Husbandly Duties

When I said, “I do” I had no idea what I was doing.

All I knew for certain was that a very attractive young woman had agreed to “forsake all others” in favor of me.

To my mind this was a miracle on a par with the parting of Red Sea or the discovery of a laundry detergent that really did get clothes whiter.  When the priest asked me if I did, I couldn’t say “I do” fast enough.

As it turns out, that two-word phrase covered an awful lot of territory.  I’m not saying I’d have said “I don’t”, but maybe I’d have been just a touch slower to answer.

Becoming a husband brings with it a whole bunch of new responsibilities.  First of all, I became Defender of My Bride and Slayer of All Things That Scuttle or Crawl.

It’s true.  My beloved, who is a trained scientist who works in a hospital laboratory full of all sorts of unspeakable bodily fluids, is terrified of anything creepy and/or crawly.  She is of the opinion that we pay for our house and shouldn’t have to share it with spiders and earwigs.  This rule carries the death penalty and I’m the executioner.

Her usual method for summoning me to duty is a piercing shriek followed by a breathless litany of “A spider!  Kill it!  Kill it! Killit!  Killit! KillitKillitKillit!”  She generally screams this from atop a chair, or a table, or the refrigerator.  Whatever gets her the furtherest from the spider.

Thousands of years ago my hunter/gatherer ancestors stalked their prey across the plains with a spear clutched in their hand.  I stalk my prey across the kitchen with a tissue in my hand.  (I’m brave enough to do the killing, but I don’t want to end up with a hand full of bug guts.)

“He’s over there!” my wife interrupts “kill it” to point from her perch to where the big, black spider is trying to hide on the beige linoleum. (Now that I think about it, it’s a little odd that she assumes that the insects are always male.  There must be some significance to that.)

Whatever the spider is trying to do, my job is to pursue it relentlessly in the manner of the terminator or a paparazzi chasing a starlet.  Heaven help me if the spider gets under a major appliance.  Until I can produce a mangled corpse (or assure my wife that the spider has died of old age) I have to do all of my own cooking.

Things are much the same where earwigs are concerned.  In fact, if it has more than four legs (the cat is exempt) and it’s in the house, I have to kill it.  If our house is ever invaded by giant mutant octopi, I’m a dead man.

Another of my husbandly titles is Mr. Big Brained Answer Guy.

My wife looks up to me and I adore her for that.  She seems to be of the opinion that I know everything.

This isn’t true, but she can be forgiven for the error.

Like most guys (and I include virtually all scientists, newscasters, government experts, and all Corporate CEOs in this) I’ve spent my life pretending to know something about everything.  Give me any topic – say the History of Baseball or Pre-Rafaelite Painting or the best way to install a shunt in someone’s brain – and I’ll tell you all about it.  The fact that I may not actually have heard of the topic until you bring it up is no deterrent.  If you challenge me on my answer, I might stop short of performing actual surgery.  Maybe.

So, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that my wife expects me to know everything.  For example, we’ll be watching some T.V. show like House or CSI or The Evening News … some show where the whole point is to make the viewers feel stupid by keeping information from them … and she’ll point to some character and say, “Why did he do that?”

I’m a guy so I have to give some kind of answer.  I usually settle for “Watch and you’ll see.”  This preserves the impression that I actually know by allowing me to not reveal my ignorance.

Which feeds the cycle and my wife keeps asking questions…even about mechanical problems.

When some appliance breaks down, she’ll summon me to the scene of the tragedy and ask, “What do you think is wrong?”

This happened a couple of years ago when our dishwasher spontaneously converted itself into a fountain.  Every time it ran, water sprayed across the kitchen like the show at the Bellagio in Vegas.  Anyone peeking in the window would have thought we were experiencing our very own personal hurricane.

“What do you think happened?”

What did I think? I thought it might be time to buy a new house.  As to the actual reason for the disaster, I had no clue.  In my mind mechanical failure and evil spirits were running neck-and-neck as the probable cause.  Yet – and here’s the stupid part – I got out my tools and dismantled the dishwasher.  I might as well have put the entrails of a goat in it for all the good it did.

In the end, I had to pay a nice repairman a ridiculous sum of money.

“It’s the dialectic cavitating reciprocator,” he said holding up an odd-shaped piece of plastic that looked indistinguishable from the dozen or so pieces I’d removed in my exploration of the machine’s innards.  “It’s completely worn through on one side.”

“I thought so,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what it was all along, but just couldn’t find the time to fix it myself.

“That’ll be $283.15,” he said.  Reminding me of my other husbandly title, Guy Who Pays the Bills.