JIM B. WRITES:

I just wanted to relay a story which made me think of your blog.

A few days ago, after I had been at work a few hours, my wife called me up, annoyed. It seems that the door to the baby’s room had swung shut. The breeze coming in the windows newly opened to the warm spring air had done the deed. Unfortunately, the outer doorknob was broken, and it couldn’t be opened. This was something that was on my list to fix before the baby came three months ago, but you know how it is (we never shut the door, and many other things had to be done, etc.etc.)

 I tried to talk her through opening the door over the phone, but it proved to be impossible (I can pretty much figure anything out mechanically if I have it front of me, but I just couldn’t seem to convey the proper sequence of actions she would need to successfully turn the knob). She was now more annoyed, asking me why I hadn’t fixed this before. The baby had by now started to cry. I told her to just remove the doorknob altogether, and undo the latch that way.

She hung up in order to get to work with the screwdriver.

A few minutes later, another call. This time you could hear the distress in her voice, and the baby’s increasingly frantic cries in the background. She had removed the knob, but she still couldn’t figure out how to turn the latch. I finally told her I was coming home.

I got on the road and drove like a maniac the 20 minutes it took me to get home. Once there, I bounded upstairs, took one look at the latch, and determined that I didn’t want to waste any time trying to figure it out myself since the baby had by now been crying for over 30 minutes, so I kicked the door open with one swift kick, splintering the door frame. We went in to comfort the baby (who took quite a bit of comforting by that point), and all was well.

I braced myself for more (well deserved) tongue lashings about not fixing the door, but mysteriously all annoyance seemed to have vanished from my wife. She hasn’t brought it up since. I can only conclude that, for a man, a demonstrated ability to kick down doors when necessary is much more important than finishing every item on lists of household chores.

Laura writes:

Poor babe. Sweet blossom, crying all alone in a room. That door frame is going to cost you a pretty penny. You should have … Oh, never mind. 

You do realize you’re going to be accused of being a wimp for speaking in this way? Also, you’re wife sounds like a “female supremacist” or a “gynocentrist.”

Jim writes:

Well, I probably let my wife get away with far too much, but in this case she had me dead to rights.  Fixing stuff like this is my responsibility, and I dropped the ball.  If relations between the sexes have become so fraught that owning up to own mistake is perceived as “wimpy”, we are farther gone than I thought.

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