The Fine Line Between Love and Hate

I really hate my husband today. HATE! It’s OKAY to use that word, I’m a psychologist, and I gave you permission. Since we got the puppy I have learned a lot more about Mr. Perfect—and myself. How could I miss these qualities?

            “Honey,” I begged, “since I sprained my ankle on the log you threw under the bunch of leaves you had to rake in a pile across the path, could you walk the dog?”

            He grabs a sweatshirt (so I know this isn’t going to be a long trek), then discards the leash. Princess, he claims, knows he’s the alpha male.

            Five minutes later I ask, “Did she poop and pee?”

            “I don’t know, I was raking, and cutting shrubs.”

            “Shrubs, cutting? I ask the man who doesn’t know a tulip from a rose.

            “I found a clipper.”

            That thought is ambushed when Princess begins to sniff the new wool rug in the dining room. Princess is now 12 weeks weighs 43 pounds. I find out in the next minute her poop weighs half of that. One ruined cake spatula later, a roll of paper towels (Bounty), I see her squat again.

            I scream so loud even David’s rectum seizes two stories up.

            What to put on? Princess has thankfully left me with one of every shoe; a boot and rubber clog (which worked with my ace-bandaged foot), David’s sweat shirt; my fifty dollar silk scarf (for only $19.00 at Marshalls) and I run outside.

            Princess unloads. She makes a prefect Dairy Queen size softie on David’s sacred lawn. Yes, he designated the “lawn” as sacred. We have 4 acres of grass. Oh well, we couldn’t make it to the hinterlands, I thought. “Rotten me,” I tell princess.   

            She appeared to know exactly what I’m thinking. She looks quite charming with my scarf run through the collar. And I smile, long enough to crook my head down to her and glimpse the climbing roses that should have been behind her head.

            A nub. They are nothing but a nub. Twenty years and my roses look like that discount plastic sack they sell for $5.99-take-your-chances at the discount department store. The ends of the branches were ripped and torn as if they were sawed off.  

            I yank my silk scarf and march upstairs to his library (the bathroom).

            “What the F-U-C-K is wrong with you? Yeah I spell it. But that’s another story.

            As I yelled out my complaint, as he told me his story—fining the new clippers—a You Tube video on pruning—my hand found the weighty object in his sweatshirt pocket.

            I pull out my brand new ergonomic orange handled fifty-dollar Frisker Sewing Scissors.

            “Dawn, you know, they really took you on those things.”

ONE HOUR LATER: 

             "Sweetheart, you're not blogging that story, are you? You know I'll go right up to that store and buy you another one of those things."