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I’m a busy woman. I have two kids in school, publish a NYC-area events newsletter for families, edit a national family safety newsletter, do freelance writing gigs when I can and attend graduate school two nights a week. So why is it that I feel guilty about forgetting to sign the occasional permission slip, being six minutes late to pick up my Kindergartener from school or willfully allowing my apartment to gather dust bunnies and piles of paperwork, dirty dishes and unopened bills on every surface? I mean…honestly, WHAT is with the guilt thing?
My husband is not entirely useless, though I may occasionally gripe otherwise to my mom or close friends…Actually, when it comes to non-complaining in-pitching, he’s like a quiet dish and laundry fairy. One minute the dirty piles are there, the next, they’re neatly stacked or folded, sparkling and sweet-smelling. Do I thank him for keeping us in clothing all week? Of course not–he might start to think of it as a chore, a something extra, rather than the automatic thing that it has apparently become for him, and then where would we be? I’d have to bat my eyes and beg sweetly, “Honey, I know you’ve had a long day at the office, and truly, the dinner was delicious, and the kitchen looks FAB, but …would you mind? The kids don’t have any clean underwear…”
Nope. Instead of lavishing him with praise and gratitude, I complain that he shrunk my black sweater by putting it in too hot a dryer. Or that the bottom of the sippy cup still has crud in it, and what was he thinking by putting it back in the kitchen cabinet without looking first? Then I make a big show of taking cup after cup out of the cabinet until I find one that doesn’t have a crusty patch in its bottom, leaving the poorly washed glasses sitting on the just-cleared kitchen counter. I know when I come back out of my home office in two hours, after the kids are in bed, and my husband is snoring with a copy of “Goodnight Moon” lying on his chest beside my sleeping daughter, the glasses will be clean and put away again. And there will be a perfectly folded stack of kids’ underwear on the living room coffee table. To which I’ll think, “Why can’t he just put things away in drawers instead of leaving them here for me to deal with?!”
Sigh. Guess now I know why I feel guilty:)
