Sometimes I come home from work only to find that my wife is mad at me. No, I wasn’t out drinking with the boys, and I didn’t show up driving yet another rusty car. I just come home on a regular day at the regular time to find my wife regular mad at me.
It took me a while to figure out what it was all about (it took a while because I don’t read minds, which, after 10 years, my wife somehow has still not figured out). I finally realized why my wife was always miffed at me after I spent the day picking up the house while she was out doing some Christmas shopping. As I cleaned the house, every time I found another thing she left out, I became more and more annoyed at her. I realized then that it all comes down to this one universal truth: The person who picks up after the other person instantly dislikes the person he or she is picking up after. My wife has been picking up after me for a long time now, so it is amazing we’re still together.
While my wife was shopping, I spent an entire day finding different pairs of her shoes that she had systematically spread all over the house. Homeless children in Africa are running around barefoot while my wife has 25 pairs of shoes, which calculates to be five sets to randomly decorate the floor of each room in the house. And if I wasn’t finding shoes all over, I was mysteriously finding her hair clips. The strange part is, I’ve never actually seen my wife wear a hair clip, but for some reason she has hundreds of them sitting on every counter, windowsill, and end table in the house.
As I continued to clean, I also found that my wife leaves ChapStick containers in every nook and cranny of our home. She is absolutely addicted to ChapStick, so she stashes the stuff everywhere just in case she is jonesing for some quick lip balm. I actually found half empty ChapSticks in the cookie jar, junk drawer, and, strangely enough, in the refrigerator butter compartment. After cleaning up after my wife, I would swear she must walk into a room and explode, leaving only sneakers, hair clips, and ChapStick shrapnel.
By the end of a day spent picking up hair accessories, lip balm, and smelly foot wear, I had definitely lost my patience. When my wife came home from shopping, she was greeted at the doorstep by a huge pile of tennis shoes. Each shoe was complete with a hair clip holding some ChapStick.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Great question. It’s a little piece of modern art I call, Ode to My Sloppy Wife. You like it?”
“You might think that this little creation of yours bothers me, but I’m just glad to have all my ChapStick in one spot.” She grabbed one off of a shoe and dabbed her lips.
“Well, now that your lips are moisturized, can we get back to the subject of your hair clip and shoe problem?”
“There’s no problem.” She put on another layer of ChapStick. “You couldn’t just put that stuff away for me? I put away all the trash you leave around the house on a daily basis.”
“What trash?”
“Please. You are the only man that can go into a room and leave his pants on the floor, but nothing else. No shoes, no socks, nothing. You come home and the next thing I know, you’re pants-less. Didn’t you ever wonder how your pants got from the floor in the hallway to the washing machine?”
“Uh, I thought the elves did that.”
“Just because you’ve got a belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly and a red nose doesn’t make you Santa Claus. It makes you a heart attack candidate. Elves don’t pick up your pants. I do it. And honestly, sometimes when I find your pants in the kitchen, I want to kill you.”
“Kill me?”
“Well, maybe not kill you, but somehow solve the problem—maybe just cut your legs off so you won’t need pants anymore.”
“Cut my legs off? That doesn’t seem a little extreme to you?”
“Does making a 4-foot sculpture out of my tennis shoes in the entryway seem a little extreme to you?”
My wife, whom I love, had me there. First and foremost, I was guilty of being a pants-less slob around the house. Secondly, while we were talking, I wasn’t wearing any pants, which really didn’t help my end of the argument. The good news was we were talking about what bothered us and thus were coming to some sort of a solution (one that didn’t require my legs to be amputated). We both agreed to try and pick up our own stuff and stop leaving our wares all over the place. Joy to the world and our clean house.
Rob put his pants in the hamper for a grand total of three days before he was back to his pants-less business as usual.
This article appears in Dec 25, 2008 – Jan 1, 2009.