Wifehood

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Fold Your Own Way

The longer you live with someone, the more you discover about how little you know them. At least, this is true for me, when it comes to my husband. I have known this man since 2001, for over half my life, and have lived with him since 2003. And yet I have only recently discovered some things about him that baffle me completely. (Does anyone else recall the time when I learned he does not consider soup to be a meal???) 

While I am the primary laundry-doer in our household, I don’t fold everything that I wash. This is not out of laziness, Internet. Well. Not solely out of laziness. My husband is not only the Better Folder of the two of us, he has folding preferences. I am sure I’ve mentioned before that he prefers to fold his own T-shirts. For that I am eternally grateful, because I am horrible at folding, especially when it comes to things that can’t be lined up edge to edge, like a towel or a blanket or a dishrag or another piece of fabric with straight and symmetrical edges. It’s not like I haven’t tried. I have. And yet, despite sometimes extreme effort, my attempts at folding T-shirts result in such lopsidedness and extreme variances in size of end product that frankly boggle the mind. My husband, possibly due to years in his youth spent working in clothing retail, possibly due to being a normal person and not folding challenged like his wife, can fold his T-shirts with seemingly no effort and end up with a stack of perfectly identical little rectangles. This is all to say: my husband prefers to fold his own T-shirts.

Okay, fine. But I can at least fold his pants, right? I fold my own jeans and leggings (the extent of my pants collection) and they make nice tidy stacks. I fold them once lengthwise, meeting one corner of the waist band to the other, so they look like a one-legged pant, and then fold them shortwise (what is the opposite of lengthwise? widthwise? I am explaining this very poorly), bringing the hem up to meet the waistband, and then fold them one last time so that the waist band touches the folded portion of the knee area. (This reminds me of that old elementary school exercise where one person has to explain step by step how to make a peanut butter sandwich and the other person has to follow each step literally, as if they have never experienced either peanut butter or jars or sandwiches before. You know: the explainer says, “Put the peanut butter on the bread” and the sandwich maker picks up the jar and puts it on the bag of bread.) What I am trying to say is that I make three folds and the jeans end up in a small square. 

Fold 1.
Fold 2.
Fold 3. I don’t know why the pocket does this but I hate it thanks.

This is how I have folded everyone’s pants since time immemorial, including my husband’s jeans and work pants. Then some years ago I found out that that my husband preferred me to simply fold the pants in half, lengthwise, and leave them at that. Okay, weird, I thought, but whatever. Saves me two folds per pants pair, clearly a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of life. But as the years passed, I wondered why he was so adamant about the single fold. Because, in fact, when he puts his jeans/work pants away in our closet, he stacks them in neat little squares just like I stack my jeans. 

It took a long time for this mild curiosity to develop into an actual question, which was, “If the end result is the same, why don’t I just fold your jeans for you?” To which he reluctantly told me that when I fold his jeans, he refolds them, and he feels bad about that, so he wants to relieve me of the initial fold. To which my response was, “WHY.” Which is when he admitted to me that when I fold his jeans/pants, I fold them backwards.

My jeans, folded my way. Still with the pocket issue.
I STILL REFUSE TO IRON.
My husband’s jeans, folded the opposite way.

This is a very, very long story to say that a) apparently people can fold jeans/pants differently, who knew, and b) apparently that can be bothersome to some people, and c) my husband and I are pants-folding opposites and I only just found out. (How do YOU fold your pants?)

(By the way, I have since been folding his jeans/pants the opposite way – although I still only make the single lengthwise fold – and it is surprisingly difficult to do! My brain has A Certain Way it believes folding should be done, and that is not it.) (It’s a feeling similar to folding your hands together differently than you normally do: if the left thumb normally sits on top of the right thumb, when you try to fold them so the right thumb is on top instead, it’s doable, but it’s weird.)

I have since kept my eyes open for other weird differences in our everyday trivialities and have come up with two others. 

One has to do with filing. Picture a filing cabinet, with folders of paperwork for things you keep track of over time – utility bills, insurance statements, tax returns, etc. I think we can all agree that it makes sense to file these sorts of things chronologically, right? And yet, to my SHOCK, there are (at least?) two ways to do this. 

