I could say more but there’s a persistent ringing in my ears. Oh. He wants his “blankie.”
Lord, don’t let me kill him.
Revenge of the Amish Friendship Bread
It’s making the rounds again. I’m not talking about the Ebola virus or toxic shock syndrome. No, no. I’m talking about something far more insidious: Amish Friendship Bread.
Oh, I can hear the men out there now: “Amish Friendship Bread? What’s that? Where’s the sports section?”
Let me put this simply: Just think chain letter with chopped pecans.
Amish Friendship Bread is a woman thing. Sure, we pretend to be friends, but when it comes right down to it, women only make new women friends so that, one day, they’ll be able to pawn off a bag of friendship bread “starter” on them.
Otherwise, we have to leave the stuff on the doorsteps of strangers, ring the bell, and scamper away in shame.
The starter looks like baby spit-up and is usually accompanied by a recipe only slightly shorter than the Constitution.
I have a theory on how this whole silly business got started. Many years ago (then again, this is the Amish, who can tell?), Amish wives got fed up with not having zippers or Cuisinarts or feng shui decorators and decided to get even with the rest of us.
They developed a bread that sounded warm and friendly. When you hear the words “Amish Friendship Bread” you can practically smell the cinnamon, can’t you? You picture yourself serving warm slices to your dear friends with one hand while tending the fire in your kitchen hearth with the other.
You do NOT picture yourself feverishly tending this starter, actually a smelly yeast that bubbles and pouts if you miss even one day massaging it. I am personally acquainted with parents who spend less time with their preschoolers than is required to keep this stuff happy.
Once you’ve got Amish Friendship Bread in your house, things will never be the same.
Believe it or not, I took the gloopy starter with me in a cooler on vacation just so I wouldn’t miss a day of tending it and ruin everything. The pressure is enormous. By keeping the recipe and starter circulating, you’re supposed to be creating one great big happy nutcake-eatin’ sisterhood.
The dreaded bag of starter is always accompanied by directions that are more complicated than missile launch codes.
Day 1: Do nothing. (This is an Amish trick. Lull them into a false sense of security.)
Days 2–5: Mush up the bag with your hands. Make sure you have exactly 16,549 little tiny yeast bubbles rising toward the top of the bag. Count them now. You can go to work another day; this is important.
Day 6: Add a cup of flour, a cup of sugar, and a cup of milk. Mash the bag real good.
Days 7–9: Mash the bag again, but this time, open it to release some of the air bubbles. DO NOT RELEASE TOO MANY AIR BUBBLES! You may want to calculate the correct air pressure with the help of the research facilities of the nearest major university.
Day 10: By now, Amish Friendship Bread has taken over your kitchen and your life, multiplying itself many times over. You have become obsessed with it to the exclusion of any social life. Low birth rates in countries where this bread is circulating have been documented by the Centers for Disease Control.
Meanwhile, add more flour, sugar, and milk and mush it all up. Finally, divide the mess into four plastic bags to give to “friends,” reserving one cup for you.
Take the cup you’ve got left and add a bunch of oil and milk and eggs and baking powder and spices and nuts and stuff and bake for an hour or so. Let cool. Cut. Discover baking time was wildly inaccurate, perhaps because you don’t own a regulation Amish stove, i.e. heated rocks. Pour liquid center back into black husk and bake for four more hours. Toss the whole mess out and see Day 1.
The last time I did this, my husband found me on the kitchen floor, sobbing, surrounded by bags of goo and a leaking, smoking black shell of a cake.
He said I’d suffered long enough and offered to take the starter “for a long ride in the country.”
I only hope it was Amish country.
Total Woman This
Recently, I spent a Saturday in a Total Woman Seminar learning how to please my man. The class was based on Marabel Morgan’s famous book and cost $25, which seemed like a bargain because it promised I’d soon be a “more attractive, loving, well-organized wife—in short, a TOTAL woman!”
It didn’t take long to discover I had the wrong stuff. When I arrived at 8:30 A.M., our instructor, Sharon, Certified Total Woman, apologized for the early hour.
“I know you had to rush this morning getting your husband’s breakfast ready,” she said cheerily.
The other wives nodded and smiled. I hung my head. I didn’t dare admit that I haven’t fixed my husband breakfast since 1988. I’m not hopeless, though. When he asks, “Where are the Golden Grahams?” I always point to the correct cabinet.
Sharon looked perfect: good hair, a nice fuchsia business suit. I was missing three buttons on my pants.
“Now ladies, you just stop sewing and cooking when your big guy wants to talk,” she began. I pulled my sweatshirt down over my gaping waistband. The other women were wearing Estee Lauder’s Beautiful. I’d barely remembered my Ban.
After lunch, Sharon said we’d talk about S-E-X. She spelled the letters out just like that.
We all leaned forward. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask us to do that tired Saran Wrap thing.
“Ladies,” she said, “I want you to take a lemon bubblebath every day at four-thirty.”
Hmmmm. I don’t get off work ’til eight. This could be interesting.
She continued, “To show our husbands how spontaneous we are, why not surprise him in the bedroom?”
