I’m glad I’m not a woman. Does that
sound sexist? Because that’s not my intent here. I’m glad I’m not a woman
because it seems like too much work.
I base this on observations I’ve made
of The Lovely Mrs. Taylor. She’s working all the time. From my vantage point in
the aptly-named La-Z-Boy, it doesn’t look like a great deal of fun.
Mrs. T works 40 hours a week at a
“real” job, doing accounting stuff. This is a good thing, since it’s the only
chance she has to relax. The rest of the time she’s slogging away around here
like a character from an Alex Haley novel, a character who’s not going to be
able to relax until Lincoln wins the Civil War.
She works hard. She gardens. She
cleans. She changes the sheets, does most of the cooking, dusts, attends to the
cats’ litter box. A lot of stuff. And when she’s done with that, she tries to
find time to create art, which is what she really wants to be doing instead of other peoples’ payroll forms.
Sometimes it makes her a little
crabby. That’s not a complaint on my part, by the way. If I lived her life, I’d
have killed someone by now; probably several someones.
The hardest part, though, is when we
have company. Doesn’t matter who. Could be the Pope, the president, or some guy
selling life insurance. Visitors, in Mrs. T’s mind, deserve our best. Put
another way: she wants to present an entirely fictional version of our lives,
one in which our bathroom floor is more sterile than an open heart operating
theater.
This is on my mind because last
weekend my daughter surprised us with a visit.
This is my daughter. I love her, but
the entire time she lived under my roof I felt like a hog farmer. The girl was
a pig. She (and all her friends) covered her bedroom walls with
Sharpie-inspired “poetry.” Her idea of organizing laundry consisted of kicking
like-colored clumps of clothing into mouldering piles. Storing a half-eaten ham
sandwich beneath her bed was not unheard of.
Living with my daughter was much like
living with a really smart chimpanzee. But not an especially tidy chimpanzee.
I would say she never threw her
feces, but there was one time when she was only three or so… But that’s a story
for another time.
My point is, she was not exactly Martha
Stewart. Unless you want to compare her with my sons. Jordan and James, as teens, made chimpanzees look like Emily
Post. (I know that’s a dated metaphor, but hang with me here.) When one of the
boys got sick, I didn’t know whether to call a doctor or a vet. They were one
pig head short of “The Lord of the Flies” and I promise that’s my last literary
reference for this column.
My children were savages. And that’s
fine. I was a single, male, parent. Savages were pretty much the best I could
hope for and they all turned out to be fine, upstanding adults any parent would
be proud of, so there.
Their own homes are relatively tidy.
Looking at them now, you’d never guess there was a time they could have passed
for extras in “The Island of Doctor Moreau” and apparently I had one literary
reference waiting in the wings after all.
So why does Mrs. Taylor act as if they’re
visiting royalty whenever they stop by? For the life of me, I do not know.
Aubreii called around noon last
Sunday. She was in town visiting one of my ex-wives (the one that is her
mother) and wanted to stop by on her way back to Detroit.
“Sure,” I said.
And then I made the mistake of
telling Mrs. T about the visit. For the next three hours, my wife performed
what she calls “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” cleaning every nook, cranny, and
cranny-nook in the house. All this for a girl who once smeared feces
(chimp-like) from her diaper (and her brother’s) on a bedroom wall.
By the time Aubreii arrived with my
grandmonsters, Rosie, Ari and Juniper, Mrs. T was beat. The house was spotless,
but so? We’re still talking feces smearers here, folks. A spotless presentation
was not a requirement, in my mind.
I appreciated Mrs. T’s hard work, but
I doubt anyone else noticed. It’s the same story when Mrs. Taylor’s kids and grandkids
show up. It’s not fair that the woman who works so hard already must work even
harder to accommodate company (by which I mean our aforementioned chimp-like
progeny).
Fortunately, Mrs. T recently read an
article about exactly this thing; working too hard to impress. I don’t know if it
totally cured her, but I’m hopeful. Next time a kid visits, we’ll know for sure.
Mrs. T was raised thinking she had to
compete with June Cleaver. But the Beav’s mother never had to work 40 hours a week
doing other peoples’ books. I’m really hoping she’ll be able to relax a little
next time one of our chimps want to stop by for barbecue.
(616) 730-1414
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