Misters Are Doing It For Themselves

I thought he’d learned his lesson after the gaffe shortly before the birth of our second child. The one when I remarked that I hoped this delivery would not occasion the same pain and suffering as the first, whereupon he asked, “What pain?” Sputtering with enraged incredulity, I’d somehow managed to refrain from squeezing his abdomen in a vice and shoving a prize-winning butternut pumpkin through an inadequately tiny orifice while maniacally screaming, “This is what you missed while you watched telly and ate sandwiches, you empathically-challenged pig-man!”

But no. It seems Mr. Lonie wagged a lot of classes at the Academy for Sensitive and Supportive Husbands, because even the greenest of dangly-genitaled spouses would have the decency, if not the self-preservation instincts, to prevent his latest clanger from passing their lips.

“Why does it feel like I do everything around here?” I complained, referring pointedly to Mr. Lonie’s habit of sitting at the computer monitoring sports results while the housework and child-wrangling is accomplished seemingly magically around him. “Hmm, sometimes I feel the same way,” he said. Not as in, “You’re right Darling, I’m sorry I haven’t been helping more”; but as in, “That’s funny, I thought I did everything in this house.”

You can imagine my flabbergastedness. I was so shocked it took a few minutes for the righteous anger to seep into my consciousness, but if he thought for that few minutes he could voice such an outrageous opinion with impunity, he was wrong. Just in case I’d grossly miscalculated, I mentally ran through my obligations and accustomed duties, tallying them against his. “Nope,” said the little accountant in my brain, punching some final numbers into his calculator. “The figures say FIRE AWAY!” So fire away I did.

It was a short, sharp volley which ended in the perhaps none-too-mature denunciation: “You think you do all the work around here? Well now you can see what that’s really like!” followed by my desistance from all normal tasks and complete refusal to lift a finger to help. (Well, except for the grocery shopping. And the laundry. And the washing up. Because if you want something done properly, and all that.)

The only apology I received was half-hearted and obviously insincere, so until I get a real one, I’ll be enjoying my new leisure time. And Mr. Lonie can forget any bedroom hijinx – he’ll soon learn the meaning of doing everything himself.