Helga

So the girls' dad comes by after work.  We live two blocks from Best Buy.  The girls did his laundry.  (They don't even do their own, sigh).  I had on a dress I bought last November, a summer dress, marked down to $1 at Walmart.  So I waited all year to wear it, and should have worn it earlier but I forgot about it in the back of the closet.

He thought it looked like a house dress evidently.  He walked in and said, "Hello Helga."

I remembered all the reasons we are not together anymore.  There are a lot of them, most worse than that, but it doesn't take much to rewind that movie.

One time he accused me of scrubbing the toilet with his tooth brush.  He said that was why he'd been nauseated a few mornings in a row, and I said, to be funny, that I was not using his tooth brush for anything and had never thought of anything so evil (of course, then he gave me the idea!  but no, I never acted on it) and that there were other causes of nausea.

"Like what?" he asked.

"You might be pregnant."  I was trying to be funny or at least distract him.

"Is it yours?" he shot back.

Like, who else?  So, right now I'm not feeling so sympathetic about the piddling little kidney stone which of course, I'm not superstitious, but I worry it will come back on me and I'll get one so I'll know how it feels.  I deserve it for feeling vengeful, and vengeance belongs only to Jehovah.

Most men would be happy you could buy clothes so cheap.  That's the trouble with men.  Other than the obvious (do you look hot???) you can never predict what qualities they admire or desire in a woman.  I must have read Proverbs 31 about 1000 times during the decade from 2000-2010.  I can cook and clean and organize and smell good.  I cover my gray and put on my face and shop for bargains.  I can comment and write poems and my paycheck is good enough that I could support a pioneer.  All these years I wanted to pioneer if I could just have the right man, and now the irony of knowing I could be the man!

One time my husband and I were with another couple in WalMart and the other woman put a hairbrush in the cart (she had long curly hair, very pretty) and her husband took it out and told her she didn't need it.  I could have used a wheelbarrow to hold my jaw shut enough to get back out the door.  She worked and made a good financial contribution - if he had asked, I would have been okay, or negotiated, but he just took it out, end of story.

One time, another woman, well, we went to buy groceries together, and when we brought hers home before I went home (we used my car, she has carless is how it happened) she and I carried everything in while her husband laid on the couch watching football with the toaster next to the couch on the floor.  (He liked Pop Tarts).  I'm not kidding.  He finally ended up a few months later catching the rug on fire.  I didn't say anything but one day David said something to me, called me some name like Helga Housewife, haha, and she said how do you put up with that.  She said she would knock her husband to Kingdom Come if he pulled that.  I just smiled and said yeah, I know, but he does carry in groceries.

I'm sure he put up with something about me he didn't like.  There were trade offs in my direction I'm sure.  That's the problem with imperfection.  When we are perfect, how will it work?  Because if you marry a Latin lover, you got that forever, and if you marry a Scottish fellow, you have red hair ever more.  So there are trade offs that way.  But should we look for someone who likes the beach or the lake depending on what we like?  I don't care about math, but I love architecture and, obviously, language and music.  But eventually I plan to dabble in all of it.  I mean, eternity, that's what it is for, right?  If I have a husband then, will he tell me we must work on guitars this century and put pianos on hold?

I don't know.  Jehovah will stretch out his hand and satisfy our desires.  I am not one to worry about complexion or eye color, but I sure don't want anyone telling me I'm spending 100 years on algebra.