The other day, I decided to be a nice guy and help my wife out by doing the dishes. It wasn’t Mother’s Day, my wife’s birthday, or anything like that. I just did it because I have a kind heart … and a fairly greedy libido.
At my house, candy and flowers are always outshined by handling a few household chores. I’ve heard people say, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” At my house, the saying goes, “If you want to end up in the bedroom, then make sure the house is vacuumed.”
On this particular day, I decided to tackle the dishes since the sink was pretty full and my wife had been busy with work. While I was emptying the dishwasher, I went to put away a glass into an upper cabinet. I noticed there didn’t seem to be any available real estate for the placement of this clean glass. If I tried to force it and push the glass into the cupboard, it would squeeze the other glasses and assorted dishes, making the adjacent cupboard door magically open. I tried holding the other kitchen cabinet door closed with one hand and pressing hard on the glass with my other hand, but it was no use. That method only caused other dishes to pop out all over the kitchen. Our cabinets were at maximum capacity.
In order to make all the dishes fit, small cups had to go into larger ones, and bowls had to go on top of plates. There was a strange system for organizing the dishes that I obviously wasn’t familiar with. Emptying the dishwasher at my house was like working a large Rubik’s cube puzzle.
Instead of using duct tape to keep the cabinet doors shut, I decided I would take a closer look at this particular kitchen cabinet to see why it was giving me so much grief. I knew we couldn’t possibly have so many dishes that they wouldn’t fit in the cabinet, because it seems like we are always running out of dishes. What was it that was taking up all of this precious storage space? After a few seconds of investigating, I realized that we couldn’t put any dishes away because my wife was stashing 10 years’ worth of “her things” in these cupboards. These “things” of hers can be simply classified with one word: crap.
She had a decade’s worth of complete crap stuffed into those cupboards. She had a collection of leaking dead batteries next to some random Slurpee straws. Those were all on top of a stack of coupons that expired in 2008. She had a school lunch menu from one of our kid’s second grade year. That same kid will be a freshman in high school this August. Did she think we really needed to know if they were going to serve tater tots on a Tuesday in 2005?
The most offensive (and possibly dangerous) of all of the crap she stashed in this cabinet was expired medicine. I mean extremely expired medicine, like “do not use after 2003.” Looking at the seriousness of the expired medicine, I decided the right thing to do was to get busy with some spring cleaning. I dragged the garbage can in from the side yard, put it into the middle of the kitchen, and started filling it up.
Anything that looked relatively important, like broken jewelry or our kids’ report cards, I put into a small bag for my wife to go through when she got home. You see, she wasn’t around when I decided to go through “her” secret stash and get rid of a few things. I was making decisions in “her” kitchen all on my own. I tossed out the bad medicine, the endless ball point pens that didn’t work anymore, and the out-of-date family Christmas cards from our friends who have been divorced for three years now.
Once I was done, I scrubbed the cabinets clean, and then, with the greatest of ease, I finished putting away the glasses. Now there was plenty of room for every glass in the house, and it meant putting away dishes in the future would be a snap. As a secondary benefit, nobody in our family was in danger of being killed by six-year-expired cold medicine. I was feeling good—great, in fact. I couldn’t wait until my wife got home to see the good deed I had done. I just knew that the moment she saw all of the hard work I had put in, I would be in her good graces (which, as a husband, is my No. 1 priority).
Finally, my wife, whom I love, came home. I tried to play it cool and casually reach up to grab a glass from the newly organized cabinet: “Honey, can I get you something to drink?” She walked into the kitchen, looked around, and instantly knew something had changed. She got this very concerned look on her face. She wasn’t curious; she was angry. My mouth went suddenly very dry. I filled the glass with water and took a quick drink. She moved past me and threw open the cupboard doors.
“Surprise?” I asked.
“Where’s all my stuff?!” she demanded.
“Uh, I put your stuff in this small bag. It only has about six things in it. Everything else I … threw away.”
“Why were you in my kitchen?!”
“I was just trying to help and get things organized.”
“Next time you want to help and get things organized, go clean your garage! You don’t know what is important in here. You are banished from the kitchen!”
She stormed off into the backyard and began to go through the garbage to make sure I didn’t throw away anything of value. With my luck, within 15 seconds, she found some unexpired medicine for which she had recently gotten a prescription. Whoops. This meant I got a new prescription, too: “Take two Aspirin and sleep on the couch.”
Rob not only threw away his wife’s prescription, he also threw away any chances for intimacy for an undisclosed amount of time.
