Must he lay right next to me in bed and actually fall asleep at a reasonable hour? Doesn’t he know that his wife is over there tossing and turning, cursing the sheep who finally got tired of jumping the fence and just went on to bed? Doesn’t he realize that while our entire house looks like a budding episode of “Hoarders,” that not loading the dishwasher the same way I do makes me want to jump off the roof? Has he never had the joyful experience of almost killing himself in the dark while trying to recover from almost plunging to a watery death sitting on a toilet with the seat up? And why doesn’t he understand how devastating it is to settle in for a night of “Drop Dead Diva” episodes on your DVR, only to realize that two of them are not there because someone recorded 400 episodes of “Dual Survival”?
I mean, I’m just stating random examples here. Any similarities to my real life are completely coincidental.
Now, I don’t even pretend to be the perfect companion. I am quite certain there are things I do that make my husband wonder if housing will notice him digging a big hole in the backyard. I am a terrible housekeeper, my cooking is less than stellar, and I frequently get so distracted that I not only forget to finish unloading my perfectly loaded dishwasher… I frequently forget to finish a sentence. On more than one occasion he has almost broken a bone tripping over my shoes that are scattered throughout the house. I spend way too much time texting, I somehow always forget anything he tells me to do concerning the cars, and it’s possible that I have forgotten to thaw out dinner until 6:30 p.m. a few times.
A few hundred.
It’s a cruel irony, I think. When they are gone it is horrible. We miss them terribly, we worry about their safety, we miss out on moments together that we will never get back. We sometimes struggle because we are handling everything on our own, and that can be HARD. But on the flip side… some things are easier. No one cares if you and the kids want to eat cereal every night for a week. No one cares if the laundry goes from the dryer to your body and never sees the inside of a drawer. The toilet seat is always down, (or up for my MANspouse friends), and there are no remnants of a morning shave in the sink. We fall into a “It’s all MINE” mentality with the bed, the remote, and the positioning of the driver’s seat.
And then we usually feel a tremendous amount of guilt for enjoying all those things.
