When Your Wife Doesn't Feel Well

I always think that if a man can't figure out how a woman wants to be treated, just look at how she treats her kids. However we mothers treat our children (if we're mentally normal and all) is bound to be our idea of what pure love is. How do we greet them? How do we talk to them? Comfort them? Hold them? Feed them. Whatever.

With that in mind, let me just say that when I am sick I would like the following:

I would like you to look at me with tender concern. (Fake it if necessary.)See if I have a fever.

I would like you to tell me to lie down and rest. Cover me up with a blanket. Ask me if I want anything to eat or drink. Ask me if I have taken any medicine and if I have not bothered, insist that I am going to take some and right now. Then bring it to me.

Touch me. I understand that you don't want my cooties. But my body aches, and you are better than Tylenol. I promise not to give you my germs if you just let me put my head in your lap, or if you hold me for a few minutes or rub my back. Maybe a kiss on top of my head would be nice.

If you fussed over me in this manner for about five good minutes, I would feel all warm and fuzzy and would then insist that you go do whatever you want to do. Which is what you do anyway, only I do not feel warm and fuzzy.

If you wait until I have a heart attack or stroke to hover by my bed, I'm not going to know it. Take care of me when I'm just lightly-to-moderately sick, and I will love you for it.

The Great Pretender

My son Brandon is a big Beatles fan; also a big pretender. He's growing out of it somewhat at 7, but when he was little he was always in a costume or carrying a prop, "being" somebody else.

Today he was apparently being Paul McCartney, and Paul was writing in his diary.

PAUL McCARTNEY (it said at the top of the page.)

Then it said:

"Today I will have fish and tea, and other British foods."

That was apparently as far as Paul got before he went out for a snack; a British one of course, old bean.

Only A Man Would Think of This Phrasing

Brian was in a recording studio this weekend doing a voiceover audition, and while there he went into the restroom. He told me he saw an interesting sign taped to the restroom wall. I may not quote it exactly right, but basically it said this:

If you are driving a long freight train,
Flush once and THEN use paper.

Not doing so may cause the train
to jump the tracks and flood the station.

How Alarming

At 1:30 this morning our house alarm went off, and if there had been an actual bad guy in the house, I would have rushed directly into his arms, so intent was I on silencing that piercing noise. I mean really. Our bedroom is mere steps from the kitchen, back door, and alarm control box thingy, and when my conscious memory of last night begins, I was already a few steps out of the bed and the phone was ringing and all I was thinking was STOP THAT NOISE. I turned the kitchen light on and noted that the kitchen door was OPEN a couple of inches, and still I was thinking SHUT UP, SHUT UP, how can I make this thing shut up. I closed and locked the door, maybe locking a bad guy inside with us, for all I knew. Brian had not arisen from the bed, where apparently he was having a chat with the alarm people and giving them the secret code word without bothering to ascertain that everything was actually okay. Although everything was, I guess.

It worried me, though. I had been in bed, but still awake, when Bliss came home at 11:25. I heard her turn off the alarm after her own entry and then reset it for the night. Then I guess I fell asleep while she was rattling around the kitchen fixing a snack. But the thing is, the door has to be shut for you to reset the alarm, so how did it come to be open two hours later? Brian theorizes that Bliss didn't shut it completely (much less lock it) and that our cat, who's always trying to make a break for it, worked on it bit by bit until he finally got it open. Pretty good theory, except that if the cat did painstakingly work until he got the door open, why was he still inside the house?

I had another alarm scare years ago that went like this: I was hugely pregnant with Bliss, and my then-husband worked at night, hence the whole decision to get an alarm. So on the evening after we got it installed, there I sat on the sofa, nervous, pregnant and alone, when suddenly a piercing BEEP, BEEP, BEEP caused me to leap up and then just stand there, paralyzed with fear, and wait for the intruder to appear. When he never did, I eventually figured out that the alarm company man (who had unplugged various appliances during the installation process) must have accidentally hit the button on big loud alarm clock in my kitchen, setting it to go off several hours later.

These incidents together suggest to me that the only thing an alarm is good for is to give me a few seconds' notice that I'm about to be murdered. Seriously, what we should have done last night was jump up and lock the bedroom doors, get the gun and wait for the cops to show up. Instead, I go running into the kitchen to silence the alarm so as to be killed more quietly. And to think I pay twenty-seven bucks a month for this protection.