First Socks, Then Shoes

JustKooki.Blogspot.com

Some things just can’t be undone. It doesn’t matter if I cook his favorite meal tonight and buy gummi bears for dessert. Or put the children to bed by myself. I could even stand on my head and do naked splits in the air. No matter what I do, it won’t change the fact that this morning when my husband tried to get ready for work, he couldn’t find any clean socks, anywhere. He couldn't find clean pants either. 


Nightmares come true. 

It’s entirely my fault. On a normal day my husband works almost 10 hours — and that’s before he gets home (he'll contest this number but then he has some explaining to do). On a normal day I work about 10 hours too. It’s just that part of my work involves things like doing the laundry. I usually keep the pile within an inch of my chin. The children will occasionally whine that they don’t have any clean socks but the reason is usually because the socks are strewn across the floor rather than piled in the hamper. Unlike the children, my husband usually puts his dirty clothes in the hamper.  

But this week hasn’t been normal. It’s vacation. You do understand that by "vacation" I mean the children’s vacation, right? Which means I’m working more than 10 hours and my husband probably wishes he was working more, but that might just be me projecting. Vacation means I didn’t do the laundry. And haven’t, apparently, for a couple of weeks. It is not helpful that I realize this at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, when I'm enjoying a fresh cup of coffee, when I see my husband standing in front of me in his boxers. 

Is it selfish to wish he’d run out of boxers too?

Just last night I was rejoicing that I was smarter than him. I’d scored 26 on Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Age test (20 is best!). I generally feel like my brain functions like a lobotomized monkey so was as excited as a child on her birthday that I scored anything below 70,  and that on my first! try. When I saw my husband’s score was 36, the words, “I’m smarter than you,” may have repetitively spewed forth from my mouth like sewage on a rainy day in Doha.

I wasn’t feeling so smart now. I wanted to vomit. Thing was, I knew a few more things my husband hadn’t been awake long enough to discover yet. Not only had I not done the laundry, I hadn’t booked the flights I said I’d book (thanks Qtel!). Also we didn’t have any milk. 

Some negligences can’t be remedied. 

My husband is nothing if not pragmatic. He calmly asked me to please go to the store and buy him a hamper. I thought that an odd request given the current state of his dress. But he figured if the current arrangement wasn’t working, make another arrangement. He’d wash his own clothes. 

My husband knows he can do what he does because I'm in the background doing what I do. He knows this because he used to be in the background doing this. I (& his parents) put him through University - in Switzerland that's a substantial number of years more than in the States. Even after we had our first child and I was at home full-time, I was the in-your-face bitch telling him that I'd already worked 15 hours that day and he'd only done 10 so he had some catching up to do. That usually coincided with elbowing him in the ribs at 3 a.m. when a certain baby was crying. I'm not an easy person to live with and even harder to be married to. 


But we are impeccably suited for each other. There are a few reasons for this, one of them being that I also know that I can do what I do because he does what he does — even though I'm not always sure exactly what that entails. All I can see some days are the multiple phone calls on the weekend, as well as running out to some exhibition hall or other, sometimes with a drill in hand, other times, with only his fury. He'll come back hours later. The children will be in bed. Maybe we'll sit out back. He'll smoke and I'll drink. Both of us silently hoping we can keep these coping mechanisms under control and that they won't kill us. Between deep inhalations he'll tell me about the man that was almost electrocuted or the documents that had to be signed five times, by the same person, so that some trash could be removed from the building. He makes it sound like my own private viewing of a Cohen movie. The next day we wake up and do it all over again. Because while he was gone doing what he does, I was at home doing what I do. Except when I don't. And that happens overwhelmingly during school vacations. And then he finds himself standing downstairs with nothing but his underwear.

JustKooki.Blogspot.com

Which is why I did laundry for the next two and a half days. (I may have been a bit further behind than I thought.) I even took laundry duties a step further and considered walking his shirts to the dry cleaner (something he usually does because I resist being two-legged entertainment for the men at the dry cleaners & also I refuse to wield an iron).  I went to the store. I bought gummi bears. And I didn’t buy just one hamper — I bought three laundry baskets for optimal pre-sorting.The orange basket is for towels; blue for dark clothes; white for lights. The idea being that everyone throws their dirty clothes into the appropriate basket. When the basket is full someone (I) wash the laundry in that basket.  Totally streamlining the whole process. I think.

Any bets on how long it will be until he runs out of boxers too or am I going to have to come up with another way to get him out of his shorts?