Thank You for Asking

Unconditional Acceptance

Sitting in the car, waiting for the boys to finish tennis clinic at the Cal Club, I listen to Eminem’s, “I Love the Way You Lie” over and over.  The song shows how crazy a man can get when he is madly in love with a woman, which makes me feel very annoyed with Beloved.  Why can’t he be more wildly passionate?!  Not in the physical sense, which I didn’t mean to infer because that would be gross, but in the hard-core rapper sense, which isn’t.  I get a little thrill every time his girlfriend (Eminem’s, not Beloved’s) says she’s going to leave and he says forcefully (but only because he loves her so much) “No you aint!”   If I said I was going to leave him, Beloved would probably just (sensibly) say “I hope that’s a decision you’ll be happy with down the road.”  And he would definitely not say, “ain’t.”  The rest of the song gets a bit risky what with tying people to beds and setting houses on fire, but still it’s enough to make me exasperated with Beloved’s sense of restraint and annoyingly proper grammar. 

I realize it’s not fair to judge Beloved thus, but still I do!  One minute I’m wondering why he can’t be as manly as the cigarette smoking job foreman working on our house, and in a startling about face wonder why he’s not as attentive a listener as the darling sales associate at the Jonathon Adler Boutique.

If Beloved were to judge me as I do him I would collapse in a heap.  Luckily for me, he seems not at all interested in analyzing my personality, femininity, fashion sense, behavior at dinner parties, sense of humor, friendliness to service people or how I am at “active listening.”  In fact, he is so accepting that if I ask him if he likes my outfit he is able to mumble that it is “fine” without ever taking his eyes off his computer screen.   A couple of times, just for fun, I’ll stop speaking in the middle of a sentence to see if he notices.  I’ve timed him up to 18 minutes before I storm out of his office, slamming the door as loud as I can leaving him completely bemused, saying he has no idea what sets me off on these moods of mine.

Of course, I love Beloved just the way he is, but why can't he try just a teeny bit harder? I know it is silly for me to expect my straight-laced husband to act like a rapper, but would it kill him to work on his snappy repartee and maybe acquire the slightest hint of a British accent?   Hugh Grant seems to manage it well enough!

    

The Morning After - Part II (or how tequila ruined my reputation)

Barb and I sip our steaming cups of tea and recount the events from the night before.

The party had started out tame enough.  We both agree the cute couple was charming and attractive.  We note how sweet it was for the millionaire husband to make sure the anorexic billionaire wife was fed a well-balanced meal.  We laugh at the late-night-antics of the guests which make me uneasy as dim memories of the evening come to the fore.

I think the trouble started with Barb and I rushing to the kitchen to get another place set for Sabrina.  She had arrived, assessed and announced she would be staying for dinner.  The cute husband was in the kitchen pouring a drink and in a comradely manner offers Barb and me each a shot of tequila.  I dislike tequila, and I think it’s unbecoming for a middle-ag…for a mother of three to be standing around knocking back shots.  I look to Barb for guidance, but she’s rushed out of the kitchen mumbling something about needing to set the table. 

Not wanting to appear unfriendly (or old) I take my shot.  I even wipe my mouth with the back of my hand to show how much I enjoyed it, a decision I immediately regret.  Feeling a bit slutty, I try to throw the cute husband off-balance by downing Barb’s shot as well.  We then go in to dinner where I slowly sip some lovely red wine and have sparkling conversation with my dinner partners.  Or at least that’s the way I remember it.     

Barb has an alternate version that, between screams of laughter, she relays to me. In  this version I am knocking back red wine, behaving inappropriately with my dinner partner, stealing her cousin’s roadie and loudly demanding to know what he did with that bottle of Haut-Brion. 

This is obviously a gross exaggeration, but I do have a foggy vision of my shin being stroked by the shot-pushing husband.  Remembering my mother’s instructions to be at all times lady-like, I respond with a prim, “thank you” to his lavish compliments on the smoothness of my legs.  I must admit, though slap-dash about many things, I am vigilant about hair-removal.   I vaguely remember Beloved furiously glaring at me from across the table…no, no, not because of the shin stroking, but because he had just eyed my new pair of sensible, nude, patent leather, Jimmy Choo pumps that go with everything and will certainly see me through multiple seasons.  I really do regret hiking my leg up on that table.

I have flashes of the rest of the evening’s hijinx that need to be confirmed by Barb.  She assures me that, no, the millionaire husband was not breast-feeding the billionaire wife (as I loudly accused him of doing) just coaxing her to eat her vegetables.  Yes, her cousin did hide his bottle of Haut-Brion, but only because I kept waving my glass in his face and demanding sips.  And she swears Beloved stopped me in the nick of time from calling Oldest and requesting he run down the hill to bring us another bottle of tequila as Barb had somehow run out.

I wait until Barb has settled down from her hysteria (a bit of an exaggerater that Barb) and coolly sip my tea.  She finally gets herself together, turns on Apple TV and for the next few hours we doze in and out while watching Four Weddings and a Funeral.