Marriage is strange. No one tells you how bizarre living with a man is or what to expect and once you're in it, there are times that you hover over your kichen or your living room and watch the scenes as they play out between the two of you and you think, "What the...?"
A few mornings ago, Mike and I were having breakfast and he kept making this sound...a short, repetitive yoga breathing type of sound. I looked up from the paper.
ME: "What is that?"
MIKE: "What?"
ME: "That. That thing..."
MIKE: "What thing?"
ME: "That weird noise you keep making...that! You just did it!"
MIKE: "Oh that?"
ME: "Yeah!"
MIKE: "That's muted burp."
What the?!
ME: "I'm sorry...what?"
MIKE: "It's a burp but it's sort of quiet, like, I'm not busting out with a real burp because I don't really need to burp burp, but it's still releasing a gas without being loud."
ME: "It's really annoying. You keep doing it over and over again."
MIKE: "So? It's not loud."
ME: "I know but it's weird. Do you really have that much indigestion?"
MIKE: "Yes."
ME: "Maybe take a Tums and try not doing that so much?"
MIKE: "Whatever."
Needless to say, he continues to do the muted burp thing all the time now and of course, since I brought it up the first time, I'm so hyperaware of it that it's not longer "muted" it's on full volume. Then, the other night, a friend of ours called about boyfriend advice and I was standing in the kitchen, on the phone with her...
ME: "Well, I think you should call him."
MY FRIEND: "I can't call him. You told me I should never call him unless I'm returning one of his phone calls."
ME: "Well, now it's time to up the ante. You need to call him and invite him out this weekend otherwise you guys will lose momentum."
MY FRIEND: "Uggh! Why can't I just get married and be done with this!"
ME: "Oh, yuck!"
MIKE: "What?!"
MY FRIEND: "What?!"
ME: "There's all this...grainy stuff on the kitchen floor!"
MIKE: "Yeah, there is."
ME: "Wait, I don't understand...you've been in this kitchen for the past hour, I just got home, and you never thought to clean up whatever that stuff is before I stepped in it in my bare feet and tracked it all over the place?!"
MIKE: "What's the big deal?"
What the?!
MY FRIEND ON THE PHONE: "Oh, that is so annoying."
ME: "It's annoying!"
MIKE: "So you're going to clean it up now. Calm down."
ME: "The point is, it was here. When you see it...just wipe it up, so that you and I and the dog don't take it on a whirlwind tour of our wooden floor so that I can continue to sweep it up everyday for the next three weeks and every time I find a pile of those little grains I'll think, 'Why didn't Mike just sweep this up when he saw it?'"
MIKE: "Fine. I'll do that next time."
Sure.
ME (into the phone): "See? This is what you have to look forward to. This is why people stand at altars and profess their love for each other...so they can have this exact conversation over and over again for the next 25 years."
MY FRIEND: "Maybe I don't want to get married."
ME: "No, no. You do. You just have to know that when you celebrate someone's 50th wedding anniversary, you're really acknowledging the fact that they were able to endure having this exact conversation 750 times without eventually murdering each other. It's a true accomplishment."
And so, when went to a wedding last Saturday night, all I could think was, "If you can put up with the muted burps, the leaving the laundry in the basket for three weeks without folding it, the refusing to acknowledge spilled food products on the floor, the never ending conversations of 'why can't you' and 'why didn't you?'...if you can survive this...without bludgeoning one another...you did it...you did it..."
So last night, I'm cleaning up around the house and I notice these white specks all over the floor in the bathroom, in the guest room and in the kitchen.
ME: "Honey? What's this?"
MIKE: "I don't know."
ME: "It's weird. I think it was the dog...it smells like perfume though..."
MIKE: "Oh, oh, yeah...I dropped my deodorant on the floor."
WHAT THE?!
ME: "And you didn't clean it up?"
MIKE: "I don't know...I guess I didn't."
And just as we were about to have the same coversation...the one we'll celebrate at our 50th anniversary, I stopped myself.
ME: "Don't worry, I'll take care of it."
And I did...without murdering him.
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