Why is it that the person who possesses your heart and soul (not to mention your money and the secret knowledge that you wear padded bras) also possesses the qualities that rank in the top five of your Top Ten Pet Peeves?
Captain is one of my all-time favorite people…until he steps out of the shower dripping wet and walks across the bathroom floor leaving small, cold puddles of water that I (an unsuspecting fool who should know better after so many years of marriage) step in when going in to pick up the dirty clothes he left lay on the floor (Pet Peeve #6).
Tardiness is a close second on my list of irritants. Not so my life mate. When we were dating, Captain was constantly late. My mother made every excuse for him: “He’s working…he had car trouble…he lost track of time.” Uh huh; I knew better. He was sitting at home reading the paper and watching The Golden Girls on TV. I know this to be true because I got his best friend drunk once and wheedled it out of him. I finally got smart on this issue instead of mad. I simply told him to be there 30 minutes before he really had to be there. This turned into a mutually agreeable solution because he got to be late (in his mind) and on time (in my mind) simultaneously.
Is procrastination a guy thing? Captain’s approach to any situation is a two-step process 1) wait and see what happens, and 2) see #1. Take windshield wipers for example. We will be driving down the road in a rainstorm, and Captain will not turn on the wipers until so much rain has accumulated on the windshield that he can no longer see oncoming traffic. When I ask him to please switch on the wipers, he says “Why? You aren’t driving.” Sarcasm (Captain’s pet peeve #3) kicks in. “No, I’m not. But if you’d clear the windshield, I could see the oncoming traffic and tell you how to drive.”
Is it compulsive of me to switch on the wipers at the first sprinkle? Or is a manifestation of a deep-seeded maternal instinct to protect? There must be some inherent genetic codes at play here. Someone should make a study of this.
Any wife who has been compared to her mother-in-law can sympathize with this pet peeve of mine. Not long after we were married, we had the opportunity to move into Captain’s childhood home. My mother-in-law specifically commanded me NOT to feel I had to arrange my house as she had. Captain spent two years—count ‘em—complaining because I put dish towels where his mother’s silverware had been. I didn’t waste the energy to point out that any intelligent life form should be able to remember after two or three times that the dish towel drawer did NOT have silverware in it.
It is true that the smallest things can destroy the biggest love affairs. Our marriage almost disintegrated one morning over a lack of clean socks for Captain. I do a marginal job of keeping home and hearth together while maintaining an full time outside job, but I have never claimed to be superwoman. I will gladly accept any and all offers of help. The problem, of course, is that there are no such offers being spoken. There are, however, many words spoken when a load of laundry is not done the night before.
I didn’t think laundry would be an issue when we got married. His mother had told me that she specifically taught him to operate a washer and dryer. However, once he signed the marriage license, this information seeped out of his brain and became lost in the ozone layer somewhere. Probably the same place that all those lost socks from the laundry end up. However, he has since been retrained in this skill so all is well on that front.
This brings up the issue of whose responsibility it is to check pockets before laundering jeans. As far as I’m concerned, if an article of clothing is in the hamper, it’s ready for the washing machine. Apparently Captain is not of the same theory. Many a cold glance has come my way after he has found his checkbook in the dryer completely unusable. I say that any man who is certified in the application of noxious chemicals should be able to check his own pockets before putting his jeans in the hamper. This issue is currently still under debate. Although, truth be told, I do not debate too loudly about it because Captain also leaves loose change in his pockets, because the rule in this house is: if there is any currency less than $20 in the washer, it becomes the property of whomever is doing laundry. Oh Captain, if you only knew how much fun stuff for me was paid for with your loose change!
Here’s the last one, and this one just baffles me. It isn’t so much a pet peeve as a puzzlement. Captain refuses, adamantly, to use any eating utensil that has been in my mouth. Say we are out for a nice dinner and I want to share part of my entrée with him. I think this is sort of sexy and romantic. Captain...instant horror and panic. And I'm thinking to myself, Hey buddy, seeing as how we have two children, we have shared germs before and you didn’t have a problem with THAT!” Nope, he won’t do it. I just don’t get it.
To put this little quirk of his in perspective, picture the scene: we need to go somewhere in his pickup, and when I get in, I see sunflower seeds all of the floor mats that must have spilled from an open bag at some point. They are all mixed in with the other agriculture debris on the floor mats. Fellow farm wives, you know what I am talking about. Then...THEN...I watch him scoop up a handful of those sunflower seeds and who knows what else and put it in his mouth! Seriously, dude?! You won’t use a fork that has been in my mouth but you will eat a sunflower seed that has been laying in yucky stuff??? Okay, whatever.
In the interest of fair play, I’ll tell you that Captain’s biggest pet peeve is that I will occasionally put a serving bowl with leftovers on the back deck for the dogs to eat. He says he doesn’t like the idea of eating off of something the dog ate off of. Even when I explain--patiently, I might add--that the serving bowl gets run through the high-temp pots-and-pans scouring cycle on the dishwasher, he still gets the heebie-jeebies. Suck it up, Bunky, it won’t kill you.
Oh, if you ask Captain what his biggest pet peeve is, he will tell you, “Listening to my wife whine about her pet peeves.”
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