It sounds easy enough.  But once you’ve got young kids, it’s surprisingly difficult.  There’s not much time, and babysitters cost a lot of money, and since it becomes such a rare occurrence to have a date, it puts all kinds of pressure to make it a really great date.

Add it all up, and it can be a tough job, dating your husband in the post-kid era.  So here are some suggestions.

With Father’s Day approaching, I want to take a moment to celebrate the unsung paternal instinct.  Even though it’s somewhat retrograde when stated explicitly, I feel like the notion of the mother’s instinct–some superior sixth sense that governs female parenting decisions–is still widely assumed.

That is, in parenting matters where there’s disagreement between mother and father, mother is innately more right.  Egalitarian and progressive as I’ve always believed myself to be, I have found myself falling into this trap.  It venerates the mother and marginalizes the father and, perhaps worse, can lead to decisions that are less beneficial than children.

Because, dear reader, the paternal instinct can be a brilliant thing.  Here’s why.

As a tennis fan, I’ve been following the French Open, especially the human interest stories.  The male world number one player, Novak Djokovic, won his third round match and then was greeted with the news that his first coach (the one who’d coached him as a child) had died.  He was too upset to give a press conference.

It got me thinking about the meaningful emotional connections–attachments–that children make to people outside the family, those whose influence can span a lifetime, and how, as parents, we can encourage our children to make those sorts of attachments.

One of my clients who is currently in a depressive episode told me, “I don’t have anything to look forward to.  I’m just going through the motions.”

That’s not an uncommon experience for those suffering from depression.  But honestly, it’s not that uncommon for a lot of people.

In my last post, I wrote about how to balance dreams and reality for ourselves, and for our children.  I said that we have to help our kids calculate odds as they get older: Risk versus reward, where best to allocate energy, which dreams are likely to come true.

But it occurred to me that our own assessment about those things might not always be accurate.  It will most assuredly be shaped by our own experiences of success and failure.

I met with a client today who I hadn’t seen in several weeks.  She started telling me about her Mother’s Day–where what she wanted was peace and quiet, but what her kids needed was crisis management, and guess what won out.

“Well,” I said, “that does sound like a real mother’s day.”  We both laughed, and what I was thinking of was my own Mother’s Day (my second), from a few weeks ago.

It’s easy to catch a case of this: You see someone else’s life (or what you think you know of someone else’s life), and you think how much better they have it than you do.

Why are we so susceptible?

A lot of us assumed bullying was over when we left high school.  Turns out, it’s still happening in the workplace.

So what do you do about it? 

My post, Assertiveness for Beginners, sparked some passionate discussion.  There were two main–and very different–themes in the discussion.  Some people were talking about isolated (or recurring) incidents of hurt feelings, that may or may not constitute bullying; others were talking about systematic harassment by their bosses (bullying).

So in this post, I’m going to talk about the former.  In a few days, I’ll be doing another post, “Assertiveness with Workplace Bullies”, and that’ll address the latter.

But first, you need to distinguish between the two.  How do you know when your boss is just being thoughtless or unaware, versus when your boss is a bully? 

It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to admit in polite company.  But I know from my practice–and my own life–that it’s more common than we want to think.

Say, you’re home with your daughter all day; your husband works full-time.  You get more time with her, which he envies; he gets more time with adults, which you envy.

When does envy become full-blown jealousy?  When it is a problem?