On Monday of this week I had to have a “Come to Mom, Interrupted” conversation with Dad, Interrupted about division of labor, in that I was working outside the home better than full-time and he’s a work at home dad right now and I expected that maybe we could get closer to a 50/50 split of duties, but only over time as the shock of going from 100/0 (and that’s a me/him split, if you’re keeping score at home) too quickly might kill him.

I pointed out that I have made it shockingly simple to do something like, say, clean the toilet in our bathroom, by placing cleaning supplies IN the loo, with brush and cleanser which would render cleaning the toilet a fifteen-second affair at best, with the hardest part being walking the little disposable scrubber head to the trash.

He agreed to do just that.

So, this column ran on Wednesday.

My husband texted me at work to tell me that it ran. Which was a little unusual. He also didn’t say anything about the content (e.g. “it was hilarious,” or “it made the dog throw up”), which made it even more unusual because that would normally be the only reason he would tell me that it ran.

When I got home, he told me again, with no addition, that it had run. So I, sensing danger, used my Super Columnist ESP-fu and asked him: “What did you think of it?” He paused and said, obviously carefully choosing his words, “It was well written.”

Turns out that he didn’t like it when I said that FIVE people in the house were confused when the maid (me) quit. Because using the number FIVE includes him, and he apparently thinks he’s fully participatory in the ol’ Chore Game.

Which is absolutely nutjob when you consider that the very minute he said how ticked he was, he had not, in fact, gone near that master bath toilet, that toilet he had promised to clean as if it were the last toilet on earth and our lives depended on it being clean enough to serve as a base to perform surgery on, other than to make it dirtier. Even today, Saturday morning, that damned toilet he said he’d clean right away has still not seen the bright side of a toilet bowl brush.

It’s getting a little gamey, to say the least.

And I have decided that I will never, and I mean NEVER crack and clean that thing. (I think I can pull this off with the simple dodge of not wearing my glasses in there and going in armed with a fresh can of Febreeze.)

I will wait until the germs in that porcelain evolve into a sentient life form and build their own civilization. I will wait until Bidetopia develops its own written language and starts publishing little newspapers on used cottonelle. (Hey, maybe THEY’LL run my column! SCORE!) I will wait until the little citizens of Lavatory World build their own little Apollo Program and plant their flag on the toilet paper roll.

And when I shake their Neil Armstrong’s hand and he asks me to take him to my leader, I will gently and respectfully place him on my palm, introduce him to the prone, sleeping body of my husband, and then go clean that damned toilet.

© E. Stocking Evans 2010