Have you ever sat at a bar mitzvah and wondered when the father was going to wrap up what he was talking about already?

Last week, I started speaking about bar mitzvahs and how the father always mentions in his speech that he would like to thank his wife for doing everything. Everything. And everyone in the audience is looking around the room at all the decorations, and the colors that she’s turning, and thinking, “Yeah! It looks like she did do everything!” The wife is thinking that too. Is anyone thinking, “Well, I mean he’s giving the speech, though, isn’t he?”

But as a father, putting this into your speech is a minhag that was handed down to you by your father, who got it from his father, back through several generations of men who wanted to remain married. Because to be honest, you definitely did stuff. You did things that your wife can’t even imagine. Just like there are things that she did that you can’t even imagine. That’s why there are two of you.

For example, last week, I spoke extensively about how you have to teach your child to lein, one pasuk at a time, which takes approximately a year and a half. If you have boys closer in age than that, then someone’s not leining. You have to choose which child you think has the most potential and make it very obvious that you feel that. Or you can have them both do the same parsha. No one knows when your son’s birthday is anyway, outside of his immediate family, unless he was born near a Yom Tov. Whereas if your wife is spending a year and a half planning the bar mitzvah, that’s maybe too much. What’s she going to do when your kids get married? Talk everyone into an 18-month engagement?

You also have to ask several relatives to speak, including at least one relative from each side because if you only ask one side, the other side might be offended even though no one on that side actually wants to speak. You have to beg your brother-in-law to speak so that your father-in-law, who does not speak at these things, will not be offended. And your brother-in-law does not care.

I understand that the wife does plenty for the bar mitzvah, which the husband doesn’t even think about, and I’m not denying those things if I know what’s good for me – 100%. I’ve spoken about this in numerous articles. But at the end of the day, if the wife made the simcha without any help from the husband, there would be no pshetl, no other speakers, the boy wouldn’t lein and everything heavy would still be in the car.

And that’s not all you do. Speaking of things that the father has done over the course of several years, how about taking the kid to shul? Forget a year and a half; this has been going on for almost 10 years. At some point this commitment was suddenly foisted on you, the father, to bring a wriggly jumping jack to shul and teach it to sit still for progressively more and more parts of davening, while all the fathers around you don’t seem to be doing the same for their sons, as far as you can tell.

You can’t just leave the house and run out to shul anymore; it has to become a 10-minute process that begins with the finding of the shoes. You have to hang up your son’s coat when you get there, which by the way is a coat that neither you nor he wanted to bring. You have to get him to behave. You have to help him find the place every five minutes.

“Do you know what everyone’s saying? They’re saying Shema! You know Shema!”

“I said Shema like five minutes after I got here. You said to daven everything I daven in school. How much do you think I daven in school?”

And this is all so that when your child’s bar mitzvah comes, he’s not standing in shul like a deer in the headlights.

“So when is leining?”

“Which one’s the bimah again?”

“Where do they keep the Torah?”

“Which way do I assume is mizrach?”

And this is all fine and part of chinuch. But it’s every single week for like 10 years. And you have to do this with multiple kids at once, all on their individual levels. Every time you bring another kid to shul, your wife’s Shabbos morning gets easier. But if you point that out, boy are you in trouble.

Also, let’s face it, your wife is not teaching your son how to put on his tefillin. And particularly the finger-wrapping part that is based on your family minhag that you personally don’t know how to talk your son through. You have to just do it on yourself, like a necktie.

And then which parent is managing the dancing during the bar mitzvah, exactly? It’s you, of course. You have to figure out how to manage 50 12-year-olds whose names you don’t know, because no one else is parenting them. Also, you have to make sure they don’t walk off with the schnapps. Or pour coke in the centerpieces. Is your wife doing any of that? The only reason you’re not parenting them all now, from your position at the mic during the speech, is that a lot of them seem to have walked out when you started speaking. That said, maybe you need to cut the speech short.

So anyway, in closing this article, I would like to thank my wife for doing everything. I couldn’t have done this article without her. I would also like to thank my parents, who are here in spirit but in actuality are in their own home because they don’t show up every week to watch me write my articles.

I would also like to thank my rebbeim, who always said I would never amount to anything, and thanks to them, I was able to manage my expectations. Additionally, I would like to thank everyone who came from far and wide to interrupt my writing process, including my kids, who have been home for weeks now, apparently with some baby chickens.

Most of all, I would like to thank God that I’m done.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].