My husband likes to make proclamations.  Every so often he comes into a room that is not his (like the kitchen or basically any room except his office and the bathroom) and makes an announcement that he believes will be profound.  “We need to __________” This isn’t my first marriage, so he never experienced that naive new bride who waits with bated breath to hear her liege fill in the blank.  He got me.  I don’t do naive.  I do bitchy.

At first, I thought the proclamations were kinda cute.  “We need to be greener!” ” Isn’t that cute.  The guy who would drive back to his office if we could get a golf cart in the door wants to go green.  He who has thrown away enough Coke cans to pave a road to the moon  and back is becoming Captain Conservation.”  Back then I listened  and waited to see what he was going to do, and then I decided whether or not I was going to support it.  As it turned out I was good with this greener proclamation, and agreed to jump on board.  At first it was okay.  He brought in the re-cycling bins and we begin sorting through the trash like civic minded raccoons.  We changed the bulbs in the lights to the energy efficient type and actually began turning them off on occasion.  Then the new wore off.  I had to remind Captain Conservation more and more often that the bins were full.  His solution was to play reverse Jenga.  (switch to mind numbing marketing music) You just cleverly keep stacking the cans on the top of the pile, but watch your step!  One wrong move and….Junka!! (fade to black)

 We must have had 10 bags of aluminum cans in the garage that needed to go to the recycling plant (which is on the way to the golf course, but damn my luck…it’s winter). So I moved on to phase 2…subtle bitch.  I placed the re-cycling bags on things that were imortant to him.  The unopened case of Cokes,  his tools, and the weekly, to the curb, trash container have all been home to the recycling bags.  He had to have noticed, but for months he never said a word.  When Halloween rolled around and we needed space in the garage to set up the boxes upon boxes of decorations, my genius husband comes up with a great idea…hey you clean out the garage and I’ll take the recycling to the plant.  I want you to know that he managed to pull back into the garage at exactly the same time as the last piece of dust was swept into the dust pan.  I swear to you it was planned that way from the first day he suckered me in to going green!

So today when he swaggered into my house and began “we need to”… “WHAT!  What do WE need to do?  I need to shower and I need to dress.  After that I will need to eat…You need to realize that when you say WE you are actually speaking for both of us and I have a voice.  Now tell me what YOU need to do, and I will decide whether or not I am going to help you.  My sweet, gentle, loving husband who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouth full of it looked at me as if I had grown a third eye and said in a somewhat stunned voice, “Put up the Christmas tree.”

My IQ is high enough.  I do well in social situations of my own choosing.  I have worked in the public eye and with the unwashed masses, and for the most part I have behaved admirably.  However; when you put me in a situation like the one I tried to illustrate for you in the paragraph above, anything can happen.  Most of the time now I blame it on menopause, but in truth I’ve always been emotionally erratic.  I might get caught laughing at inappropriate times, or saying things purely for shock value, but the one thing that will always cause it to happen, is when I don’t get the response I expected from the person I’m dealing with.  So here I am, all 5′ 3″ of me ready to take on my 6′3″ husband who I just know is going to say something stupid like “we need to join a nudist colony,” and I hear “put up the Christmas tree”.  Well, I just errupt in a fit of laughter.  The stunned look on his face is absolutely priceless, and I’m pretty sure the man is convinced I’ve lost my mind.  I’m rolling around on the floor in tears.  My husband isn’t my first love, but he is my last…and the way I figure it if I keep acting like I just escaped from the 5th floor of the local hospital he isn’t going to be stupid enough to take on another woman after I’m gone.  He may be wise in the ways of recycling but I’m wise in the ways of him.   Maybe if I keep laughing at him when he says “we need to”  eventually he’ll just give up, like some sad Pavlovian response.  No…not my husband…no way in hell!!!

  

I know I’m not the first to notice that feminine products are advertised on “girl” shows, and masculine products are touted on “guy” shows.  That’s not news.  It’s when the programming crosses over that things get awkward.  I don’t really enjoy sharing the details of “that not so fresh feeling” with my husband, but try explaining yeast to your adolescent son.  Then bake some bread with him…see where I’m going?  Men are just not equipped to handle the inner workings of the female person.

I think most of us don’t realize how sadly lacking our sons may be in instruction in female anatomy until they are involved in adult relationships.  They all know where the boobies are and what size they like, and they can come up with some rudimentary term for a vagina. Now speaking only from my experience with my sons that was about it.  If asked they could tell you a woman is “on the rag”  once a month and there was some extra trash in the bathroom at least that often.  In addition it seemed like their step-father played a lot more golf during that time. But they couldn’t have given any kind of informed conversation and commercials weren’t going to change that.  To be fair, my daughter wasn’t much wiser.  After having used pads throughout the winter months she was going to be “big” and use tampons so that she wouldn’t have to give up swimming while she was on her period.  Several disasters later I’m talking through the door, “spread your legs…”( you know). When my level of frustration became as high as hers I screamed at the top of my voice “just cram it in the hole!!” and she responded with equal gusto “I don’t have one!”

 One day while forcing my son to watch a little Lifetime with me, there was a commercial on for Monistat. (This has been a while back…so don’ give him grief about it.  We both were mortified) “Hey mom, what is that stuff for?” Now I tried to put it to him in language a 14 year old boy could understand…”it’s what ladies use when they get jock itch.”  OMG!!  I thought  I was going to have to get a jell-o mold to pour him into.  He was all over the place laughing.  After about ten minutes I’m beginning to get a little ticked cause I still think I gave a pretty good answer, so I try to find out what’s so funny.  “Women don’t wear jocks, Mom!  What do you think they would put in ‘em?  It’s for something really gross and you have it cause I saw that junk in your bathroom and you don’t want to admit that you have cooties!”  And then I endured the twenty minutes of cootie taunting that followed.  By the end I found myself screaming back at the child “…well you’re a cootie!” and things pretty much went down hill from there.

Guys commercials are never for anything truly embarassing like “cooties” (although they should be because God knows it has been scientifically proven that they are the cootie carrier monkeys).  Their commercials are for beer, trucks, tires, and electronics.  I sorta get that I guess, but I’ve known plenty of women who drink beer, drive trucks, change their own tires, and are electronics geeks.  Yet I’ve never seen one guy figure out how to put that tiny little glycerin ampule on the end of that inserter and take care of their own yeast infection.  That takes real balls. Usually it’s more like, “hey hon..when your at the doctor getting your stuff checked out see if he’ll give me sumthin’ too.”  And he will because if he’s a guy he gets it, and if she’s a woman she knows if she doesn’t you’ll get it again.  I don’t even know if guys could go pick up the stuff at Wal-Mart if it didn’t have jock in the title.  Makes them sound athletic…”baby I’m a jock and I got the itch to prove it!”  Listen now and hear me later…it’s jock itch, damn it and we should be glad they share.

Anyway, after that experience with my son, I decided just telling them about the birds and the bees isn’t enough.  That’s telling them how fun the playground is and forgetting to tell them that the grass is asbestos.  No, I decided that all the men in my life should know a few things about women.  We have discussed periods.  Why women have them.  Why they don’t.  We discussed childbirth…natural, Caesarean, breech.  We have discussed breastfeeding and breast exams and each medical procedure I have undergone in depth.  I call them with the results of my mammograms and pap smears.  I let them know when I re-floored the dance hall.  If there is something going on in my life or in my body that might embarass my children I make sure to tell them.  It’s working pretty good so far…we rarely hear from them.