Spooning, Bacon and Husbands

I was eating bacon this morning with a friend who has a miserable situation at home right now.  Bacon is the only thing that might help.

As we were leaving she said, “Has Alex finished your kitchen?”

“Hell no,” I laughed.

“Oh no, it’s almost Thanksgiving.”  She sounded genuinely alarmed.

“He still has to put the trim around all the flooring.  And all the countertops are still plywood.” I realized how bad that sounded after I opened my car door. “Hey, it could be a lot worse, one year he decided he could build a deck out of the big wooden pallets.”  Turned out that was a very bad idea. And ten years ago he thought it would be a great idea to upholster our bar with all our old Taekwondo belts. Lexie was eight at the time and thought it was so pretty.

I was trying to make her feel better by telling her about some of Alex’s silly ideas. But once I got in the car I remembered there’s some other stuff he does that’s not so silly.   He resets the alarm every morning and gets dressed in the dark, so he won’t wake me up. He does math homework with Sandor because I’m not very good at it. Secretly he cuddles the cat when nobody is around.  He never gripes when the kids and I have to run off to a Taekwondo tournament or I need a new dress so I can announce an MMA event, and last night when I absolutely insisted on spooning for five or ten minutes he just laughed and let me have my way. “We’re gonna spoon and you’re gonna like it, damn it.”

Alex doesn’t send me flowers, call me “sweetheart” or “beautiful” he never buys me  extravagant jewelry (he would if he could I think)  but when I have an emotional break down and cry for two days because we’re broke he doesn’t get mad or make fun of me. Instead, he puts up with me, day after day and that’s a pretty big deal.