My Husband (upon discussion of this week’s grocery list): “The next time you put avocados on the list, I’m going to buy one and then light a dollar bill on fire. Because that’s the same as buying two.”

(Originally published here on July 31, 2005.)

I think one of my favorite things about being in my thirties is the fact that I no longer feel like I have to pretend about who I really am (or am not) in order to get people to like me. This was not always the case.

Back during our first year of marriage my husband, who is himself an Eagle Scout, worked as a volunteer with a Boy Scout troop and I, caught up in the flush of wanting to impress my new husband, agreed to go along on one of his troop’s camping trips.

Important Side Note: If you have never been camping before, I would HIGHLY recommend that your first trip not be with a troop of scouts, because any points you feel you have gained by being “a really cool wife” will quickly fade when you realize that, compared to everyone else on the trip including elementary school students, trail dogs, etc., you feel like a giant, incompetent wuss.

I really should have known that I was in over my head when my husband and I went to the outdoor store to buy me some gear. We did not go there to buy a cool backpack, or a kicky bandanna, or a nifty trail tool. No,we went so that I could buy my very own, neon orange, plastic poo shovel.

Things kind of took a turn for the worse once we had hiked up the trail to the spot where we were going to camp that night. We had foolishly drunk all the water we’d packed, so my husband went down to the river, filled our two plastic bottles with water, ran some iodine through the bottles, and handed one to me. I looked at the bottle, looked at him, and said, “It’s brown, And. There. Are. Bugs. In. It!” He looked at me and said, (and please bear in mind that he had only been a husband for a little under a year and hadn’t yet developed the sensitivity that he has now after nine years of marriage), “Well, the bugs are dead. And we have this lemonade mix to add to it!”

Even now, eight years later, I can’t think of this story without experiencing total incredulity at his response.  And even now, eight years later, my husband insists that we would not have even had this problem, if only he had packed a darker colored drink mix.

Happily I did recover enough from this trip to start going out on day hikes with my husband and our friends. As a matter of fact I was pretty impressed with myself on our last trip, because not only was I wearing my very own pair of official hiking boots, but they were so well used that we had to patch them together with duct tape.

(Yes of course we had duct tape-I was hiking with three engineers! As a matter of fact, the only reason that I didn’t have to sleep suspended in between two trees in some kind of jury-rigged duct tape shelter was the fact that the other spouse who came on this trip was five months pregnant.)

However, there are still some hurdles to overcome before I can consider going on another camping trip, as is clearly illustrated by the following conversation I had with my husband the last time he went camping.

10:00 pm. The phone rings.
Me: “Hello?”
My husband: “Hey, Jenny. I need your help.”
Me: (panicking at all the possible emergencies that could befall campers, and wondering just exactly where I can rent an emergency extraction helicopter at 10 pm on a Saturday night) “Oh my gosh, are you all right?!”
My husband: “What? Oh, yeah, we’re fine. I just need you to get the Almanac so you can tell us the geographical size of Liechtenstein in square miles.”

Silly me-what was I thinking?! These were highly trained, highly capable, highly intelligent men. Clearly the only emergency situation in which they could possibly have found themselves would be to be without immediate access to the geographical data of tiny, landlocked, central European countries.

So anyway, the jury is still out on the whole camping thing, but between you and me I wouldn’t hold my breath.

(originally posted June 29, 2005)

The next post I’m republishing from my archives is one of the first stories I ever wrote about me and Mr. Cranky Fibro Girl.

In honor of today being my 9th wedding anniversary, I thought I’d write a little about how my husband and I have worked out our own particular division of marital labor in order to ensure a smooth, well-running relationship. Because there are certain things they just don’t cover in premarital counseling, such as how to adjust to the fact that each of you deals with stress differently.

When it comes to handling stressful situations, my husband is in charge of Being Calm, which is best illustrated through the following story.

After we’d been married for three years we bought our first house, and after we’d lived in our house for six months we had a really bad ice storm. We thought the worst that happened was that we lost power, but we soon discovered just how wrong we were when I walked into our bedroom and saw a GI-NORMOUS tree sticking through the roof.

Naturally I called for my husband, and he responded by saying, “What?” Now I’m sure you can picture this situation, so you know the tone I was using. It was not, “Could you please come in here when you get a minute, hon?” It was, “COME! NOW! BAD!” Fortunately he decided to amble in and see what was going on. That was good because I only had the one yell in me, and then I lost all ability to speak and was reduced to quiet whimpering.

So he came into the room while talking on the cell phone to his dad, saw the giant hole in our roof, and… started describing it in precise, rational, scientific terms to his father. Like, “Hm, the hole is about the size of a dinner plate, and the tree is protruding approximately eighteen inches down from the ceiling.”

