The other day my family was about to leave the house. Most of us had recognized we needed to be somewhere so we were ready to roll. However, one component of our family somehow didn’t get the message. In reality, leaving the house is not a very difficult task. First put on pants, then shoes, then walk out the front door, insert car key into ignition, and drive away. Simple, right? Well, that is how men leave a house. Women, on the other hand, don’t just leave a house; they sort of migrate from a residence, over some unknown length of time.
If I knew what that exact amount of time was I could be the next Nostradamus. Calculating the numerous factors involved with a woman leaving a house is enormously complex. It would be easier to pick seven numbers to win the lottery. Determining a woman’s time to get ready has thousands more variables than the lottery, and it requires calculus to solve. In fact, a woman’s hair alone has way too many variables: dying it, washing it, conditioning it, drying it, brushing it, curling it, starting over with it, and then ridding the armpits and legs of it.
Just the hair aspect of getting ready is a complicated process that involves blades, electricity, and chemicals. It’s less complicated to land something on Mars. Seriously, the engineers on the Mars Rover project only had to calculate the specific gravity of the Red Planet and then factor in the entry speed to adjust the booster rockets to land a manmade device 189 million miles from Earth. Easy. Can those same engineers tell me when my wife will be ready to leave the house? Forget it.
Since no one really knows the actual time we’ll leave my house for an event, I just ask foolish repetitive questions:
“Is everybody ready to go?”
No response.
I ask again: “Kids, put your cell phones down for a second and please listen to me for a moment. Are you guys ready?”
“Yeah, we’re waiting on Mom,” the kids inform me, as they barely look up from their phones.
“Where is she? We were supposed to leave five minutes ago.”
“Where do you think? She’s in the bathroom,” my daughter answers in a tone that suggests I might be the stupidest person ever born on the planet Earth.
On this particular day that I was attempting to leave the house, I walked into the bathroom to find my wife buck-naked. Seeing my wife naked is usually a good thing, but when we’re running late, seeing her naked is a problem. It means we are nowhere near being ready to leave. We still have to go through the “I don’t have anything to wear” or the “my clothes don’t fit anymore” routine.
“Clothes not fitting anymore” is always blamed on our daughter, who has been wrongfully accused of washing the dirty clothes with hot water. This evil hot water has been blamed for extravagant amounts of shrinkage. What is never discussed—and never will be if I want to continue to live at my own house—is that there’s a slight possibility the clothes don’t fit anymore because of an uptake in calorie consumption. Or maybe my wife had a growth spurt in her mid-30s. If you are taking away from this that I’m suggesting that my wife gained weight, you sir, or ma’am, are sorely mistaken. Do I look like a man standing on the ledge of a building threatening to leap off? Of course not. I’m not suicidal. Therefore, I’m not making any hints or subliminal indications that my wife, whom I love, has gained weight. The science is clear in this: the clothes have shrunk … three sizes worth.
Regardless of the amount of incredible clothing shrinkage, my wife eventually found some clothes so we could take her super-made-up-hairdo/hairless body out into the world. Right before we got into the car, I asked everyone in the family, “It looks like it might get chilly. Did everyone bring a sweatshirt?” My kids nodded their heads from behind their cell phones and my wife said, “Nah, I don’t want to have to carry it around. I won’t need one.”
My wife has said this phrase 27 times in our marriage. How do I know the exact amount? Because she owns 27 overpriced sweatshirts that we purchased at tourist attractions all over this country when she got chilly and needed a sweatshirt. We have one from Niagara Falls, one from the Chicago Cubs, one from the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, one from Pismo Beach, plus numerous other places that sell sweatshirts for $50 a pop. And don’t let me forget we have three sweatshirts from Disneyland (a brand new one every time we went) that cost $75 each. So, when my wife tells me, “I don’t want to have to carry it around. I won’t need one,” I have to ask myself, what does she think a sweatshirt is constructed with to make it so heavy that it would be a problem to carry around? Her husband and her two kids are standing right in front of her with sweatshirts tied around their waists. The kids and I skip around theme parks without a care in the world, and when it gets dark and cold we put the sweatshirts on—problem solved. But my wife, 27 times in a row, can’t seem to find a way to bring a sweatshirt anywhere in the world because it’s “too much work to carry it around.”
Now that I think about it, if it is so easy to tie a sweatshirt around a waist, I should just tie an extra one around my own waist and save myself $50 every place we go. Problem averted. Now if I can just find a way to get her out of the house quicker, I could bring about world peace.
Right now Rob is standing in line to purchase sweatshirt No. 28. This one is from Baker, Calif., in the middle of Death Valley, which was chilly when the Kriders passed through.
This article appears in Oct 24-31, 2013.