Save Me From Myself
I should never be left alone for any lengthy period of time. Bad things happen when I get bored. Not as bad as when my friend Megan gets left alone (she has a tendency to paint rooms funky colors and cut her own hair), but bad nonetheless.
Yesterday, I left work at 5:00, disappointed that no one I know had popped out of the woodwork to invite me to an impromptu happy hour. So much was I not looking forward to an evening alone in an empty house that I actually did the unthinkable--I called my parents to see what they were up to. I got my mom, who announced she was lying on the sofa because she hadn't felt well the past couple of days. "Maybe it's allergies," I tried, but her response--that her stomach was slightly upset in addition to the headache and sore throat--made it clear that she was, indeed, ill and not worth the risk of infecting myself.
Fuck.
So I decided to order Chinese take-out for dinner and watch Bad TV--shows I won't admit to my husband that I actually consider worth watching. Like "What Not To Wear." I don't like Clinton nearly as much as I liked Wayne Scott (or whatever his names were), but I still love this show, even if it makes my husband roll his eyes like a teenage girl.
Around 6:45, I decided to go for a walk.
By 9:00, I was bored out of my mind.
And then came the phone call from darling husband, informing me from his safe distance of about 100 miles that, in the event some fucking high school baseball team wins their game today, he will be back at his 100-miles-away post NEXT weekend, too.
That really, really pisses me off.
And I don't want to hear any stories about women whose husbands work third shift, or women whose husbands are truck drivers or traveling salesmen or on active military duty. I don't want to hear about how some men go out every night or take trips without their wives or similar bullshit, and that I should consider myself lucky I only have to deal with lost weekends and evenings and then only about 75% of the time. Because no way, no fucking way, would I have accepted a marriage proposal from someone I knew would be absent more than present.
The way I see it (and many have told me I'm blind at worst and short-sighted at best, but that's their opinion), there are two classes of married women. The first are the Married for Practical Reasons. These women claim to have married for love, but the reality is, they married for the status. They married because they didn't want to become an old maid. They married because it's easier to live on two incomes than one. They married because society still makes it shameful to have kids without a husband. Maybe they did marry for love originally, but they stayed married for convenience, whether they know it or not.
The second category are the Married for Romantic Purposes. These are the happily-ever-after idiots who think the perfect marriage is one that feels like dating for about 50 years or more. I fall into this category.
I got married because I wanted to spend every waking moment with this particular man, whether such a notion was practical or not. And as wonderful as he is, I have to admit that, had he been at his former job when I met him--a job that demanded he be in a hotel room 6 nights out of 7 every week--the relationship probably wouldn't have made it past 3 or 4 dates. I don't want to be a commuter bride. I want a husband who's home more than he's not. I'm a demanding fucking bitch, but that's the way I am--take me or leave me.
So today I'm desperately hoping that this particular group of high school kids is crying into their jock straps right now over the agony of defeat, because I am fucking tired of losing my husband every goddamn weekend because he has to sit around and watch them chase balls and then write a story about it so their parents can ooh and ah and cut it out for their fucking scrapbooks. I'm tired of stepping over those papers in people's driveways when I go walking (sometimes 2 or 3 of them in a sad pile of unread news) and getting so pissed off that his work and my misery go unread that I want to pick up the papers and hurl them at the residents while screaming "pick up your fucking PAPER, you asshole!"
And mostly I'm just tired of being left alone all the damn time. Left to sit in my house and stew in my own angry, bored and lonely juices.
Maybe I'll go paint a room. Or cut my own hair. God knows I couldn't do any worse than the mullet I got from the Hairdresser from Hell.
Yesterday, I left work at 5:00, disappointed that no one I know had popped out of the woodwork to invite me to an impromptu happy hour. So much was I not looking forward to an evening alone in an empty house that I actually did the unthinkable--I called my parents to see what they were up to. I got my mom, who announced she was lying on the sofa because she hadn't felt well the past couple of days. "Maybe it's allergies," I tried, but her response--that her stomach was slightly upset in addition to the headache and sore throat--made it clear that she was, indeed, ill and not worth the risk of infecting myself.
Fuck.
So I decided to order Chinese take-out for dinner and watch Bad TV--shows I won't admit to my husband that I actually consider worth watching. Like "What Not To Wear." I don't like Clinton nearly as much as I liked Wayne Scott (or whatever his names were), but I still love this show, even if it makes my husband roll his eyes like a teenage girl.
Around 6:45, I decided to go for a walk.
By 9:00, I was bored out of my mind.
And then came the phone call from darling husband, informing me from his safe distance of about 100 miles that, in the event some fucking high school baseball team wins their game today, he will be back at his 100-miles-away post NEXT weekend, too.
That really, really pisses me off.
And I don't want to hear any stories about women whose husbands work third shift, or women whose husbands are truck drivers or traveling salesmen or on active military duty. I don't want to hear about how some men go out every night or take trips without their wives or similar bullshit, and that I should consider myself lucky I only have to deal with lost weekends and evenings and then only about 75% of the time. Because no way, no fucking way, would I have accepted a marriage proposal from someone I knew would be absent more than present.
The way I see it (and many have told me I'm blind at worst and short-sighted at best, but that's their opinion), there are two classes of married women. The first are the Married for Practical Reasons. These women claim to have married for love, but the reality is, they married for the status. They married because they didn't want to become an old maid. They married because it's easier to live on two incomes than one. They married because society still makes it shameful to have kids without a husband. Maybe they did marry for love originally, but they stayed married for convenience, whether they know it or not.
The second category are the Married for Romantic Purposes. These are the happily-ever-after idiots who think the perfect marriage is one that feels like dating for about 50 years or more. I fall into this category.
I got married because I wanted to spend every waking moment with this particular man, whether such a notion was practical or not. And as wonderful as he is, I have to admit that, had he been at his former job when I met him--a job that demanded he be in a hotel room 6 nights out of 7 every week--the relationship probably wouldn't have made it past 3 or 4 dates. I don't want to be a commuter bride. I want a husband who's home more than he's not. I'm a demanding fucking bitch, but that's the way I am--take me or leave me.
So today I'm desperately hoping that this particular group of high school kids is crying into their jock straps right now over the agony of defeat, because I am fucking tired of losing my husband every goddamn weekend because he has to sit around and watch them chase balls and then write a story about it so their parents can ooh and ah and cut it out for their fucking scrapbooks. I'm tired of stepping over those papers in people's driveways when I go walking (sometimes 2 or 3 of them in a sad pile of unread news) and getting so pissed off that his work and my misery go unread that I want to pick up the papers and hurl them at the residents while screaming "pick up your fucking PAPER, you asshole!"
And mostly I'm just tired of being left alone all the damn time. Left to sit in my house and stew in my own angry, bored and lonely juices.
Maybe I'll go paint a room. Or cut my own hair. God knows I couldn't do any worse than the mullet I got from the Hairdresser from Hell.
posted by Mitzi Green at 5:08 PM
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