She suggested we “crouch” buck nekkid on the bed or a dresser and leap out at him from the shadows.
Now, my husband can’t see all that well in the dark. I think if he comes into a darkened bedroom and finds 140 pounds of cellulite hurtling through space at him, he’s going to run like the devil.
I know I would.
By the end of the day, I had a legal pad full of Total Woman tips. At the top of the list was Sharon’s suggestion that we become a “Yes, let’s!” woman. That means if your husband asks if you’d like to join him watching all twenty hours of the Super Bowl, you say, “Yes, let’s!” even if you’d really rather ask the Mormon missionaries to just put a bike rack in your front yard and stay a few years.
I tried to be a Total Woman for forty-eight hours, at home and office.
I did housework in baby-doll pajamas and white go-go boots.
I installed a pink lightbulb in the bedroom.
I lowered my normally obnoxiously loud voice in the office and purred at my male coworkers.
I made coffee for the boss AND poured.
I was making myself very, very sick indeed.
By the end of the second day, my husband actually pined for the acid-tongued woman he’d married. He said he didn’t want a Total Woman, that all that sugary niceness was making him crazy.
At work, the guys said I was creepy, like some kind of pod person.
So I went back to my surly self and everybody’s happier. Still, there are moments every now and then when I think I might just sew those buttons on someday.
Nah.
Lazy Men
When it comes to housework, my husband, like a lot of men, can’t seem to finish one chore at a time. If I ask him to do the laundry on Monday, there is no doubt in my mind that by Friday I’ll be wearing my bathing suit bottoms to work.
And he’ll be forced to dig out the novelty bikini briefs that glow in the dark, the ones with Santa on top of an outhouse saying “Dammit, Rudolf, I said the SCHMIDT house!”
It’s not that my husband doesn’t do a good job with the laundry; he does. But, like many men, he can’t be depended upon to COMPLETE routine household chores. He might do half the laundry and then get sidetracked on how the bleach dispenser seems not to work and what if he sq
uirted that most manly of emollients, WD-40, into the guts of the thing and, before I know it, the washer has been disassembled and there’s a note tacked to the fridge saying: “Gone to the hardware store for parts.”
Men love to buy “parts.” It doesn’t even matter what for. They wander the aisles of those auto “parts” superstores for hours. Women prefer to buy things whole, as in, “I’ll take a whole couch, please.”
Women are less likely to get sidetracked doing chores. I will vacuum the house, then dust, then fold clothes, then put them away. Chores are done in order. Rooms are cleaned one at a time.
My husband will begin to vacuum, notice a minuscule chip in the paint along the baseboard, drop the vacuum like it’s a snake, and drive to the hardware store for paint, brushes, a drop cloth, spackling compound, nails (just in case the baseboard pops away from the wall during the repair job), and something called “epoxy,” which I don’t think he knows what it is either but it’s a real virile “I’m-going-to-Hooters-with-the-guys” kind of thing to buy. Plus a couple of baseball magazines because you can’t very well expect him to think about work all the time, can you?
Last weekend, hubby was sweeping the porch when he noticed, halfway through the job, that a strange vine had sprung up in the hedge. That would never do. He stopped sweeping and went straight to the storage shed to fetch hedge clippers and weedkiller. Well, almost straight. He saw a neighbor working on his boat and walked over to chat about boat motors and stuff for a while. A favorite “man trick” is that if you ask him what he’s been doing, he’ll say “Oh, I had to help Rufus with his boat (car, pickup, lawn mower).” That way it sounds almost noble that he wiggled out of a chore.
Anyway, he returned to look for the hedge clippers, but before he could find them, he spied the WeedEater hanging on some pegboard. He took it down and decided to fire it up for the season but, alas, as Shakespeare used to say when his WeedEater didn’t work, the thing didn’t have any string in it so he went BACK to the hardware store FOR PARTS.
Like other men, my husband probably has as many as a dozen little “projects” going at the same time.
Women don’t stop cooking supper midway through to dismantle and clean the stove burners. Men like to do these things then mutter about “don’t know how you were able to cook on those damn burners; you shoulda seen the stuff I cleaned off…”
We just wanna eat supper sometime before Letterman, okay?
“Hmmmm,” he’ll say. “Soon as I can figure how to get that heating element back inside the, whatdoyoucallit, oven…Hey, let’s just call pizza. I think a part’s missing.”
A Caveman Weekend
My husband and his buddies are safely home from their annual male bonding weekend. Before you get the wrong idea, this isn’t one of those “discover-the-hairy-primate-within” retreats to a sweat lodge we read so much about a few years ago. (And while we’re talking, what happened to that whole Sensitive Man movement anyway? Did Iron Trevor finally get sick of building fires and realize he had central heat at home?)
This annual pilgrimage isn’t so high-minded and noble as those in which men sit around fires and discuss being fathers and sons and finding their place in this world, all while getting in touch with their feminine sides. (“Ian, you and Brad serve the biscotti and decaf, okay?”)
What it is, is football. My husband and four or five other testosterone factories worship at the shrine of Our Lady of the Endless Bud Lights, Greasy Pizza, and Smelly Tube Socks, all in the name of football.
