Now that I will be headed off for work, we are in the process of finding a nanny for the afternoon witching hours, when I’ll be fighting through 5 o’clock traffic and Doug will be home with the kids pulling his hair out (so to speak, of course). As my starting date draws near, I have prepared him for the possibility that he will be in charge of interviewing nannies while I am at work.
In his mind, here is a fantasy conversation between the two of us after he wraps up one of those interviews:
Me: “Why are the Gold Club girls here?”
Doug: “Those are our new nannies.”
Me (hands on hips, looking skeptical): “And why are there two of them?”
Doug: “They were a package deal. This is my package, here’s the deal!”
I share this not because I find my husband’s perverse and inappropriate humor funny (I lie. After ten years of marriage, it’s the only thing holding us together.), but because of the conversation that ensued.
Doug knows I keep my eyes open all day for something mindless to post on Facebook, an evening ritual he’s been mocking me for since I joined you all four years ago. Every time he says something the slightest bit clever, he follows it up with, “Put that up on your wall and smoke it!”
In this case, I wasn’t taking the bait. “Your package belongs nowhere near my wall,” I said decidedly.
“Oh, it’s going up there,” he countered. “And this, time, you’re giving me the credit. I’m sick and tired of people coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, your wife is so funny! You should hear what she wrote on Facebook!’ They don’t believe me when I tell them I already heard it because THEY’RE ALL MY JOKES!”
“Believe me, I have no intention of taking credit for your package. And anyway, if you’re the guy behind the joke, I always attribute it to you. I even use quotes. And even then, no one’s laughing at how you say it. They’re laughing at the way I write it. You tell the jokes, I make them funny. Without me, you’d be some washed-up wannabee with ringing ears crying behind a curtain after getting dragged off the stage with a hook at some lame revival of the The Gong Show.” (Indeed, “The Gong Show” resurfaced in 1988. It can happen again.)
But the truth is, in my decade between journalism school and kids, I went through a bout of writer’s block that I’d never care to repeat. Perverse and inappropriate he may be, but without him and the beautiful children he bestowed upon me, I wouldn’t have a shred of material.
It’s a good thing he doesn’t do blogs or social media. Otherwise, he’d find out I admit it.