It’s 12:28 a.m. and I may never sleep again. The scene of depravity that I just stumbled on in the den has burned itself into my brain and it will fester there until my last moment on this earth.
I went to bed at eleven, and left G still on the couch watching TV. After reading myself into a trance (Junot Diaz’ “This Is How You Lose Her”–ironic, given the way this story is going), I switched out the light and tried to fall asleep. I almost had, then jerked awake because my nose was stuffy. 12:05 a.m….dangit. I poked around in the medicine cabinet for one of those sexy nose strip things and couldn’t find any.
So I walked toward the den to grab my phone and type a note to get breathie strips tomorrow. As I opened the door from the hallway, a guilty looking G whirled his head around from where he sat on the couch and I heard a strange clunking noise as he tried to hide an object on the lower shelf of the coffee table. My eyes darted to the TV, expecting to see some horrifying adult pay-per-view. Nope, just a sci-fi movie (and not even a sexy one at that). Then I looked closer at the object he had tried to hide.
What do you think it was? Given the level of panic on his face, you might guess crack pipe. Then he started to giggle and I saw that the secret object was my kitchen shears. My fancy German steel kitchen shears. The ones I protect from the children when they want to cut paper. The ones I squawk over when he uses them to slice open a plastic bag. My precious.
The father of my children was using my kitchen shears to cut his toenails. He was staying up late, waiting for me to sleep, so that he could do perverse things with foreign objects.
As the truth of the moment revealed itself to me, I stood frozen in the doorway, one hand covering my gaping mouth. Seconds ticked by as he waited for my outrage to pour forth.
“I would rather have found you in here with a woman.”
He cringed and laughed. ”The clippers just don’t do as good of a job.”
Like he’s done this BEFORE.
“I was going to put them in the dishwasher.”
We laughed so hard I bent over double. When I finally got myself back together, I said, “You KNOW this is going in the blog.”
So that’s why I’m sitting here in bed typing at 12:40 a.m. Some stories just beg to be told.
And damn if the fool didn’t just come in here and waggle his eyebrows at me in a suggestive, “Hey, the kids are asleep” fashion. I met him with a steely glare.
“You have GOT to be kidding.”
He plopped down on the bed beside me and said, “Hey, at least I wouldn’t scratch you.”
As Paul Harvey might say, I want to hear “the rest of the story…”
Rest of the story: I went to sleep.
Readers:
please, rest assured that, should you ever be invited for dinner at our place, we won’t be serving bonne-in chicken.
However, if you already has chicken here, well… You just wish you had never read this story now, don’t you?
Meh. The dishwasher sanitizes everything, right?
Let’s hope…
I have similar issues too. There are some things that a lady would never do but a man has no problem with – a “potential” problem isn’t even in their orbit. My thing is dish towels. A dish towel should never touch the floor. We have floor rags for that but more than once I have found all three using a dish towel to wipe up a spill on the floor. When I squawk they look at me like I am an alien.
Oh, Tracy, I once received validation on that one from my eldest brother. He said to my (now-ex) husband, “Don’t let my mother catch you doing that…She’ll kill you. Besides, it’s kind of gross.” Hah!
I hope he was wearing a gun at the time.
Yep–hand towels, dish towels, PAPER TOWELS.
Hahahaha!!! I love him!
Sent from my newest, and even more darling and invaluable iPhone.
>
I am willing to trade.
You know how I hover like a madwoman over my sewing scissors. And I’m with Tracy and Constance about the dishtowels. I wash mine separately because well, I don’t want any comingling in the wash. Or something like that. OCD. It’s so much fun. And it just makes sense, right? Thanks for the giggle this morning.
Oh, I can’t even think about what he would mingle in the wash!
Sorry, I can’t stop laughing at that.
Obviously you;ve never watched ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ – at least he didn’t ask you to cut them. Poor Marie. And as for scissors: LEAVE MINE ALONE, WORLD!
He’s KNOWS better than that!
like our mutual cousin above,”Bo”, it seems an unusually short piece today???
Hardly! It was quite a lengthy piece for something written after midnight!
I read this post yesterday morning and at the time didn’t feel compelled (read: was too embarrassed) to share. But the more I thought about it…the more I realized how common this must be and I thought it was just MY man. MEN THINK FRESH CUT TOE NAILS COUNT AS FOREPLAY. Mine will enter the bed with a deep, sexy “I just cut my toenails” proposition. And I will kill that mood with my comment “Funny…I don’t recall hearing the chainsaw running?” Which is code for “Go to sleep” and also code for “You have thick, nasty, man talons so don’t touch me.”
hahahahahaha….deep breath…..hahahahaha!
Thank you, Baddest Mother Ever, for giving me the best laugh I’ve had in a long, long time – and to AmyB too for her comments, which sound amazingly similar to things I may have heard or said before…ahem. Anyway, I’m likely to have the church giggles all day on this one, so coworkers beware. I’m definitely bookmarking this post for when I need a good chuckle (and a reminder that it’s really just not MY man who does things like this).
“Church giggles”–I know exactly what you mean!