And I’m standing there looking at him, the love of my life, the man I waited seven years to marry, and I’m thinking, “Who are you, and what is the MATTER with you?! Why are you not freaking out when CLEARLY that is the response called for in this situation?!”

But this is where the whole division of labor thing came in handy, because he calmly organized some roof triage, and I got to come up with a funny story to tell people.

However there are some times when being calm can backfire on you, and that is where I come in. So in addition to Getting To Do All Of The Freaking Out, in stressful situations I am also in charge of Reasonable Expectations. And I have a story for that too.

About a month after moving into our house, things were going well. I was enjoying unpacking and decorating, and I had just gotten a new job working at a bookstore, which is something I always wanted to try.

One day my husband came home from work and announced that there was a position open at his job for someone to go to Denmark for a year. And he thought we should go. And…he was serious. He honestly believed that this was absolutely the best, most rational, most logical next step for the direction of our lives. And he was upset when I responded by bursting into tears and crying for like, an entire day. He said, “I don’t understand why we can’t discuss this rationally.”

So here we are six years later (still living in America), and we’ve gotten our routine down pretty well. He is in charge of Things That Sting, Time, Calling People On The Phone, and Knowing How To Get Around In Any Given Location, and I am in charge of Funny Smells, Sneaking In Decluttering So He Doesn’t Notice It, Knowing Things About People, and Holding His Drink When We Go Out Somewhere.

It works for us.

Because when I come to him in tears and say, “I’m sorry you have a sick wife. You should find someone else who isn’t defective,” he says, “I’m sorry I have such an awesome wife who has to be sick.”

The other day, as we were making dinner, my husband decided to bring me up to date on his latest video game.

“So I’m playing Far Cry, and it’s different than other video games because you’re placed in this hostile situation, and there are all these things coming against you, and you have to figure out how to survive.”

I snorted.

“What?” he asked, surprised.

“You have just described the plot of Every. Video Game. EVER.”

“I have not,” he responded, highly offended. “Name one.”

“Um, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect…”

“Those are completely different,” he countered.

“Ha! How?” I remained unconvinced.

“Because Far Cry takes place in Latin America, which is an actual place, and not some fantasy world that’s made up.”

My only response was an eloquent, unbelieving look.

“It is not the same thing!” he shot back, his voice significantly louder than when we’d begun this conversation.

“You’re just mad because I’m right,” I said.

“You are not right! You are not even on the same planet as right!”

I just looked at him, feeling like there was nothing more I needed to add to my position on the matter.

He turned away and started chopping vegetables with unusual vigor. Then I, unable to leave well enough alone, said, “You know-just because I’m quiet, that doesn’t mean I agree with you.”

And then…he stopped talking to me.

But that’s all right,I understand; sometimes the truth really does hurt.

My husband: “I’m sending you a link, and despite what the subject line says, you have to watch it all the way through.”

Me: “Uh oh. On a scale of 0-10, where does it fall on The Dark Side Of The Internet?”

My husband: “6.”

Me: “What?! That’s high. I don’t want to watch that.”

My husband: “That’s not high. If 0 is as pure as the driven snow, and 10 is the deepest, blackest pits of hell, then 6 isn’t that bad.”

Me: “Oh, OK. I guess that would only be a little bit above 50%. I was just relating it to my pain scale; if I have a 6 pain level, that’s really high.”

My husband: “True.”

Me (the language major in me dying a little as I said this): “I guess we need better calibration between our scales.”

1. My husband, calling me from work.

My husband: “Our girl scout cookies are here.”

Me: “Cookies!”

My husband: “I was able to get the extra Thin Mints you requested.”

Me: “Cooookkkkiiiieeeessss!”

My husband: “The house owes me $35.”

Me: “OK.”

My husband: “I just spent thirty-five dollars on cookies!”

Me: “And they are worth every penny.”

My husband: “WE HAVE OUR OWN BOX OF COOKIES!”

Me: “And?”

Loud thunk as my husband’s head hits his desk in despair.

2. My husband, calling me from the airport on one of his many recent business trips.

My husband (talking very slowly and sounding kind of funny): “So, we had a little excitement here.”

Me (thinking that maybe he missed his flight): “Oh?”

My husband: “I refused to go through the X-ray machine, so I had to have them pat me down and run the wand over me.”

Me (wondering where this is going): “OK?”

My husband: “They also did that thing where they swab your hands and clothes to look for…whatever it is they look for. ”

Me: “Uh huh?”

My husband: “Well, they found something on the swab and it set off all the alarms. So then they unpacked all my stuff, x-rayed it, took me over to the side,…(long, involved explanation that kept going on as I grew more and more frantic.)

Me (cutting to the chase): “OMG, ARE YOU IN JAIL?!”

My husband (in that slightly condescending tone that people take when speaking to someone they believe is needlessly overreacting and unnecessarily hysterical): “Um, NO-oh. I would have led with that.”