The idea is to escape family, jobs, and Serious Thought. If anyone in this merry band of aspiring cavemen ever suggested a group hug or a round of General Foods International Coffees, he’d be shoved butt-first out of the van with instructions to “go home and help the little woman change the shelf paper.”
Guys being guys, is how my husband put it the first year.
“Does that mean you’re going to spit a lot and scratch yourselves and talk about some obscure players’ statistics in some game no one in his right mind would remember, much less care about?”
“God, I love you,” he said. “You really DO understand, don’t you?”
Not really.
Gross Gridiron Getaway’s okay, because I know that while my husband probably told the guys he had to excuse himself to “do something manly like wrassle a grizzly with my bare hands,” he really snuck away to call home and say he missed me.
Oops. I guess that’s like revealing the secret handshake.
It’s almost endearing, this need to attend a football game far from home and sit in the company of other men who have arranged similar weekends of quasi-debauchery. You recognize these “weekend furlough” types because they don’t just belch. No, they fling their arms wide and belch the tune of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
My husband and his buddies, his pardners, his homeboys, his posse—the terms get more manly as the weekend approaches each year—spend hours planning these football forays.
“Tommy’s on the phone,” I called to him as the weekend drew near. “He wants to know what you’re wearing on the ride up.”
“You’re making that up,” my husband said. “Uh, aren’t you?”
They sprinkle these phone conversations with verbs that make them sound like they’re going into battle. They plan to “attack” the interstate, “storm” the stadium, and “retreat” only when they’re told by security to leave.
I know by the end of the weekend they all wish deep down inside they were back home eating a nice plate of pot roast and mashed potatoes and playing Jeopardy! with the wife.
Who always lets him win, incidentally.
“I missed you,” my husband said, dropping his duffle bag of dirty laundry. “What do we have to eat?”
“I thought it would be cruel to just throw you back into civilized behavior so I fixed cold pizza, warm beer, and there’s a furry Snickers bar I found under the car seat that’s probably safe if you wipe the crud off.”
He groaned.
Just then, I remembered one of the guys had a two-week-old son.
“How’s baby Michael?” I asked.
“Who?”
“David’s son. How is he? How’s his wife?”
My husband looked genuinely puzzled. “Did they have a kid?”
“Yeah. Two weeks ago.”
“Hmmm. Didn’t come up.”
“What about Joel? Will he and his girlfriend get back together after that big fight they had where she threw all his clothes into the street?”
“Dunno. We didn’t talk about that.”
“You just spent twelve hours in a van with these men and no one talked about their lives?”
“Huh-uh. Why would we do that?”
I give up.
Fighting Still Bad for Relationships
A recent study following the marriages of 124 childless Seattle-area couples—can you imagine a more ultra-hip or caffeinated demographic?—reports the not so earth-shattering finding that “couples who escalate a fight are much more likely to divorce.”
Everybody say duh-huh. Anybody who’s ever spent more than twenty-five minutes in a laundromat watching a couple fight over who’s got dibs on the Donkey Kong knows that. On second thought, maybe you had to be there.
Researchers at the University of Washington tracked these Seattle chic for six years and guess what? They found out that men hate it when women whine and women hate it when men breathe with that funny in and out motion.
Or something like that.
They also found that most arguments started when the wife presented a problem. This is because most men would rather gnaw off their arms and legs and THEN go shopping for new drapes and sheers than pick a fight.
The fact is, if men would stop doing boneheaded things, it would make it easier on us women. No longer would we have to waste our little college-educated brains on subjects like how, OF COURSE, the toilet paper has to flow from the front of the roll, not the back where it touches the wall and can get, well,
icky.
It would help, too, if men would just stop going to the grocery store. Men are very fond of saying how good they are at grocery shopping. No they’re not. I guarantee that if you ask a man-type husband to pick up some “milk, hamburger buns, and OJ,” nine out of ten will come home with a “reduced for quick sale and, frankly, because we can’t stand the smell anymore” chuck roast, two packs of Skittles, and a large container of Goo Gone.
Lists, after all, are for girly-men.
The researchers reported that the biggest lesson to be learned from the study was that the way couples begin a discussion about a problem is crucial.
CORRECT: “Sweetheart, it upsets me when you come home so late. I miss our time together and I’m sure you do, too.”
INCORRECT: “Hey, Loser Boy, I’m changing the locks if you’re late one more night. Oh, and you can just forget about that kidney I said I’d give you.”
CORRECT: “Puddin’, I value our partnership and I enjoy being able to plan together how we spend our fun money.”
INCORRECT: “Oh, great. You’ve wasted another fifty bucks on computer software and a new joystick so you can pretend for a few short hours to be something other than the pathetic, unemployed weirdo that you are in real life.”
Another groundbreaking finding from six years of taxpayer-funded bedroom peeking? Contempt can be detrimental to a marriage.
This comes under the heading of Things That Are Painfully Obvious, like that commercial for NBC’s Later Today show which says—and I am not making this up—“It’s like Today only later.”
Sure glad they could clear that one up.
I told my husband that I thought that commercial was stupid but he isn’t speaking to me since that kidney thing.
Men.
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