This Round Finally Goes to the Husband

My wife and I had a major breakthrough in our marriage on Monday. And by breakthrough, I mean I won a round.

As you have no doubt heard at countless weddings, 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love is patient, love is kind, blah, blah, blah, “love keeps no record of wrongs.” That part is not true. Every married couple keeps records of wrongs, and I am WAY behind in the count.

But on Monday, my wife actually conceded that she had been wrong about a long-held belief regarding the messiness of one of my personal hygiene habits. I am talking, of course, about my weekly high colonic. Ha! No! Just kidding. Don’t stop reading. I’m actually talking about brushing my teeth.

If you are married, or share a sink with anyone, and that sink has a mirror above it, then you are all too painfully familiar with the toothpaste-spittle-splatter-on-the-mirror debate.

Wife: Look at these spots all over the mirror!

Husband: OK.

Wife: That is gross!

Husband: Not really.

Wife: Yes it is! They’re from toothbrushing and they’re all from you!

Husband: No way those are all from me.

Wife: Yes they are! They’re not from me, so it must be you.

Husband: Oh, OK.

Wife: OK? Is that all you have to say about all these gross spots on the mirror??

Husband: [runs away, if he knows what’s good for him]

My beautiful wife was so convincing in her denials of spittle culpability and so adamant about my overall toothbrushing grossness, that I never even questioned her. (That probably comes from a veteran husband survival instinct, more than anything.)

But the pearly white dental tables have turned. We were talking with friends the other night who were raving about their activated charcoal toothpaste. Yes, for those of you like myself who had never heard of this stuff, I mean jet-black, Kingston briquette, charcoal. In toothpaste.

They convinced us that it tastes just like normal minty toothpaste, even though it looks like a tube of graphite grease, but in a completely opposite-of-what-you-think-is-going-to-happen way, actually whitens your teeth. So my beloved wife made a special trip to Target just for charcoal toothpaste, and naturally came home with a couple workout shirts, some leggings, $349 worth of makeup and shampoo, some throw pillows, and a food processor.

Oh, and the crazy black toothpaste.

She brushed her teeth with the new toothpaste Monday night while I was also in the bathroom.

After smiling at me, mid-brush, to show me that she looked like she had just licked the inside of a barbecue, she rinsed and checked out her teeth in the mirror to gauge any immediate change in whiteness.

And then the miracle happened. No, she did not go back to Target to return everything. She stopped looking in the mirror and started looking at the mirror, and boom!

She said, “Well, I guess I can’t blame you for the toothpaste mirror spots anymore.”

Score one for the husbands of the world! Can you believe it? We got a win, boys!

She actually called herself out on it! She had dark black toothpaste spittle spots on the mirror, and they were most undeniably hers. I didn’t even bother to inspect the mirror. I just played it totally cool and gave her a small laugh and a shrug, like, “Whatcha gonna do?” (More veteran husband survival instinct there. Take note, new guys.)

The record of wrongs is not a written document, you see. It’s a mental tally, and by playing it cool I scored more points than I ever could have if I had been the one to point it out. Of course, I could never be the one to point it out, because as a man, I am physically incapable of seeing the spots on the mirror in the first place.

And that is the main reason why I will NEVER use the charcoal toothpaste myself. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind having whiter teeth. I’m just scared to death of what the mirror is going to look like when I’m done. All my new plus points would be instantly erased.

Good luck out there, gentlemen.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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No Kids at Home Improvement

All our kids are gone! All our kids are gone!

I’ll probably shout the same thing when the third one finally ships off to:

A) College

B) Boot Camp

C) Taco Bell New Employee Orientation Day

(Complete toss-up at this point)

This happy occasion, however, is the result of church camp. All three boys are gone for the whole week, so my wife and I are doing what every healthy, loving, happily married couple does when they finally get the house to themselves – home improvement.

We dropped the boys off on Monday afternoon and immediately raced to dinner, followed by a romantic trip to Home Depot to browse the aisles in peace and quiet.

Then we headed home to get some more ice and Advil. My wife seems to be doing a little better than me after our week of chiseling off our old hardwood floors. I’m still nursing a few sore muscles and joints, pretty much everywhere on my body that I have a muscle and/or a joint. Back when we were first married, we could renovate all day long, but now we need to take it a little slower.

Our first full day without kids was spent hanging out with Jason, Paul, and Larry – the three gentlemen who are installing our beautiful new fake hardwood floors. Thankfully, the new floors do not get glued down, because after last week, if anyone ever tries to glue anything else down to my concrete slab, there is going to be a fight.

The first thing the guys did was remove half the downstairs baseboards, so we were immediately able to start our kid-free week off right – by sanding and repainting our old baseboards. They look amazing!

