Getting Ready

The other day I read a blog post from a woman with four children. They were traveling and she had packed all she and the children needed for the trip. Her husband needed only to get his little ditty bag ready and load everything in the car. However, when they got to their destination, he asked, "Honey, did we pack my lotion?" Needless to say the rest of the post should have been unprintable, but she managed to finish the story without curse words.

I know what she means. Wednesday night we gave a party for my husband's minister, celebrating his twenty years at the church. I cleaned the house, bought the food, hid 500 items of clutter, prepared the food, set out the food, went to church, and came home to light candles and turn on the music (a playlist I had carefully prepared sometime during the day) and await the company.

Five minutes after everyone had gotten here, my husband loudly asked why the music was so soft. And what was that playing? I ignored him. Why were we playing the music on my small IPod player and not through the speakers, he went on. The music was playing through the speakers, so I continued to ignore him.

On the dining room table, there were ham biscuits, fruit and vegetables that I had cut up, cheeses, desserts. Around the kitchen there were containers of nuts and sesame sticks. There was one dish of chips and salsa. As soon as the chips and salsa were gone, my husband loudly asked if we had any more salsa.

My point is this: There was no we to anything that had gone into the preparation for the party.

That said, let's get back to the blog post I mentioned earlier. My husband once said that men don't wear "outfits" and this was hilarious to me at the time. But when we were going on a trip, the fact that girls and women wear outfits was my biggest advantage. I could tell my daughters, "Three outfits," and they could pack their entire wardrobe for the trip. I didn't care if the outfit components matched as long as there were socks, underwear, shoes, shirts, and pants for every day of the trip. I could add, "One dressy outfit" to the instructions and they could execute that part too. Young as they were, they understood the concept of packing in outfits.

I guess I'm rambling here, set off by the inability of the husband in the blog post to perform a task that even my young daughters could do--that is get himself packed and ready for the trip--and the fact that he asked if his wife had brought the thing he had forgotten. Even my daughters would have said, "Mommy, I forgot my toothbrush," or their Sunday shoes or whatever they didn't pack.

I will say that I felt avenged at the party Wednesday night when my husband changed the music to a playlist that was entitled, "Dance Party" and he thought he was getting the Rolling Stones and other rock musicians. It was disco music, and I laughed out loud when I heard the Village People do the intro to "YMCA" - my husband HATES disco music.

Irony: The daily reading today says, "Everything that irritates us about someone else should lead us to an understanding of ourselves." Carl Jung