Please don’t tell my husband. We have a solid partnership, and there are a couple of things that he still likes about me. It’s a relatively small secret I’m asking you to keep, but the consequences of disclosure are dire. If he finds out that I have become my mother, my sex life is finished.
In my defense, I wasn’t absolutely sure that I had become my mother until last weekend, when the aforementioned partner announced that he thought we should spend the day increasing the energy efficiency of our house. That’s how he put it, too, as if sealing up drafts was going to be a full day project, a family event the way shopping for school clothes, or washing cars used to be.
“Really?” I said.
“There’s a draft coming in the front door,” he answered, suppressing a scoff. “The back room feels like a beer refrigerator. We need to caulk up the windows in our bedroom with that removable tape sealant.”
Every word he said was true. Our house needed Sealant Day the way Houston needs Arbor day. Desperately.
So why was that a problem? Because he was using my words. Repeating my phrases. And he had no idea. This is a man who up until two weeks ago refused to close the chimney flu because he didn’t believe air moved that way, who bellowed up the stairs that I’d “Done it again!” as the house filled with smoke when he lit a fire. This is the man to whom I said, “There’s a draft coming through the door, feel it?” for a week. To whom I joked that our new beer fridge had windows and a kitchen table. Shoot, I even blogged about the chill in that back room turning it into a refrigerator, and then wondered aimlessly out loud what to do about it.
You understand, right? You know where this is going? Sealing up the house became his idea. Not mine. This was the apex of a learning curve that began when my mother first said, “Daddy will let you go if we convince him that it was his idea to send you, honey… just give me time.”
My husband did a bang up job on the house. It’s better than ever.
Not to boast, but I didn’t even help.
"It's good you thought to do that," I said. "Because it's getting colder every day."
Shhh. You promised.
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