Checking out

by tess

The Hubs doesn’t read this blog. He’s busy with his big-old-macho, man-sized, uber-important Real Life. I make no pretense about it – I embrace my insignificant little faux life. I tried it the other way but didn’t much fancy it.

In addition to his (insert air quotes and eye roll here) reeeeal liiiife, he maintains (erroneously) that I asked him not to read this blog. He might actually believe it but he’s probably just imagined this to deflect his husbandly responsibility of pretending to care about his wife’s scribbling. Either way is fine. I guess that’s what ten years of marriage gives you: the ability to use the word “fine” and actually mean “In another time and place this might have mattered, but here today it does not because I’m completely engaged in my faux life right now and you are dismissed from it. Thank you for playing and collect your consolation prize on the way out.” Plus if he doesn’t read it, then he won’t feel compelled to point out a) improper grammar, b) incorrect punctuation, c) the fact that I should be working on The Great Romance which will finance our retirement, and d) the occasional ever-so-slight exaggeration which makes my normally sepulchral nature seem vaguely funnier than a funeral.

And so in his absence I can tell you, dear readers, the Truth about Last Night. I was informing him that if he cannot be bothered to go to the doctor and get a prescription for his hypertension meds, then he better not even think of crying to me after he suffers a totally disabling stroke. And who cares anyway if we lose the house and our (non-existent) savings when the hospital takes everything we own because he couldn’t take twenty minutes to go to the doctor. And won’t he be thrilled when we have to move in with my parents because I know I’ll be ecstatic to spend the next 40 years of my life (my sexual prime, by the way, during which I was planning to become a cougar lesbian) changing his diapers. And don’t even think for a second, Mister Man, that I won’t dress you up in purple muumuus and orange lipstick and blue eyeliner before I roll your ass down to the Rec Center because that’s penance, buddy boy, and I used to be Catholic so I know all about it, dammit.

I knew I could, Ever Ready Bunny-like, keep going and going and going because The Hubs had clearly checked out of the conversation. Watching closely, I can see the exact moment it happens. Generally it’s about the time my hands hit my hips. His beady little blue eyes go watery and glaze over as he hides deep within himself like a latter day Sybil. (Sometimes on Brothers and Sisters I wonder if Sally Field will morph back into one of the Sybil personalities. It would make the show a lot less self-absorbed if she’d just totally let go and Sybil-out on their Walker asses.)

And I can almost see the movie that’s playing in his zoned out mind: he (younger, thinner, and taller) is on a big, beautiful sailboat, no land for miles around, surrounded by a bevy of gorgeous, improbably full-figured Asian girls lounging all over the deck. And in the background you can barely hear “Saaaaaailing / Takes me awaay / To where I've always heard it could bee / Just a dream and the wind to carry mee / And soon I will be freeeee.” Although Christopher Cross isn’t really appropriate for the Technicolor fantasy sequence, Jimmy Buffet is just too cliché.

So this how The Hubs and I live our lives. We take turns coping with the realities of life and luxuriating in the bliss of escapism. Perhaps that’s what vacations are for – a period of down-time during which partners can simultaneously indulge in Daydreamia, that place where we’re all taller, thinner, younger, smarter, and surrounded by minions bewitched by our beauty, charisma, and sex appeal. Whether we think of it as Heaven, Fantasytown, or Zoeland, it’s important to have a Happy Place to which we can retreat when the wolves are nipping at our heels. And if it’s healthy to eschew reality, then The Hubs and I will be around for a long, long time.