If I had spoken my thoughts, they would have said, “Oh grow up.”

It has been a process, this learning to accept the boy part of my husband. The most responsible, level-headed and predictable man I know holds a surprising male counterpart. When that side is displayed, it’s like having an extra kid in the house. I may or may not have been known to roll my eyes.

But it was often through those mysterious who-is-the-adult-here-moments, that my husband wove into our children’s lives something which didn’t come easily for me. He made life ridiculously fun. While I ran around trying to calm chaos, he created it and produced joy in his wake. We have the footage to prove it.

It’s known famously in our home as “the weekend mom was gone.” I left my husband with the three youngest children for one weekend. Flashes of what could possibly go wrong played like cinema through the reels of my mind. I imagined the clean-up and child reprograming ahead, then put it all out of my mind in order to enjoy my time away.

When my husband and kids picked me up after three days, they had a suspicious keeping-something-secret undercurrent sizzling back and forth between them. I dreaded what I might find, but by their exchanged looks, twitches of smiles and whispers, I knew something brewed. I expected flowers or banners alongside laundry and dishes.

When I walked into our house, it was eerily…perfect.

“Should we show her?” My husband asked. Heads nodded. Eyes shone. Hands clasped. They led me to the TV and the video began.

The production was called, “When Mom is Away.” The cast, barely recognizable, consisted of bedraggled waifs with black smudges on their faces and mismatched clothes. They acted out all the most horrible things a mom imagines. Dishes overflowed the sink. Every pot piled on the counter. The camera found unmade beds and toys everywhere.

Oh, the sighs recorded, “I wish mom was here.”

Piles of laundry undone, “I have nothing to wear.”

Our youngest’s bafflement in the production asked, worry creasing his face, “We’re pretending, right?”

“If only mom were here. Everything falls apart without Mom.”

And around the table, “What? There is only bread and water?”

“Oh, when will she be back? We’re hungry.”

It ended with a final off pitch song, “We love our mommy, oh yes we do. We love our mommy and we’ll be true.”

My children are grown, but they still talk about when mom was gone.

I confess sometimes I put out spines like a porcupine towards my husband’s crazy ideas. They took time, energy and work, and I often forbade an activity simply on the basis of my own convenience and sanity.

Life for a mom can get so busy and rigid we are tempted to make even recreation adult-like, clean, neat and quiet. Sometimes it takes a man who can still think like a kid to draw us back to the wild world of play.

In hindsight I realize that big men relate to little people differently, and honestly not always to my liking. My husband’s methods involved dirt, sweat, smells and danger, but they forged deep bonds and lifetime memories.

The mere thought of the demolition and clean-up of “when mom was away” exhausts me. Today, he is still the one in the sandbox, hiding in the bushes or blowing things up with our grandkids. He calls me from being a stuck-in-a-rut Grump-mother to Grandmother.

Don’t grow up, I think, as I watch. He sits on the floor with our grandson. He motors a little car around, up and over, his lips vibrate to the sounds of an engine revving. I shove my grandson’s Lego’s to one side with my foot and lower myself onto the floor next to him.