When you open one of the folders, what is on top: the most recent bill/statement, or the oldest? Well, I do it one way and my husband does it the other way (the WRONG way) and that is absolutely insane to me. To make matters worse, at one point in our relationship, we maintained separate files, so some of the files use my system and some use my husband’s. I would almost rather transition ALL our files to his (wrong) system than to have two completely opposite filing methods in the same cabinet. MADNESS.

The other way we are opposites is in how we get out of the shower. Yes, I am really writing about this. Day-to-day minutiae is my favorite topic (next to food) and if you are new here, boy are you getting slapped right in the face with household nitty-gritty.

Our shower has a sliding glass door with two panels. You slide one panel over the other – so they overlap – to expose the opening to the shower. My husband slides both panels toward the front/faucet end of the shower to exit; I slide both panels to the back, wall end. I wonder if this has to do with our individual towel placement: my towel hangs just outside the faucet end of the shower; my husband’s is on the wall on the other end of the shower. Would we exit the shower differently if we hung our towels differently? Are there simply Front of Shower Exiters and Rear of Shower Exiters, just like some people are optimists and others are pessimists?

These are some of the very silly, inconsequential differences between us that are as charming (to me, at least) as they are perplexing. All of us are weird in our own weird ways. And I’m delighted to still be learning new things about this man I’ve loved for nearly a quarter century.

There are lots of other ways that he and I are Very Different. Some of them I know and accept: for instance, he is a Laundry Basket guy, and I am a Pile Clothing Into My Arms And Drip Socks All Over The Floor gal. But maybe (probably?) there are things I am yet unaware of. I hope we have time to discover all of them.

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Friday Randomosity: Fall and Follow Ups

HOW is it October already? And am I destined to repeat some form of that query every month, every season, every year, with increasing levels of incredulity until my skeleton is staring vacantly at the sky? Probably asking, “HOW have I decomposed already? Feels like only yesterday I was fully fleshed and today I am nothing but bones!”

I am feeling a surge of randomosity today. 

  • After having felt Very Down for a couple weeks solid, I finally feel like my mood is on the upswing. I attribute this shift partly to the fact that I am on a strict media diet, and have forced myself to stop looking at updates on the Gabby Petito case and to stop reading about the many, many other missing people in this country. But the main source of the improvement is a date night with my husband. We have been on – checks notes – ONE date since 2019, and that date was a quick lunch while our daughter was at a birthday party. Turns out that some time alone with my person – outside our house and away from our normal habits and responsibilities – is a real mood lifter. Last night’s date wasn’t even anything FANCY; we went out for fast food burgers, which we ate on a bench outside the restaurant. Then we got milkshakes and drank them while walking around, looking in shop windows and chatting about nothing. Then we went to our all-time favorite date night destination, Barnes & Noble, where we tried to pin down our next audiobook by handing one another books that we have on our individual To Be Read lists. I lean heavily toward Mystery and Thriller and my husband is more of a contemporary literary fiction kind of guy, and there is a very narrow overlap in our interests. A friend of mine said very bluntly, “Man, you two are boring,” but I really enjoyed our time together! We both love books, so why not spend an evening together among the stacks?
  • Because I can and will talk about books all day, I will tell you our top three audiobook contenders: The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard, Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. We had a gift subscription to Audible that expires this month, so we are looking for a new book to “buy” with our last credit. Unfortunately, neither of us loved the reading style of the Rib King narrator, the Moshfegh got some reviews that turned my husband off to listening to it, and we somehow already owned the Tartt. So we are back to square one. If you have an audiobook to recommend, please let me know!

