someday” recipe stack, picked her favorite, and we drove to the store to collect what we needed.

I always end up in the pudding aisle.

I’m a pudding voyeur from way back. Pre-COVID, the butterscotch section alone gave me options — store brand, off-brand, multiple sizes. Now it’s just Jell-O, one size, take it or leave it. I leave the chocolate lovers their big box. I don’t need to understand them.

The cook-or-instant question isn’t really a question. Pudding is not meant to meet cold milk in a bowl and get stirred into submission. It’s meant to dirty a pan. It’s meant to thicken slowly while you stand there wondering if you’ve stirred constantly enough to avoid burning it. There’s a small gamble involved, and I appreciate that in a dessert. If you reach for the instant box, you’ve already answered something about yourself.

My daughter — the one I babysit for — has been known to locate the butterscotch box sitting in my cabinet, waiting for someone with patience and standards. I’ll make it for myself if I have to. But knowing someone thinks me worthy of a cooked product is a better feeling than I probably should admit.

Way back when my wife and I were dating, my future mother-in-law bought me a butterscotch pie. To make me feel welcome, I think. She didn’t bake it herself, which, in retrospect, was the correct level of effort for someone who hadn’t decided about me yet. I didn’t make nearly enough of a fuss over it — being a young man of profound emotional stupidity, I offered the bare minimum of gratitude. I’m making up for it now by gatekeeping the pudding aisle. It’s called growth.

I used to make homemade butterscotch pudding too, in the double-boiler era. Every recipe I look at now just says “saucepan.” If you’re currently content with the pre-made plastic-cupped pudding from the refrigerated aisle, I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.

Many of my taste preferences have shifted over the decades. The butterscotch ones have not moved an inch. They remain loyal, patient, and occasionally indulged.

And I probably shouldn’t mention this, but my granddaughter tried a small spoonful the other day. The look on her face was familiar. I’m choosing to believe it’s genetic.

Yesterday Was a Good Day

Yesterday was a good day. Not the day off I pictured when I took this job (it isn’t an actual day off, but we pretend), but a good day.

When I signed on as the primary caretaker for my granddaughter, the wins were simple. Bottle finished. Burp achieved. Dry diaper confirmed. The job description fit on an index card.

It doesn’t anymore.

Now, a good day means I kept her entertained long enough that she went down for her nap without excessive drama. It means everything ran on something resembling a schedule, because the adults in her life are trying very hard to pretend their lives aren’t a complete shipwreck since she arrived. It means I successfully assessed which objects on her high chair tray were unlikely to choke her, a calculation made more interesting by the fact that God has not yet seen fit to give her teeth.

The surveillance portion of the day is non-negotiable. We walk laps — kitchen, living room, hallway, back to kitchen — while she conducts a thorough inspection of everything that has changed since her last walk. Usually, nothing has changed. She checks anyway.

Outside, it’s the mulch. The brown mulch in the flower beds has captivated her in a way I cannot fully explain. It fits perfectly in her little fists. Also in her mouth, which is where most things end up. Her appetite operates on one schedule: eyes open.

A good day also means I timed the diaper change correctly. Change her, set her down in the living room, execute the strategic maneuver of leaving the bathroom door open, and move with purpose. If the math works out, I’m washing my hands when her little crawling body appears around the door frame, just making sure I’m not having an adventure without her.

Then there are the moments that have nothing to do with logistics.

The reluctant laugh — the one where her tummy figures out she’s ticklish before she’s fully committed to the idea. The way she sticks her chest out when you hold her hands, and she leads you, with great authority, to all the important places that require daily review. The diaper bag left unzipped for thirty seconds, which is thirty seconds too long, and the full excavation that follows. She’s looking for something. We don’t know what. It goes in her mouth.

She has also discovered my glasses. There is a game now — I didn’t name it, she invented it — where she removes them from my face with the focused determination of someone defusing a bomb. I’m usually holding her because she’s in a pre-nap mood, which means I’m also the only available entertainment. The lenses are a mess. It’s fine.

There’s also the nap itself, which raises its own question: when she wakes up crying after forty minutes, is she actually awake, or just passing through? The answer determines whether I have time to start dinner. I have not yet developed a reliable system.

The job description has changed, but so have the fringe benefits. She has a personality that walks into a room before she does. The diapers are worse, the opinions are louder, and she has a will that I respect even when it is aimed directly at me.

But I get to watch a little human discover herself. Every lap around the kitchen, every fistful of mulch, every reluctant laugh — she’s figuring out what the world is.

She’s not the only one.

The Self-Appointed Yard Whisperer

This is a further explanation of one of the titles included on my “semi-retired” business card. (Mulch Magician)

My wife was out of town again, which meant dinner was whatever was in the fridge that could survive a second heating. After staring at three containers of uncertain origin, I decided a walk was a better option than food poisoning roulette.

