Lucy, I'm Home

Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

Lucy, I’m Home!!

It is a wonder that my wife ever has the nerve to leave town. Not because it takes “some nerve” to leave a spouse alone for more than eight hours with three kids, twenty pets, and all the maintenance that implies. But because it must take nerves of steel to walk out that door knowing anything could happen, and probably will, during her absence.

My spouse doesn’t travel a lot, but she gets away from time to time; for work, for professional education, for a weekend with friends from work. It used to be, when the two older kids were small, that she went away for a week every October. Inevitably, major events would occur while she was away; the baby would take her first steps, the plumbing would back up, the new preschool teacher would turn out to be a messenger from hell (thus requiring therapy and/or non-stop cuddles for our little girl, and the need for a new preschool to attend). Actually, both older kids have suddenly changed schools while my wife was away (crises come to a head at the worse times), and it seems to me we made the decision to home school our teenager while she was at a business meeting in California.

Thank heavens for email.

The kids also tend to get sick the moment the door clicks shut. As do I. I can be perfectly healthy as I wave goodbye, looking forward to a few days with the kids, and the fun things we can do together, and be bedridden with pneumonia by bedtime. Sometimes, if we manage to be healthy, a pet will die, just to keep things interesting.

And, to tell the truth, I seem to have a compulsion to do the same. Not up and die, naturally (though that would shake things up a bit), but to “keep things interesting”. Even if all else is running smoothly, I seem to want to make major changes while my wife is away; switch bedrooms, rearrange the furniture, clean out the closets and haul a dumpster load to Goodwill. One time while she was away, the kids and I decorated their room as a rainforest, cutting out hundreds of paper flowers, leaves, vines and butterflies, and taping them to the slanted ceiling. When my wife got home she had to grope her way through the paper foliage to find them for a hug.

It’s not that she’s some monster who will shake her finger at me and say, “No!” if I suggest a change; she gave up on that idea years ago. It’s just that there is one less person in the way while I’m moving large objects, and specifically one less adult to stand there asking, “Should you really be moving that queen size mattress up the stairs by yourself? With pneumonia?”

The kids never seem to raise this objection.

Inevitably, if I’m not fixing up the home, nursing the sick, or maybe having a nervous breakdown, I’m doing exploratory grooming. I don’t know why it is that when the cat’s away, the cat’s mate wants to pluck her eyebrows a new way, get a bikini wax, or experiment with Nair. Maybe it’s because I get the bathroom all to myself. When my wife was in India for three weeks last year, I had to explain to her during our first phone conversation bridging the thousands of miles between us that I’d had a “freak depilatory accident”, so it was a good thing she wouldn’t be seeing me for twenty days or so.

Maybe I’m channeling Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo. I suspect I have a wild, irrational streak held barely in check that breaks out when routine is upset, only to be re-contained when the wife comes back a’la Ricky Ricardo with a, “Lucy, I’m Home”, and a tentative, “What have you been up to?”

Actually, my wife got back from a weekend with “the girls” last night, and she was astounded that she could find her way around the house. Stranger still, the kids were over their colds, the pets were all still alive, the house was neat and considering I’d been doing childcare twenty-four/seven for three days, I was remarkably chipper. I’m betting she went off to work this morning feeling that perhaps the anti-anxiety meds were doing their stuff, or the maturity that comes with turning forty, or some combination of the above, and that she wouldn’t have to open six doors to find her bedroom the next time she came home from a business trip.

I did think about switching beds around, painting the bathroom, or taking the kids on a road trip, but I was lazy, and we watched movies, had friends over, and ate ice cream instead. That could be the “maturity” talking.

I did find time for some grooming though. And it could have been worse, it’s not like they were new holes I was putting in my body, and my eyebrows are intact. Sure the extra piercings in my left ear hadn’t been used in over a decade, and had closed up, but I still had to look at the ugly, unadorned indents on my lobe. Why not use them? I’ll see how long it takes her to notice.