Seek And Ye Shall Find

I am sick of being “The Finder” in this house, and I am not convinced that other people even try to find something before they ask me. They know I’ll hop to it, or if I don’t, I’ll have to suffer through their ineffective, lame-ass excuses for searching before I go ahead and find it anyway.

Usually in plain sight.

This weekend Tom said he couldn’t find the mortgage statement. This is annoying for several reasons. First, I was the one who wrote the mortgage checks for 11 years. Then I forgot to mail one (or 2) measly payment/s, and Tom took over.

(Not that this approach is all bad, if you really want to get out of a job, but I didn’t mind the bill-paying so much. When we were engaged he asked if I’d iron a pair of his brand new pants. I quickly proceeded to burn a hole in them and haven’t ironed a thing of his since. That worked well. But back to the mortgage statement booklet thingy…)

I knew that I hadn’t done anything with it, so after looking in my bill and stamp basket, I said finding it was now up to Tom.

You should have seen his annoyingly wide bush-baby eyes as he gave me an incredulous look and said, “What do you mean you DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS? Aren’t you even going to look?” I shrugged and went back to my magazine.

This guy was agitated.

“What are we going to do if you really lost it?!?” he continued, pacing around the kitchen in distress.

I ventured to guess that with all the advanced degrees in the house we could probably come up with a solution, but he wasn’t digging the calm, reasoned approach. Reluctantly, I put down my Diet Dr.Pepper and looked for a bit, making a point to say, “For the record. I think you took the payment booklet and put it somewhere.”

He did not like this either.

Later that night, Tom (who had been watching tv alone on the couch) asked me where the remote was, as if I had somehow snatched it from his grasp unnoticed. By this time I was good and cranky. I may have said, “If it was up your ass you’d know.” Not sure if I should have said that, or at least in that way. I think the proper grammar might have been, “If it WERE up your ass you’d know.”

Anyway, yesterday I saw our mortgage payment on the counter all sealed, stamped and ready to be mailed. Yep, it had been in his home office all along.

Tonight at 10 when I was dying to watch “The Amazing Race” on the DVR, our son came downstairs distraught because he couldn’t find the novel he needs for tomorrow. He assured me he already had looked for it. Tom stayed firmly planted on the couch with a shrug, saying, “I looked for it earlier.”

So, I hauled my bath-robed self up and down all 5 levels of our split level and even out to the car. As the third person on this quest, I figured the book must have been tucked somewhere pretty bizarre. I did a lot of huffing and puffing and not all of it was because I’m out of shape.

Finally I found the book. On my son's nightstand.

A quiet, “Sorry Mom,” and Jake padded back off to bed.

I turned to Tom in total exasperation. “Apple. Not far from the tree. Aargh!”

He said, “Oh please. What about all the quirks the kids have that come from you??”

Trust me, this is one pissing match he does not want to get into with me. At least not right now. Girl had a lot of soda today.

Passive, Meet Aggressive

Numerous readers, okay 3, have asked for a follow-up on Tom’s utter inability to deviate from whatever plan he has in his head. I’ll try to keep this brief, since writing about it tends to make me re-live these moments and I get mad all over again. Not good for either of us, you know?

The White Faucet Incident:

In our old house, the kitchen was about 5 ft x 8 feet, the size of a modest hall bathroom. Tom’s dad was visiting and he helped jazz it up a bit by adding a new laminate countertop and a porcelain sink. I was taking care of a newborn and a toddler, so “the guys” went to Home Depot to pick out our new faucet. Well, those two brought home a $150 faucet with a dandy pullout spray. The problem was, they had chosen function over form.

Function over form? Who did they think they were dealing with? That thing looked like a cheap plastic piece of crap to me. With very few square feet in my oppressive little kitchen, I knew the power of a gorgeous stainless steel gooseneck faucet to cheer me in the mornings. This white plastic jobbie had the opposite effect.

Instead of waiting until after it was installed to tell Tom I hated it (I had learned this lesson after the Pillow Top Mattress Debacle), I pulled him aside and quietly told him it was not to my taste. Tom’s response: “We already bought it. It’s going in.”

Tom didn’t want to hurt his father’s feelings by questioning his taste— my father in law of short-shorts and tube socks fame—so he chose not to do anything. He also didn’t want to go back to Home Depot. And, I suppose he didn’t want me to look crazy, or demanding. Well, any guy with a brain should know that I could unleash all kinds of crazy if forced to live with that ugly faucet. And I did.

P.S. Now Tom’s dad and I go to Home Depot and leave Tom at home.


The $5,000 Carpet Stain:

When we moved 6 years ago—from a 1950’s house to a 1960’s one—I worked my tail off getting ready to move. That tiny house looked like a Pottery Barn Catalog when I was finished staging it to sell. Tom and his dad worked on the heinous outside chores, which sparked The Lead Paint Meltdown of 2004, of which I am not yet ready to write.

I stuck to the inside, decluttering, painting, re-arranging, and trying to make it look like no kids lived there. I packed box after box to move out of the house prior to showing it, so it wouldn’t look like the shoebox that it was.

The upside of all of this work was that I got down to 118lbs for the first AND LAST time since I was a junior in high school. Such was the short-lived benefit of all that stress. The night before the open house, when I still had a million things to do, I handed Tom a can of Resolve and asked if he would spray the stain at the bottom of the stairs. Nope. We’d done enough, he reasoned. If these people didn’t like our house the way it was, then they should just get over themselves.

Fortunately, it was a sellers’ market, as seen by our strange, strange experience getting into a bidding war with an ex-boyfriend on our new house two weeks prior.

Our open house was on Mother’s Day, in the rain, and still the offers came in. The only problem our agent encountered? That stain on the carpet. It frightened several buyers away because they feared we had water in our basement. He posited that the stain cost us about 5 grand. After the open house I sprayed it with Resolve. 15 seconds later, the stain was gone.

And a bonus:

The Wii Resistance:

On Dec 26 two Christmases ago, when Wii’s were harder to come by than a Cabbage Patch Doll in the 80’s, I got a call from my sister, who lives 5 hours away. “Anna, I’m standing in Wal-mart holding 2 Wii’s. Do you want me to buy one for your family?”

I turned to Tom, who responded in a quiet and confused voice: “But Christmas is OVER.” I thought of this inflexible remark in the ensuing weeks as I made daily pilgrimages to The Game Stop in an attempt to buy our son a Wii for his March birthday. Tom never retracted his "Christmas is OVER" stance and acted like he enjoyed camping out in the cold at Best Buy to finally snag one before Jake's big day. Note: Tom did not use the same “Christmas is OVER" reasoning when procuring a large screen t.v. for himself-- I mean the family this January 2nd.

Okay, now I’ve gotten myself into a lather all over again remembering these incidents and others. Does that happen to you? Tom tried to get frisky last night, but I kept thinking about this blog and I got all hot and bothered, and not in a good way.

So I’m wondering, when does venting become re-hashing? Tom, please do not answer this question. If I get comments telling me what a jerk Tom is, does that help my cause or hurt my marriage?

Would this blog benefit or suffer if I wrote more posts about how kind, shy, H-O-T-T , and hardworking Tom is, and that he’s a great provider and an awesome dad? Would that be lame? I know that’s not what I’m interested in reading as I sit in front of my screen in my comfy pants.

What about you? Do you want to read that stuff, or as a blogging community, are we more of the, “If you have nothing nice to say about anyone, come sit next to me” ilk?