Husband Is From Mars
When I left one recent morning, Hot Firefighter Husband had just gotten off his shift. He was wearing his favorite beat-up shorts, a t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap, and he needed a shave.
And he was preparing to vacuum.
Uh-huh. It was like suburban mom porn, I tell you. I might have been interested in delaying my exit had I not been afraid it would make him lose cleaning momentum.
Husband does not buy me flowers “just because.” His gift-giving abilities -- well, they suck a little bit. He once gave me a wood carving of a flying pig for Christmas.
But my man cleans, and I find that incredibly gratifying, and pretty sexy, too. He can do some pretty amazing things with those Scrubbing Bubbles.
However. And I write this next part with significant trepidation because I do realize how fortunate I am that Husband doesn’t mind dabbling in domestic engineering.
Yet for every totally rockin’ task he completes, it seems like something is left undone.
This morning, as I left the house whistling in anticipation of a clean house, he called for me to take the Jeep. So I walked to the Goddamn Yellow Jeep and opened the door, and stuck my shoe into the 3-inch puddle accumulated atop the floorboard. Somebody forgot to put the top up last night.
The Goddamn Yellow Jeep has long been a source of contention. I was very proud that he sold his little Mazda on Craigslist, and looked forward to lowering our car payment. But he came home with the GYJ, which is the color of an irradiated banana and can certainly be seen from space. Though it’s supposedly “almost new,” it has a huge dent in the side and the gear shift is on upside down. Initially, it only had two seat belts in the back. “We have three kids,” I screeched. Really, I can be an irascible shrew at times. In his defense, he did order an extra seat belt online and has since installed it. It’s purple.
The point is, he didn’t think anything of sending me off in a burgeoning thunderstorm driving a flooded Jeep with half a top and the back windows resting unhelpfully in the garage.
The whole porn image dissipated quickly, I can assure you.
He laughed at me for not wanting to take the Jeep, which made me mad, which made him laugh even harder, which....well, you know where this is going. It ended with me taking the Motorized Landfill instead, screaming at him unconvincingly to have a good day and then calling from the road to apologize 10 minutes later. But still, he shouldn’t have left the top down last night.
None of this would be an issue if I hadn’t last week accepted an actual job that requires me to be someplace on time. It’s just one class that I’m teaching at the
On the first day I had to do this sprint, I changed into my street clothes, flew out of the gym parking lot and promptly got stopped for speeding.
I normally consider it a little embarrassing that the Motorized Landfill is plastered with firefighter union paraphernalia. At least there’s no bumper sticker involving firefighters and poles or anything like that.
On this day, however, the deputy appreciated Husband’s service to humanity and gave me a written warning. Husband later asked me to please stop doing things that required him to write thank-you notes to police officers, and I said I would try.
Are men and women different? I never wanted to think so. But now that I’ve been living with a man for going on 20 years, I feel certain our brains are wired differently. What woman would wash a dish towel with a bra? Or forget her mother’s birthday? Or suggest tying her son’s hand behind his back to practice being a lefty pitcher?
The bright side is that I’ve learned to forgive Husband for these deficiencies because he cleans things and he has big biceps and nice legs and thinks I’m beautiful. And I will forgive him for buying the Goddamn Yellow Jeep, which he swears will be with us forever.
But I tell you, that house better be pretty fucking clean.
(Hat for sale at Zazzle.com)
Tricia Booker is an award-winning journalist and neurotic writer of creative nonfiction who is unexpectedly very good at boxing. She lives in Ponte Vedra, Florida with her husband, two daughters, one son and a dog. She has written for many publications including Notre Dame Magazine, Folio Weekly, Minnesota’s Law & Politics and the Vero Beach Press-Journal. She has taught creative writing to middle schoolers and inmates and journalism to college students. She’s currently a boxing instructor, part-time college professor and dedicated domestic engineer.
Read Tricia every week on her cool new blog site: Mylefthook.com