Today we had breakfast with Paul and Larry and then retired to the pool area to sand and paint. Around noon, we were able to get away for an intimate lunch at the hotdog shack in front of Home Depot when we made a run for more paint and rollers.

When we were finally finished with the morning’s allotment of baseboards, my wife had an amazing idea. She whispered it in my ear. It seemed like the perfect time, so we snuck off to the guest bedroom.

And started to paint it!

If you need us the rest of the week, we’ll be here, in the throes of renovation.

We might even paint the living room!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

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The Husband's Guide to Shopping for Mother's Day

As a public service to all man and womankind, I like to post something about Mother’s Day each year. Mostly they have been cautionary tales, because it’s important to write what you know, and I have a long history of screwing Mother’s Day up somehow.

This year, I have drawn on my many years of inadvertent research to provide you men out there with a handy Husband’s Guide to Shopping for Mother’s Day. Now, I know we men can be stubbornly independent, so many of you may not heed this advice. To you I say, good luck, and I hope you can dodge flying cookware. If this only serves to remind you that Mother’s Day is this weekend, then I’ve done all that I can.

For the rest of you who are wise enough to listen to advice from a guy who’s been through the Mother’s Day school of hard knocks, here are some categorized gift suggestions and advisable parameters. You’re welcome.

Traditional

Starting Point: Chocolates

Recommended: Chocolate-dipped strawberries and champagne

Avoid: Asking her to make you chocolate chip cookies

Starting Point: Flowers from the garden

Recommended: Large, expensive flower bouquet with balloons

Avoid: Suggesting that she weed the garden while you catch a nap

Children

Starting Point: You and the kids clean the house

Recommended: A whole-house deep cleaning by a professional cleaning service

Avoid: A new bottle of Windex with a bow on it

Starting Point: Hand-made cards from the kids

Recommended: Hand-made cards and hand-made gifts from the kids

Avoid: Asking her to watch the kids while you golf

Health and Beauty

Starting Point: Coupon for massage at the gym

Recommended: Swedish massage at luxury day spa

Avoid: Telling her that if she rubs your feet you’ll make it worth her while *nudge, wink*

Starting Point: A home pedicure kit

Recommended: Manicure/Pedicure appointment at luxury day spa

Avoid: Suggesting that if she would simply stop buying purple blocks of pumice and metal rasps to sand down her feet with, the calluses would eventually just form and protect the skin underneath, thereby eliminating the need for any future foot maintenance, using your own gnarly, callused feet as a helpful example

Shopping

Starting Point: Gift certificate to Macy’s

Recommended: Gift certificate to Tiffany & Co.

Avoid: Gift certificate to AutoZone

Starting Point: Perfume

Recommended: Gift certificate to her favorite cosmetics counter and a shopping day with her girlfriends

Avoid: Deodorant

Food and Entertainment

Starting Point: Breakfast in bed

Recommended: Champagne brunch at her favorite restaurant

Avoid: Suggesting that if she doesn’t want to make everyone breakfast, you could all go out to The Waffle Barn

Starting Point: Taking her to the movies

Recommended: Tickets to the theatre, complete with a romantic dinner

Avoid: Tickets to the demolition derby… for just you and only some of the kids… and your dad

Starting Point: A nice bottle of wine

Recommended: A membership to the wine club at her favorite vineyard

Avoid: Box of Franzia White Zinfandel from Chevron     

That should be enough to get you started. Good luck, men!

None of this stuff is in our budget this year, so I’m not actually going to do any of these. I’m just making her a quick card with some printer paper and crayons. And maybe I’ll get her a nice three-dollar box of Riesling.

She’ll love that, right?

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

No More Tears

I have a new theory on my role as a husband and father. I think my main job, when it all gets boiled down, is to keep my wife from crying.

Let me back up a little… I don’t like irrigation. That probably goes back to high school, when I worked for a summer on my uncle’s farm in Oregon. My buddy Scott and I went and spent an entire summer “moving pipe” in the potato fields of the fertile Willamette Valley. (Pronounced will-LAMB-et, not WILL-ah-met, for all of you non-Oregonians.)

Moving pipe involves grabbing the middle of a 30-foot long, 4-inch diameter aluminum pipe, picking it up and shaking it loose from its attachment point to the next pipe, curling it up to chest height like a tightrope walker’s balance pole, high-stepping over fifteen rows of waist-high potato plants, and setting it back down. Repeat the process for eight to ten hours a day for two months.

I won’t tell you I hated it, but “liked it” isn’t the right term either. Scott and I ended up having a good time overall, and we were in great shape at the end of the summer. While the experience may not have done much to illuminate our future career aspirations, it certainly did serve to give both of us a really good idea of what we did not want to do for a living, and a strong desire to go to college.

