By Vicki Hughes Posted March 12, 2013

To say that my husband has a thing for my butt would be like saying mice have a thing for cheese or moth’s for flames, or fat kids for cake. He simply cannot help himself. In nearly every photo or video he has produced in the twenty-eight years we’ve been together, you may rest assured my hind quarters will be included at some point.

Now that he has an iPhone I’ve grown increasingly paranoid. It’s just too easy to snap a candid photo. My only saving grace is that he is still very muddy about this fad they call the Internet and that wacky Facebook. If he ever gets a clue, I will need an app called “Remove My Ass” to put on his phone (he’d never know!)

I bring all this up to discuss one of my quirks, which is Undie Adjustment. When I get into bed at night, I like to sleep in either a light t-shirt or a nightie and my undies. He’s a commando guy. For the last twenty-eight years he has attempted to persuade me to do likewise, usually with a thinly veiled concern for my comfort, “You’d be so much cooler!” Uh huh.

I assure him, I am comfortable. The reason I’m comfortable is, I like my undies adjusted “just so,” where the elastic in the back is assigned a very particular spot in the hemisphere of my butt and I want them no higher and no lower. Like I said, it’s a quirk. So after I crawl in bed and wiggle around to appreciate the softness of the sheets and the fact that I have survived the day and been rewarded yet again with getting horizontal, I adjust my undies. I get them “just so” and for that moment in time, all is right with my world.

Which brings us back to mice and cheese and moths to flames. My husband and my ass. He is compelled to grope and examine it as soon as he gets in bed, and as you may have already guessed, this completely ruins my Undie Adjustment. The calibration becomes all caddy wompus and I lay there feeling like a jigsaw puzzle with three missing pieces. To his credit, he often tries to re-adjust them for me. But let’s face facts. Nobody else can adjust your undies for you. That might be the worst part of having no arms; never really getting your undies to your liking.

So we do the Undie Adjustment Dance almost nightly. I used to get mad. I’d say, “WHY do you have to DO that!?” Why indeed. Have you ever met a mouse? A moth perhaps? Mice have an uncontrollable urge for cheese, even when it is perched upon a steel trap. Moths beat themselves silly against hot lightbulbs and singe their wings in candle flames. It’s what they do. There’s really no point in getting mad about it.

I’ve learned to adapt. I let him have his nightly fun re-arranging my undies and then when the festivities are over I put everything back where it belongs. That’s how love works. I happen to know there are parts of his world that I have, on rare occasions, disrupted. Of course I only do it because it makes perfect sense to me.

I have a thing for putting his water glasses in the dishwasher. He drinks a lot of water. I find his glasses all over, and I assume (wrongly) that he is done with them. I put them in the dishwasher, where they belong, and then he gets parched searching for the glass he was sipping from only moments before I “hid” it in the dishwasher. This is somehow annoying to him, in spite of how obviously helpful it is.

We torment each other in these amazingly predictable and odd ways, and it’s somehow become the  weird glue that’s made us stick. Occasionally one of us has a bad day and freaks out over the undies or the water glasses in life, demanding that the other one reform immediately. But then we laugh at the same jokes, recite the same lines from a favorite movie, or roll our eyes in ecstasy over really good blue cheese, and we decide to cut each other the tiniest bit of slack. The fact is, we aren’t going to change each other. Of course it doesn’t stop us from launching a try now and then, but really, twenty eight years is long enough to conclude that a track record has been established . You shrug, you kiss, you move on.

© Vicki Hughes 2013