I Really Have No Idea What To Call This. Titles Are Probably Overrated Anyway

So the other day I was making myself a sandwich for lunch, and as I was opening up the loaf of bread it made me think about my grandparents. Apparently they had vehemently differing opinions on what exactly was the proper way to turn a twist tie in order to seal something up. One of them was adamant that it needed to be turned clockwise, and of course the other one was every single bit as convinced that counter-clockwise was the only way to go. Which really makes no sense whatsoever, I know. UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN MARRIED. And then it makes all the sense in the world.

I guess that every relationship has their own twist ties. For my parents, it’s toothpaste. My dad is a “roller”, starting at the very bottom and then methodically making his way up the tube. But my mom-she just squeezes it right out the middle, wherever the spirit happens to move her, which of course drives my dad absolutely nuts.

Now sometimes people are lucky, and they are able to find a way to resolve these kinds of conflicts. In the case of my grandparents, they got together and banned all twist ties from their house, declaring that from now on the only acceptable means of sealing up food products was to be the clothespin. And for my parents, they just started buying two tubes of toothpaste when they went to the store.

So of course that got me to thinking about my own marriage, and what our particular twist ties might be.

For a while it was the toilet seats, as it often is.  But we solved that problem by issuing a declaration stating that, “EVERYONE!-it’s just the two of us here-EVERYONE MUST PUT ALL THE SEATS DOWN ALL THE TIME.”

So we resolved that issue pretty quickly, but believe you me-that is not always the case around here.

Specifically, I’m remembering one particular Christmas when my husband and I were still in graduate school. He drove over from Atlanta to Athens to meet me, and then we were going to drive back to North Carolina together in my car. Now, don’t ask me why, but for some reason we decided that it would be a good idea to take my desktop computer-tower and monitor-home with us. Despite the fact that I only had a tiny little Mustang at the time.

Of course, that left Very Little Room for anything else to go home with us, so we were reduced to stuffing little bits in here and there, wherever we could find a little space. Eventually we were down to the last spot and, in the Spirit Of Christmas, we proceeded to get into one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had in our twenty years together over whose dirty laundry got to go home with us. Because, by God, DIRTY LAUNDRY IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS! As if we were completely deprived of laundry cleansing facilities here in Georgia, and the only hope for clean clothes lay back there in North Carolina.

You know. Because we were 20. And stupid. And so very, very firstborn. And I mean FIRST! BORN!

This really started to show up in our relationship once we got engaged and kept moving closer and closer to our wedding day. In that, whenever we had some sort of household task to perform, we actually had to sit down and break the task down into its tiniest components, and then divide up every single step between the two of us to make sure that everyone had exactly the same amount of work to do. Because, baby, if I’m still working, then YOU ARE TOO.

We might have been in graduate school but, as I mentioned before, we were so very stupid about so many things.

I mean, not once in my marriage has it helped for me to sit my husband down and say to him, “You know, if I could just explain to you how to use the subjunctive mood in Spanish, then I don’t think we’d even be having this whole toilet seat issue.” Nor has it ever helped for my husband to come to me in the middle of a disagreement and say, “OK, now if this were a math problem, and we could just graph this equation in multiple dimensions, then this laundry crisis would easily be resolved.” (Important Side Note: Not that that actually stops him from doing this, but after all this time together I’ve figured out that he really just does that for his own amusement, so whenever he starts busting out the math problems, I just stop paying attention to him, smile, and look pretty.)

And truthfully, it did take a while for us to get past that point, the point where simple, everyday statements such as, “I’M buying Miracle Whip,” or, “Well, I’M going to freeze this ground beef IN THE SHAPE OF A CIRCLE,” stopped being ways that we used To Take A Stand, the point requiring that both parties be flown to Camp David to meet with a team of skilled negotiators in order to hammer out a compromise over which laundry detergent your household will be using from now on.

However, on the flip side, one area in which being firstborn has helped both of us is in the area of Not Killing Each Other. I’d like to think that the fact that we are both still alive and have remained out of prison for all these years is a testament to the strength and perseverance of the firstborn spirit.

And if that’s not cause for a little celebration on this crisp, Thursday afternoon, well then, I really don’t know what is.