We don't talk about parenting until we become parents and the only way we know how to parent is the way we were parented. The same is true of marriage! Sure we have lots of dreams about what the wedding might be like. We have ornate rituals about stag nights, hen nights. Lots of ways to mark the start of a marriage, the same could be argued of the bits in the middle as well. The annual anniversary day is marked by the commemorating the length of your marriage by equating it with some inanimate commodity; paper, tin, silver, gold, ruby, diamond etc. There is perhaps a case for marking wedding anniversaries by animal. The animal would depend on the environmental durability of the creature in question and the year of marriage. For example one year could be Panda, five could be lynx, thirty years could be elephant and fifty could be honey-badger. We also have spectacular legal terminology and implications for the ending of a marriage, marriage is such a serious notion that if you are part of the Catholic church and some other religious institutions then technically you aren't even allowed to get divorced. Indeed God loving, Gay marriage hating civil servant Kim Davis bizarrely incurred the wrath and vitriol of that most injudicious and surreal quasi-religious hate group the Westboro Baptist Church after she refused to issue a marriage license to same sex couples seeking to get married after the change in federal law. The fallacious reasoning for the WBC onslaught was of course the fact that Ms Davis herself had been married and divorced four times, which also violates God's law. While we should obviously relegate the musings of Kim Davis and the Westboro Baptist church to the most peripheral areas of what we could even consider irrational (never mind rational) discourse on marriage, they do highlight a very good point. Marriage is something that society take very seriously.

We talk a lot about the start of a marriage, the end of marriages and we mark them once a year but I think this does the ancient institution of marriage a real disservice. I know certainly as a male who for a variety of illogical, relativistic reasons to portrays himself as a "mans man" that I don't talk about how to be married. It is not a topic friends and I discuss; the divorced don't school the married on what went wrong or what they would do better next time. My father and uncles are happy to counsel when advice is sought, In terms of the patriarchal curriculum however being a decent husband wasn't taught alongside: "Standing up for yourself", "How to start a fire", "Fixing a wheel" and "How to punch a guy so you don't break your hand".

My wife is an avid reader of parenting blogs and one of the terms I hear her and others talk about is helicopter parenting.

There is an infant happily experimenting with life in a park maybe trying to crawl up a slide, push something, experiment with some textures or perhaps try and see if they can improve their feeling of efficacy by throwing something. Standing at the side a wide eyed manic parent clocking every potential interaction between the child and the objects around the child (both inanimate and human). The parent is not playing with the child, the parent is not mindfully aware of what is going on, the parent is not ready to comfort if the child falls and gets a boo boo. This parent is on the edge ready to swoop in and surgically remove the child from any potentially boo boo inducing situation no matter how improbable.

This is the helicopter parent and certainly for my wife and I this is a model we wish to avoid. In fact we sometimes in jest accuse each other of helicopter parenting perhaps mimicking the rotating choppers of an apache gunship as our toddlering lad topples, tumbles and experiments with life to a more heart attack inducing degree each day.

I recently and suddenly realised that I have become something much worse....I have become the helicopter husband.

Like many men I maintain a steady level of attentiveness and interaction towards my wife. While balancing the other pulls on my attention: Children, work, football, drinking coffee, sleeping and fantasising about potential projects which may or may not come to fruition;

these include but are not limited too building a cigar box guitar, inventing a phone which has a substantial battery life, replacing the damaged bumper on my Honda Accord, starting a funk metal band, starting a Celtic-Punk band,starting a Jazz-Metal band, starting a jazz-metal-celtic-funk-muzac fusion quarter, practicing lots and lots of bass guitar etc etc...you get the idea.

So I have this regular level of interaction and attentiveness with my wife that is until...... I believe there is something I can fix. This is made worse by the fact that my wonderful wife is currently again with child and we are preparing for the arrival for our second baby. On Saturday my wife is in a taxi coming back from an appointment. The taxi driver tried to refuse her fair and then shouted at her and drove erratically on the way home. I can't abide that kind of behavior especially when your passenger is a heavily pregnant woman. So my wife sends me a text telling me what was happening so I resolve to to wait outside our house and make sure she gets out of the taxi without any more grief and if necessary take a note of his ID number and report him to the authorities or at the very least give him a bit of a verbal battering over how he has treated my wife. As the taxi comes up the hill towards the house I am standing there waiting arms folded, head shaved, chest puffed up, all ready to give this guy a verbal shoeing. I am very lucky in that through a combination of genetics, geography, upbringing and natural thuginess, it doesn't take a lot for me to look like I am ready to give someone a a good old fashioned high five to the face with a fist. So when the taxi driver saw my mean looking mug at the top of the hill he didn't say a word and dutifully dropped my wife off without a crossed word said.

Now I am not saying that what I did was a bad thing in fact there is a school of thought that says I did my husbandly duty however that is not the issue the challenge for me is to be a consistently mindful and aware of the how much of my constant support and attentiveness my wife who has brought constant joy, support, love, children and a larger family circle in to my life deserves.

I shouldn't be the helicopter husband. I should be the fleet husband.

I should be a part of the navy flotilla which mutually protects and supports each other. That is what a family truly is, that is a wonderful beautiful thing. Real men need to start talking about that.

In fact I would go as far as to say that real men do talk about it. Instead of the cliche conversations of resignation referring to your wife as the some kind of burden as opposed to someone who has devoted her life to you then you probably cant find the real art and satisfaction that is to be found in marriage. It eludes me much of the time but I know it's there and I will not stop looking for it. We should be brave enough to talk to each other about how to have a good and fulfilling marriage.

We don't about parenting until we are parents and then we decide what kind of parents we want to be. We don't talk about marriage until we are married. I would say that the teaching and conversation sits on the shoulders of everyone. We all can contribute to teaching boys about what it means to be a good husband and woman what it means to be a wife and everyone what it means to work as partners.

It falls on institutions to acknowledge that it is not black and white and we have to have deeper conversations about what leads to bigger fleets and less helicopters. We should all encourage each other to celebrate commitment and longevity.

Thanks for the love by reading comment or don't either way you are awesome.