Last night something unusual happened. It was so unusual I felt the need to post it in a funny mom’s facebook group that I belong to so other women out there could be shocked by what happened.  So unusual that about 30 of those women commented on the post and 60+ “liked” it.  So what is it that happened you say?  WELL, not only did my husband do one nice thing for me, but he did TWO nice things for me!!!  Say whaaaaaaat?

The first thing surrounded my need to watch the season premier of the TV show Nashville. It’s the one and only TV show I actually watch religiously.  We haven’t had cable TV in over a year.  We cancelled it to see if we could survive without it and just watch Netflix if we felt the need to watch something.  It worked.  We had no problem at all filling our time without TV or else with binge watching series on Netflix.  My husband did more of the latter.  When I needed to watch Nashville I streamed it off of a website I found.  But when we moved into our new home we were given a great TV and internet package for free for the first year so we checked it out and decided to sign ourselves up again.  But, part of the reason the package was so good was because it didn’t include all of the “smut” TV channels that I love (TLC, Slice, HGTV, W Network, etc) so this meant that I could not watch Nashville last night.  So I was happily sitting on the couch, eating popcorn and playing on my ipad right before Nashville was due to come on when the husband came over, picked up the remote and turned the TV on and started flipping it to the W Network channel.  I told him he’s wasting his time, that it isn’t part of our package, but he looked at me smugly and suddenly the channel was blaring away!  Turns out he paid attention to how badly I wanted to watch the episode so he secretly called our cable provider and had them add the channel as a surprise for me!  I might have clapped and flapped my hands with excitement when I discovered I know had two long hours of Nashville ahead of me to watch and it totally warranted the previous popping of popcorn!

The second crazy thing was, while I was flat on the couch indulging in some country goodness, I heard the dishwasher be opened and then dishes clanking around. At first I thought that he was just getting something out of it, but upon further side eyeing, I realized he was emptying it and loading the dirty dishes from dinner in!  This might seem like nothing to a majority of you….but in my household this NEVER EVER EVER EVER happens.  I’m talking once or twice a year phenomenon.  I was shocked he even knew where to put the dishes since he hasn’t handled any of them since moving into the new house.  I just quietly tucked myself back down into the couch and let him carry on.  I didn’t want to ruin the spectacle that was going on in there.  That miracle was somewhat short lived as, once my show ended, I went to turn the lights off in the kitchen and I discovered that he only put about 40% of the dishes away and stacked the rest on the kitchen island.  Apparently it was too difficult to take another five steps and put the plates and bowls into the cupboard and then a half step for the cups and another two steps for the cutlery.  I just laughed at this because it made me wonder what he would actually do with that stuff if I wasn’t around.  Would he put it away?  Would he leave it there until he needed it again?  Did he put it there thinking “Andrea can deal with this later”?  It’s baffling to me the thought process behind it.  It’s like he wanted the end goal of loading the dirty dishes but wasn’t prepared for what had to be done in order to make it so those dishes could be loaded.  I wanted to say something to him about it and about how I already have enough to do every day that I don’t need to finish something he started and couldn’t be bothered completing.  But then I thought about the age old advice of “pick your battles” and decided to just let it go.

Men work in weird ways. I will never pretend to understand a single thing about them.  But I know that if I had created any kind of a stir about the half completed job it would deter him from doing it again because he thinks “why bother?  She’s just going to rag on me anyway.”  Or it will end up like the other night when I told him, for the sixth time, to stop tossing the matches that he uses to light the big candle we have into the bottom of the sink.  That after he runs it under water, he can toss it into the garbage, which, ironically, is two steps away from the sink.  He just shrugged it off so I mentioned that I’ve now asked him to not do this 6 times and it’s starting to annoy me that I keep having to deal with it.  He then made some smart ass remark about how there’s things I do that annoy him and he tells me not to do but I still do it and I don’t hear him talking about it repeatedly.  So I asked for an example.  He just looked at me and said “I’m not falling into that discussion.  It won’t be pretty.”  Which, to me means that he has absolutely no examples because if he asks me to not do something, I simply don’t do it anymore!  Maybe there are things I do that annoy him that he hasn’t said anything about, but I can’t fix those unless I know about them.  But, I digressed a little here.  Basically I was trying to avoid the risk of chasing him off from ever doing nice things without being asked again.

All of this got me thinking. The fact that I felt the need to post a witty comment in a mom’s facebook page about how he either did something wrong or he’s going to ask for something, because he never does things like the two above items.  The fact that it was so shocking that he did it, I felt the need to share with other people who would be like “whaaaat??” about it.  It makes me laugh because the two things he did, are things I do on a daily basis.  Sometimes multiple times a day.  That dishwasher is emptied and loaded by me daily.  Almost daily I think of things that he would like that could be a nice surprise.  Yet…do you think that he goes and raves to friends about how amazing it is that I do these things?  Nope.  It’s so much of the norm in our house that these jobs are, as my sister would say, “pink jobs” so they are just something I do.  Of course I ask for help often and sometimes get it.  But it’s just something that is part of my routine and it’s kind of comical that it’s so celebrated and acknowledged when the man of the house does a “pink job”.  If it isn’t something that us women are celebrating, then it’s something we are questioning.  We immediately wonder if he did something wrong so he’s trying to make himself seem awesome so he doesn’t get in trouble.  OR he’s after something that he knows that by doing nice things for his wife, she will be more likely to say yes.  It’s hilarious that we don’t believe that a husband is capable of doing something out of the ordinary without speculating that something isn’t right.  I don’t think he’s done anything wrong, and he’s already been given approval from me to go to Hawaii at the end of this month with two business partners of his, so it can’t be him looking for me to approve something bigger than a frigging trip to Hawaii.  I’ve already told him what gifts I will require because I approved this trip and what day at the spa I’m booking myself once he is back.  Soooo what could it be?

I can think about this for ages, but I think what it truly came down to was, for the TV channel, he knew how badly I wanted to watch it and wanted me to stop whining that I couldn’t watch it. And for the dishes, it’s the novelty of having a big, shiny, brand new kitchen and he’s enjoying using it.  The novelty will wear off soon I’m sure!  It’s either two of those things….or the world is ending and he knows it but I don’t.  It’s the only logical thought I can come up with!