  • Every time I think about or talk about The Secret History, a modified version of the little Ted Lasso ditty starts playing in my brain. Donna Tartt, doo do, doo doo dodo, Donna Tartt doo do, doo doo dodoo, Donna Tartt.
  • Speaking of Ted Lasso: I rewatched the entire first season as part of my recent efforts at self-care and it was just as lovely as it was the first time around… but – perhaps because of my mood, perhaps because of what I have seen of the second season – it felt a bit more melancholy this go round. I still love the series with my whole heart, though. 
  • In quick updates about distressing things: 1. My root canal has been set for November. My husband had a light day, and was able to reschedule his patients (sorry patients!!!!) so he could be with me for my appointment. Nitrous oxide does nothing for me, and my husband said he would want to be sedated for a root canal no matter how “not a big deal” it is, so I am doing the conscious sedation and my husband will be there with me. HUGE RELIEF. Except for the part where I have to get a root canal. 2. My mother-in-law got the final results of her pathology back. Her cancer is at stage 1A, which means they caught it very very early and the prognosis is good. But the type of cancer is extremely aggressive. So, even though we initially thought she would only need radiation, she will be undergoing both radiation and chemotherapy to hopefully zap any tiny fragments of the cancer that escaped the surgery. Her doctors are very positive but of course the news is upsetting and stressful. 
  • Her doctor said that only radiation is necessary. He is an expert in her type of cancer, and he has conducted research on post-surgical adjuvant therapies, and has found that doing radiation vs. radiation and chemotherapy makes no difference in the short- and long-term recurrence rate. So his recommendation would be only radiation. However. He presented her case to a Cancer Board at the hospital, and the other experts who were on the board all pushed for chemo as well. AND he said that in his experience, the stress of not feeling like you are doing “all you can” can be worse than the chemo. Hence my mother-in-law’s decision to do both. My husband says, based on the research, he would only do the radiation, if it were him. But I just don’t know. I don’t think you DO know until you are the person in the situation. I kind of think I would do everything, too, just so I wouldn’t sit around thinking, “Dammit, if only…” should there be a recurrence. Which of course is a form of magical thinking. But it’s so hard when it’s your life at stake. 
  • CHANGING SUBJECTS DRAMATICALLY: I have made my first candy corn purchase of the year. Man, I love candy corn. 
  • Usually, I don’t put out fall décor until quite late in October. But this year, I’m getting the Halloween itch a little earlier than usual. If I didn’t have Real Things to do today, I might dedicate some time to putting out the ghosts and maybe buying some mums. 
  • Here is where I call on your plant knowledge. My summer planters did not turn out the way I wanted them to. I wanted them to be full and to have these tiny white flowers and yellow petunia-style flowers spilling down the sides, with these big spiky plants in back for some texture and height. And some little hot pink flowers in there for added color. Perhaps part of my problem is that I have no idea which flowers I planted, nor how they tend to grow; I typically walk through the garden center and grab things that look pretty together and do a quick check to see if they are deer resistant (although our local deer laugh in the face of deer resistant flora) and then stuff them in a planter and hope for the best. Anyway, I am ready, now, to move on from my summer failure into fall florals. Who are we if we cannot draw strength, if not knowledge, from our errors and stride forward with renewed purpose. What remain of the white flowers will have to go. But I don’t know what to do with the tall spiky plants. From an aesthetic standpoint, they are different heights and girths which bothers me; I want symmetry on my front stoop! But they, unlike the white flowers, are thriving. So I don’t necessarily want to euthanize them in their prime. Plus, they might look nice with some bright yellow or orange mums in the foreground? Can I… DO that? Remove some of the things in the planters but not all? And add new plants without disrupting those that are already growing? What do I do here?
  • Don’t even get me started on the planters in the back.
  • Carla has decided to be a witch this year. We ordered her costume – which she picked out; she had a lot of specifications for the ideal costume, including “sparkles” and “big sleeves.” It arrived yesterday and it is amazing. Except that the glitter gets EVERYWHERE. My entire kitchen floor sparkles. My husband washed my face with a wet paper towel – yes, like I was a toddler – before our date because I somehow had glitter all over me.  She told me that she is a witch of glitter and sparkles and I think that summarizes her personality and her effect on people pretty accurately. 
image from amazon.com. Carla not pictured.
  • The Christmas Fret has set in pretty hard, especially since a friend expressed Extreme Shock that I hadn’t yet started my holiday shopping. I know, I know – supply chain issues, postal service delays, etc. etc. This weekend, I plan to badger my husband into picking out some things for Carla, just so we have SOMETHING. But I absolutely cannot think about what to get my husband. His birthday is next week and I had to scrape the darkest corners of my brain to figure out what to get him for THAT, so I am completely tapped out for Christmas. 
  • What are you having for dinner tonight? I am making taco pizza. I have been looking forward to it since Wednesday, when I finally got my act together enough to plan meals for the remainder of the week. Not the weekend, though. So who knows what will happen tomorrow or Sunday, food wise. Not I.

Well, I have run out of randomosity steam. Hoping your day is going well so far, and that your weekend is relaxing and enjoyable.