During college, I ended up having to take a few engineering-related classes on irrigation and irrigation theory. I had had enough irrigation practice up in Oregon to outweigh any irrigation theory that some professor who never moved a pipe in his life wanted to tell me about, so I wasn’t really very interested in hearing what he had to say. There are some things that text books just can’t teach you, like how to get a whole bullfrog out of a 1/8-inch diameter sprinkler hole at high pressure. I suffered through the classes and moved on.

Fast-forward to today, and you likely know my stance on home irrigation. I simply do not like to spend my time or money operating and maintaining a sprinkler system. Especially for something that is not a crop, and has no possibility of paying me back for my investment. Only the social convention of suburban houses having year-round short, green lawns keeps me from shutting off my sprinkler system entirely and letting the grass go native. I would do it in a heartbeat if the neighbors would cooperate.

I am willing to bend to social pressures when it comes to the lawns, but the very first thing I did when we bought our house was to shut off the drip irrigation system that was responsible for the trees and bushes. I was not about to waste time and money maintaining a system of tiny plastic hoses meant to water things that, in my opinion, should be able to fend for themselves. That was all fine and dandy until a week ago.

We had a long, hot summer here in Northern California, and a few of the leafier plants in our backyard ended up a lot more brown than green. My wife had made a few comments to me about them that went in one ear and out the other, but last week at lunch, she sat me down and said flatly, “I want a drip system for the backyard plants.”

When I said, “No way,” she cried.

Now, she claimed it was not my refusal to irrigate that started her tears. She claimed that my rebuff was simply the last straw on a large pile from a frustrating week, but I know better.

Apparently the appearance of the plants around the back fence of our yard is tied directly to her self worth, and it embarrasses her to have dead ones. I, on the other hand, could not honestly care less about them. When people come over to our house, I am not the least bit ashamed of the dead yellow bush in the corner. In my mind, it is the bush’s fault that it could not survive a summer in this climate, not mine. That bush is the one that should be ashamed for being weak.

She doesn’t see it like I do.

I was very taken aback by her tears. While she does have a long track record of tricking me into doing home improvement projects using deception and false naiveté, my wife is not one for employing emotional blackmail just to get her way. It was obvious that her desire for green shrubbery not only outweighed mine considerably, but was a much more serious concern to her than I had realized. Or not realized.

I don’t like it when my wife cries. I especially don’t like it when I’m the one who made her cry. So, guess what I did last weekend?

When I flipped the switch on the electronic sprinkler timer in the garage, and the drip line valve came on, our backyard looked like the grand finale of the fountain show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Water was shooting straight up into the air from under almost every bush and tree. I hate drip line systems.

I ended up spending $64 at Home Depot for the supplies to patch the 18 geysers and replace the 16 feet of main line that I had torn out during a fencing project last year, thinking foolishly that I would never use it again. Shows you what I know.

It seems to have made her happy that she can now have green plants all year long. But, I didn’t do it to make her happy. I did it to keep her from crying. I will attempt to make my wife happy as often as I possibly can, but if I can keep her from crying, I think I’m really doing my husbandly job.

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one that I think extends to all my roles as a husband and father, and will help me keep my eye on the ball, long term-wise. For instance, if I’m great at my job and make a ton of money, my wife will be happy. But also, if I’m marginal at my job and make a marginal amount of money, she’ll still be happy. However, if I’m bad at my job and get fired, or let my emotions get the better of me and quit one day, we’ll have no money. If we have no money, she and I will have to stop eating so the kids don’t starve to death, and that will make her cry, because she gets very cranky if she doesn’t eat. So, I need to maintain a marginal or better rating at work, and keep my job.

Another good example is our kids. If I do my job with the boys, and all three of them grow up to be something awesome, like astronauts, or doctors, or beer brewers, then my wife will be happy. But even if I do just an OK job with them, and they turn out to be just accountants, or managers, or computer programmers, she will still be happy. However, if I totally neglect them, and they grow up to be jobless ne’er-do-wells, she will cry. So, I need to make sure I do my part to make sure they grow up to be fine young men.

The way I see it, I need to focus on maintaining a level of operation as a husband and a father that strives to reduce spousal crying to a minimum, or in a perfect world, eliminate it altogether. If I can do that, I think I’m doing my job. If that job has to involve drip irrigation from time to time, then so be it.

Home improvement and career issues aside, I will be concentrating most heavily on the boys. I need to keep a sharp eye on them and make sure they’re heading in the right direction, because, as I said, if they grow up to be unemployed lazy bums, she’ll cry. But if they really take a wrong turn and grow up to be lawyers or, worse yet, politicians, we’ll both cry, and I do NOT want that!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

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