Ladies, if you are like me, I’m about to sing your psalm when it comes to your husband and children.  Yes, we love them dearly, adore them to pieces and yada yada yada but, when it comes to chores around the house, why is it that they always seem to get temporary blindness?  I’m not a stay at home wife and mother (never have been).  I work eight to nine hours a day just like he does, and then I work my other full time job at home.  When one of them finally offers up a little bit of assistance, this is what I get and it’s how the fight began…

The Trash

The pungent odor stuns me as soon as I open the front door, and I know that familiar aroma tainting up the house.  Even my dog is ashamed of me for letting it get to that point.  I realize that something must be amiss because I ever so sweetly asked my teenage son, who is home ALL DAY LONG, doing nothing but watching YouTube videos on his phone, to take the trash out that morning.  Sure enough, I walk into the kitchen to find the overflowing can.  So much trash has been forced into it that the lid refuses to close and the house smells like the dumpster outside of my favorite restaurant.  The one, single thing that this lazy kid was supposed to do ALL DAY that he didn’t do has now turned my usually gleeful self into a fire breathing dragon lady who is growling the boy’s name up the steps.  He knows that I know and, yet, he strolls downstairs wondering what I could possibly have an issue with.

I said, “boy, didn’t I ask you to take out the trash?” and in his usual calm, collected tone, he looks at me and replies, “yeah.”  Now he’s forcing lasers to spew from my squinted eyes but he still can’t figure out what my problem is.  “Have you had a bad day?” He has the audacity to ask me and that’s how the fight began.

The Yard

My wonderful husband, bless his heart, does all of the mowing and trimming and, in fact, recently bought a new, top of the line trimmer to help him with this task,  He does a superb job of maintaining the lawn until, one day, I go out to water my flowers and they have disappeared.  I’m perplexed because I know that he knows better than to mow down my flowers.  Even more disturbing was the suspicious brown . . . we’ll call it “trim” around my flowerbeds, our storage shed and the driveway.  Oh, I could have wasted the time to ask myself what on earth could have possibly caused this “trim” of dead grass because surely, he knows better than to do that in our otherwise immaculate yard.

“Honey,” I beckon ever so sweetly with a welcoming smile, “do we have some sort of yard mite or something because there’s a wide strip of brown, dead grass edging our yard, around the flowerbeds and shed.”  I know that he’ll be just as flabbergasted as I am upon hearing this, but he calmly explains that well, that new trimmer he bought isn’t properly made and, therefore, not sufficient enough to do the edging so he has so geniusly opted to use the weed kill for that job now.  He explains to me how much time and effort this will save him.  Here come the lasers again.  “And what happened to my flowers?” I query, and it turns out that, although he didn’t catch sight of any flowers, even though it was a flowerbed full of them, he did notice a few clumps of weeds that he so generously cut down for me so that I wouldn’t have to pull them out, and that’s how the fight began.

The Laundry

My very responsible teen son, you know the one I depend on to take out the trash, was doing his laundry (which is how I taught him to be so responsible) and decided to toss in some of mine and his dad’s since his wasn’t enough for a full load.  How generous, right?  WRONG!  Not only was the washing machine finished with them well over an hour ago, but he has left the house to “hit the gym” without a single care that the wet clothes will stink more the longer that they’re left in there.  Now,  had they been all his clothes, I would have left them.  I mean, he can stink if he wants to but, since mine and my husband’s are in there too, I decide to get them out.  I lift the lid and what do I find?  An array of colors!  Yes, this boy who is an honor student, in advanced classes, the same one who plans to study aerospace engineering in college, didn’t have the sense not to wash colors with whites so now, he has turned his father’s white and light gray shirts to pink!  Oh, I just can’t wait to see his reaction.  I call the boy to warn him of the impending wrath that could greet him and he is just shocked that his father and I could be so dramatic.  “Chill out,” he says, and that’s how the fight began.

Cooking

It was our anniversary, and my husband surprised me with a romantic dinner that he cooked.  This is a man who NEVER cooks so you can imagine my surprise, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we would be dining on Ramen Noodles or scrambled eggs, since that’s all I’ve ever known him to make, but I cared more about the sentiment than the meal, of course.  He leads me into the dining room, where he has even set the ambiance with candles and, to my surprise, he has baked chicken breasts!

“Wow!” I tell him. “You’ve gone all out,” and I was so impressed by his efforts.  “This is a man who loves me,” I say to myself as we’re enjoying a lovely, romantic dinner with great conversation, then, suddenly, a crash from the kitchen startles both of us and now, his face is showing panic which, of course, makes me panic a little.  “Stay right here,” he says.  “I don’t want you to lift a finger, sweetheart.”  Great news for me!  Now, I’m hearing a bunch of rustling, angry, profane-laced mumbling and clanging of dishes, and I can feel a sense of paranoia coming on.  I’m offering my help but he insists that I stay put and, when he returns, he assures me that everything is fine.  After dinner, he refuses to allow me into the kitchen because “I don’t want you to lift a finger,” but when I see the dog darting through the living room with a chicken breast in her mouth, I’m now suspicious.  Turns out, our dog seized the opportunity while we were eating to scurry out to the kitchen and rob us of our third piece of chicken, which my husband left on the stove, while also knocking over a mountain of soiled pots and pans to get to it.  Not only had my dog committed this theft, the pan of hot grease that he knocked down splattered the wood floors with burns.  “Why did you leave those pans out where he could reach them?” I ask, awaiting his very reasonable and valid response.  “I didn’t want you to clean it all until after our dinner,” he replied and that, folks, is how the fight began.

The Bathroom

I’m one of the lucky ones, ladies.  I have a husband and a son who both know how to put the toilet seat down.  It took a lot of fighting but they have learned, so when I asked my son to do his weekly clean of his bathroom, I had no doubt that he would do a pristine job.  All seemed well until I saw him come back out of the bathroom not even five minutes after going in to clean.  Wow!  Record time.  “He’s getting good at this,” I thought but I don’t see any cleaning aids or solutions in his hands.  I must have missed something here because both of them and everyone else who knows me is very well aware of my fear of germs.  Another issue I had was that he put the toilet paper roll on backward, not that it really has any relevance to this, but he knows how particular I am about the sheets rolling over and not under and I’m left to wonder where he got these Adolf Hitler type tendencies.  I mean, who does that? I had to wonder.  It shouldn’t have been an issue for me, but my world was completely off its axis until I changed it.  Anyway, I complimented his ability to get his bathroom done in record time as he grinned with pride.

“But where is the cleaning stuff?” I asked, and he explains to me that well, he didn’t need it.  “I didn’t see any dirt or pee on the toilet so I just used toilet paper to wipe it down,” he says and now, I’m cringing, completely grossed out and appalled as I try to explain that you can’t see germs and they can’t be killed with dry toilet paper.  Once again, honor student, enriched classes, aerospace engineer, yep.  This is why he has changed the toilet paper roll, I realize while explaining to him that he put it on the wrong way, thereby knocking my universe off kilt!  Now, he is giving me that usual confused look because, once again, he is stunned by my behavior and non-appreciation of his efforts.  I’m commanding him, at this point, to redo the bathroom and to do it correctly.  He looks me dead in the eye and says, “can you get me some more toilet paper?”  and that’s how the fight began.