So I Married a Sexist

Warren got President’s day off, so I decided to stay home too. The plan was to send the boys off to school and enjoy a little Stacey and Warren time. Over breakfast at Barksdale’s (not Brother Juniper’s as I had planned—damn you Monday!), I said. “You know, I think you might be a sexist.”

“Whaa-aat?” he sputtered as Western omelet flew out of his mouth.

“This morning when I was getting out of the shower, I overheard the conversation you had with Jiro in which you discovered he had poopy butt,” I stated slowly and clearly.

“And…?” he said, wiping the egg off his face.

“And you didn’t change his diaper. You just waited for me to do it.”

He said nothing, but there was lots of blinking. Obviously my sensitive new age guy was not used to be called a sexist. “I do other things—I cook, I do bath time…”

I continued, “But you only change his diaper when I’m not home. It’s like if I am in the house, I am the de facto diaper changer. Do you have any idea how many diapers I have changed!?”

“I don’t like changing diapers,” he meekly confessed. Then he flashed his puppy dog eyes. I backed down.

“Oh and I do? You don’t want to deprive me of my fun, right?” I laughed. “I say we institute a ‘whoever smelled it, dealt it’ policy.”

“Okay,” he said as he willed his olfactory senses to ignore the smell of poop.

We ended up having a really good day and capped it off with some quality (hint hint) time before picking up the kids.

“Do we need to use...protection?” he innocently asked.

Instead of a simple yes or no, I exclaimed, “I can’t believe that someone who basically knows everything, someone who is nicknamed McGuyver for Maude’s sake, has no concept of a woman’s cycle!”

“I’m not a gynecologist,” he countered.

“No, you are a sexist,” I said for the second time in eight hours.

But I was being unfair. I had no clue about my own cycle until I was 30 years old. It isn’t like I actually learned anything useful in high school health class. (And honestly, if I had to tell my mom what a hickie was in sixth grade, I can’t fault her for not telling me how to chart my cycle. I doubt she even knows herself.)

“Okay, here’s how it works…” I said as I went into a very simple explanation of how I figured out when I was ovulating and what it meant in terms of him having to don a condom.

I watched as a light bulb went off in his head. “That’s pretty cool,” he said.

“You can bet Satchel and Jiro will have this information by age 10,” I said with all seriousness.

Later that night as I was getting the boys ready for their bath, I heard a loud scraping noise. I followed the sound to the backdoor where I discovered Warren outside shoveling snow off of the deck.

It never even occurred to me that the deck needed shoveling. And even if it did, I’d be hard pressed to pick up a shovel. I opened the door and said, “Hey honey, looks like I’m a sexist too.”