"Detail Oriented"

I’ve been married for eight and a half years, which is long enough to know that that’s not long, but also long enough to have teased out some of the trends in conversations about husbands. Maybe you didn’t know this, but women like swapping the details of family life, and I think that this is an ultimately healthy impulse. I need other women to laugh with me, and I also need to know if I’m being a nutcase about something. Apparently, companionship between men is different—they don’t talk about wives as much as wives talk about husbands. Anyway. I’ve drawn quite a bit of information about husbands from these “here’s how our week was” conversations.

Husbands…

• forget to put sunscreen on the kids

• don’t respond to text messages

• don’t label the water bottles

• schedule the doctor’s appointment at the wrong time

• make the kitchen all smoky when they cook

• never remember to put socks or bibs on the baby

• don’t spot the clothes before putting them in the washer

• leave crusty pans in the sink (even when they said the kitchen was clean)

Sometimes, uncomfortable questions are indicated by trends in the evidence. In this case, I’m led to ask: Am I a husband?

Whenever I tell my kids I’m roasting a chicken, my daughter says, “I’ll open the windows, Mommy!” because it is about to get very, very smoky. If my kids are lucky enough to get a water bottle, it is not labelled, and I didn’t even bother to buy socks for this most recent baby because I knew it wasn’t relevant. We have plenty of blankets that we can tuck over bare feet in the carseat, and it’s easier to find blankets than teeny tiny socks.

I’m a wife and mother, albeit one who is flummoxed by sunscreen and labels and baby socks. Whenever anyone mentions something her husband did, didn’t do, or forgot to do, there is an 85% chance that I did, didn’t do, or forgot to do that thing in the last week. This (rather ridiculous) situation has given me a new understanding of the term “detail oriented.”

In March, I received an email from my daughter’s dance teacher that had the relevant dates and times for the May “Wizard of Oz” recital and a spreadsheet that detailed everything I would need to buy or locate for her performance. Armed with these organized to-dos, the first thing I did was navigate over to Thriftbooks.com to purchase a large, illustrated copy of The Wizard of Oz. It was our read-aloud for the next several weeks.

The Wizard of Oz was first published in 1901, and there are some fun differences between the Frank L. Baum original and the movie. Dorothy’s shoes are silver, not ruby. The witch who greets her in the land of the Munchkins is a sweet little old lady good witch of the North, and not Glinda, who is the good witch of the South. The phrase, “Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!” is never used in the book, but there are these awful “tiger-bear” kind of monsters called “Kalidahs” that threaten Dorothy and her companions—the Kalidahs are chased away by the Lion.

Oh my. (Illustrations done by Michael Hague)

But—but—the phrase “lions, tigers, bears” is found in J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter Pan (it’s a description of the beasts prowling around the Neverland [“the Neverland,” is the way the characters refer to the island]). Lions, tigers, bears—in that order. Because there is not a more satisfying order in which to say those three words. “Bears, lions, tigers”? Ridiculous! “Tigers, lions, bears”? A little better, but not as good as the version that ends up in our stories. I have a distinct memory of a Noam Chomsky video I watched in a college human development class about English and emphasis and what we fall into naturally. Like “Big, red balloon” instead of “Red, big balloon”—all native English speakers default to that pattern, which is fascinating.

And just in case you’re wondering, I found the other things my daughter needed—the things her teacher mentioned in the email—in the 48 hours before the recital took place.

I have always struggled with domestic details, so I have this sense of kinship with anyone else who does, too. Last week, I was looking at the apples in the wooden fruit bowl in our kitchen. I’d dropped them in there with the plastic bag still wrapped around them. And the thought occurred to me… maybe the counter would look better if the apples weren’t still in the bag. It took me almost nine years to make it to that observation. I’m trying to get better at things like this. The upside of the situation is that I often get this comment: “I didn’t clean up the house before you came over, because… well, because it was you.”

We all have blindspots (and those blindspots do have upsides). Spouses rarely place the same level of emphasis on the same details, which leads to the typical shenanigans about trash can liners and towels and cabinet doors. None of this is actually about towels, of course. “Becoming one” is a lifelong mission, and it’s tempting to think it would be more beautiful if it didn’t involve so many mundane details. But I don’t know that there’s anything more beautiful than two people reaching out to find one another in the middle of a conversation about the bottle of sunscreen that never made it into the diaper bag.