I had an audiobook. I had a route. I had a text out to my son one street over, which he was apparently in no hurry to answer. Fine. I walked.

About ten minutes in, I spotted a couple of women in a front yard — one holding a hose aimed at some trees that had clearly given up, the other supervising from the porch with a German Shepherd on a leash. I crossed the street to say hello, because apparently that’s the kind of person I am.

The dog was skeptical. Her owner told her several times I was fine, then shook my hand in front of her as a formal introduction. The dog considered this, leaned in, and licked my hand. Endorsed. I was in.

What followed was a twenty-minute conversation I had absolutely no business being part of, and yet somehow led.

The trees had been pruned badly — topped, actually, which is basically a death sentence delivered slowly. The grass was Bermuda sod laid in December of 2021, right before they moved in. They moved from Seattle, where watering the lawn is something God handles for free. They waited for spring. Spring, in any meaningful grass-growing sense, never came. They’d tried a series of quick fixes that the yard had rejected with contempt.

I suggested weed mat and perennials for the flower bed. I floated the idea of waiting until fall to deal with the grass. I cautioned them about ordering a truckload of dirt before a rain. I was, by any objective measure, a complete stranger who had wandered in off the sidewalk and was now running a landscaping consultation in their front yard.

At some point I said something like, “I could come help you with some of this.” Then I heard myself. First meeting. Showing up with unsolicited yard opinions is one thing. Showing up with a shovel is how you become a story someone tells later.

Then one of them mentioned they’d found a drug pipe on top of the kitchen cabinets when they moved in.

“That’s not good,” I said.

“We don’t smoke it ourselves,” she said, “but we own a dispensary. So our main question is — what exactly were they doing while they were high in our house?”

Apparently, one of the answers was fixing the door latch — with notebook paper stuffed around the strike plate. High-effort, low-intelligence engineering that you can only pull off when a glass pipe is involved.

My son called during all of this. Then called again. I let it go. He would understand. He’d seen me do this his whole life — stop to talk to a stranger when someone who knows me is technically available. And honestly, I’d just seen him the day before. The women with the dying grass and the drug pipe had never met me. They needed me more.

Toward the end, something clicked. I asked if they happened to be hockey fans. They loved the Kraken (Seattles Pro Team). I told them about the rink just off I-35 south of 240, the boys who live with us, and the extra tickets we pass out to potential fans.

The two of them looked at each other. Nodded. Already knew who they were inviting.

I walked home with no audiobook progress, a missed call from my son, and the quiet satisfaction of a man who had done exactly what he set out to do — even if he hadn’t known what that was when he left the house.

Maybe it was the yard advice. Maybe it was the hockey tickets. Maybe it was just better to talk to absolute strangers than to call someone who’s heard all my material before.

The trees are still lopsided. But I’ve got fans to cultivate.

The “I Do” Adoption

My son is getting married in a couple of months. She is wonderful. She is also from a completely different culture than ours, which means we are all, on a fairly regular basis, figuring each other out.

That’s not a complaint. That’s just the truth.

When your kid gets married, you don’t just gain a daughter or son-in-law. You adopt them. Nobody tells you that when your kid says “I do,” you’re quietly saying it too. The vows are theirs. The adoption papers are everybody’s.

We’ve had our share of “whoops” moments. Some of them are hers. Some of them are ours. I’d be willing to bet that on the occasions where I thought she’d missed something, she had a perfectly reasonable explanation rooted in how she was raised — and I just didn’t know enough to ask. I’ve been married for 35 years. I still miss things. The idea that I’d have it all figured out with someone I’ve known for just over a year is ambitious, at best.

To his credit, my son prioritized pre-marital counseling before any of this got official. Smart move for any couple. For a cross-cultural one, it’s close to mandatory.

My wife is better at this than I am. She is more patient, more instinctively gracious, and far less likely to assign fault before asking a question. I am a work in progress. She has been working on that project for 35 years and will probably need a few more. It took me that long to become even slightly less selfish than I was on our wedding day.

We are, in a sense, the booby prize she gets for loving our son. She knew what she was signing up for with him. The rest of us came with the package.

What I do know is that she is trying. She genuinely loves our son. She has put real effort into being part of this family, even when this family probably made that harder than it needed to be. She’s learning us in real time. So are we.

The grace has to go both directions. Different families have different quirks even when they share a culture. When the cultures are genuinely different, you need more runway, more patience, and a willingness to say “I didn’t understand that — can you help me?” without anybody getting their feelings hurt. We are still building that. Some days are easier than others.

When they say “I do,” we all do, a little bit. We’re agreeing to figure each other out. To give grace before assigning blame. To ask before assuming. To remember that someone who does things differently isn’t doing them wrong.

I’ve needed that same grace extended to me more times than I can count.

Welcome to the family. We’re still under construction, too.