They Who Would Abandon Their Husbands

Soon the Wife will be leaving me. For a week.

One whole week with her girlfriends in Florida, dressing up like unleashed cougars, lounging around the pool and casually eyeballing young men with no shirts on. One whole week of eating like royalty and consuming fruity martinis. No kids, no cares, no husbands. She and her merry band of women will be cavorting in the sun and surf, with half a dozen husbands left in the dirt wondering how in the hell any of this seems fair.

This has become an annual affair, and far from being an impossible situation, it’s a great week back here at our own Ground Zero. This is when the men rule the roost, when we leave the toilet seats up and declare fish sticks a culinary delicacy, one worthy of replicating six nights in a row. The Heathens and I will do our damnedest to consume as many episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants as possible. How about some raw toast for breakfast?

While she and her friends are loudly and publicly referring to themselves as The Girlie Whirlies and demanding punk-ass 20 year olds with their hats backwards dance with them, I’ll be teaching the boys the virtues of motorcycle ownership. We’ll crank some Dropkick Murphy’s music (she really hates that stuff), we’ll go down to the tattoo parlor as a family and talk to the guy I want to do my first ink, and if they’re really well behaved I might introduce them to my favorite barkeeps down at Patton Alley Pub.

And my wife wonders if it’s a good idea for her to go out of town.

She always worries about it, but that never stops her from her reckless abandon(ment). This trip is sacred to her, for reasons unknown to the male gender as a whole. Men sometimes congregate in groups for out of town trips, but mostly this is for the express purpose of shooting something in the woods and drinking whiskey while telling tales of their prowess with a firearm. I’ve never thought about trying to get a bunch of my guy friends together for a week on the beach, where we could sit around the condo and tell each other how beautiful we all are as we lurch towards middle age. If I proposed this, it would be met with a bunch of “what the hell are you thinking, man? I’ve got kids. The missus would never go for it.” Plus, it might be a hard sell, offering them the chance to pay money to fly to another state with the stated goal of laying around with sand in our shorts, catching some skin cancer and complaining about our love handles.

This is, apparently, the perfect way to spend a week in her eyes. She needs it, or so she claims. I claim to need to live back on the Pacific coast, but that is met with little more than a rolling of her eyes. This, my friends, is the beautiful chemistry of the well oiled machine that is a healthy marriage.

So off she goes. Fine. And good riddance. Who needs her anyways?

After a week, we will.