A Hard Lesson Learned

Like everyone else in the country it seems, I made a New Year’s Resolution to start working out and get in shape. So now it’s March and I have been faithfully sticking to my regime; sweating, bouncing and shimmying with 100 other girls several times a week at the local gym. And yet, after two whole months of this I am STILL not built like a supermodel. Which is, of course, discouraging. So, looking for some sympathy (or permission to quit altogether) I said to my darling husband, “I’ve been working and working so hard for all these weeks and I haven’t lost an ounce of weight.” And HE says…wait for it…wait for it…(drumroll please)… “Yeah… but your butt looks less saggy.”

Your. Butt. Looks. LESS. Saggy. He said it with this happy, bright-eyed and generous look on his face like a child handing you a bunch of freshly-picked wildflowers. Imagine the awkward scene: I stare back at him in stunned silence. He’s still smiling. My upper lip begins to curl over my teeth. Confused, his smile fades just a little. A bit of saliva drips off one of my fangs. He takes an unsure step backwards and begins to stammer, “But…I said it looks…LESS saggy…”. BAM! I fly across the room at him, horizontal in the air like a ninja, my “less saggy” (and obviously stronger) glutes propelling me forward like a bullet. I wrap my hands around his neck and apply a sleeper hold until he is unconscious in a puddle.

Now, my husband it not new in town. This is certainly not his first rodeo. He has spent the last 11 years attending the Paige Schlegel “Watch every word you say because it will be dissected, twisted around and then held against you” seminar, and truthfully he rarely slips up anymore. If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have said he was an expert on what not to say. He never falls into the “do these make me look fat” trap, always passes the “is she prettier than me” test, and knows exactly when to say, “You’re like that Benjamin Button guy—I think you might be getting YOUNGER every day.”

So imagine my surprise at this über flub that he should have learned to avoid in his Dealing with Females 101 class. LESS saggy! Finally I am able to respond, “So what you’re saying is, my butt was REALLY saggy before. Even though you always tell me how great I look, and how my butt looks exactly like that Russian girl’s on Dancing With the Stars.” I take a deep breath and begin to rant, “So that must mean you were lying, and if you’d lie about this, then you’ll lie about anything and now I can’t trust you, so what else are you lying about, you probably have another family living somewhere that you just didn’t feel like you needed to tell me about because you’re a big liar and you think I’m a saggy cow and our whole marriage is a sham!”

He knows he’s trapped. He knows there is very little chance to escape. His eyes nervously shift back and forth-- I can see he’s deciding between trying to dig his way out of this mess and just falling on his sword in the noble tradition of the Samurai. Like a fool, he opts to dig. “I’m saying…that your hard work….is really paying off…” (He pauses to see how the rest of the sentence sounds in his head) “…and that…your butt…is like a nice round…” (In all honesty I am sort of eager to hear how this ends. A nice round WHAT? Watermelon? Cheese wheel? Planetoid?) Unfortunately, he could not come up with anything and ended up bolting out of the house, leaving a body-shaped hole in the door. Coward.

But the moral of the story here is that you think you’ve brought them up right: you’ve gotten rid of all their Def Leppard Tshirts, showed them that a hairstyle should NOT be ‘party in the back, business in the front’, and taught them to wash their underwear after each use instead of relying on the ‘sniff test’. And yet, when you least expect it, they forget crucial elements of their training and you realize how far you still have to go. Apparently, like working out, bringing up a civilized husband is a journey, and not a destination.