Reason #256 to Love Tad
For about two months, I had a new, unassembled metal shoe rack in its box, in my bedroom. On the floor. In the way.
One day a few weeks ago, I finally broke down and asked my boyfriend, whose pseudonym is Tad, to please assemble the shoe rack for me.
Then I went away somewhere for a while. It was either to work or to do laundry. Or to the grocery store with the kids to get emergency cat food and lunch meat, maybe.
When I came back, Tad had not only assembled my shoe rack, but he’d also cleaned my whole closet and arranged all my shoes on and around the rack accordingly to frequency of use.
I love Tad.
No, bitches, you can’t have his phone number. Get away. I WILL CUT YOU.
Reason #3
Because he very often cooks us dinner.
You know why I hate to cook? No, not because my kids tell me that my dinners “taste like throw-up.” Because I hate having to clean up the mess when I’m done. As the years have gone by likes sands through my hourglass, I’ve found more and more efficient ways to prepare food, solely for the purpose of saving myself the clean-up time.
So, for instance, nothing I cook ever contains grilled onions. Because that would mean washing an extra cutting board and knife. Nothing I cook ever has too many ingredients at all, really. So, when my kids think of my cooking, they think of boneless pork chops with salt and maybe some pepper, plus asparagus and parmesan flakes combined in a microwave. Or else a stir fry containing a bag of frozen vegetables, some soy sauce, and the same boneless pork chops, but this time cut up.
Or maybe they think of my cooking as a checkbook with “Papa John’s pizza” written on every check. I don’t know.
Tad likes to cook. As long as someone else is cooking, I don’t mind cleaning up. It’s only half the work, you see. And Tad cooks better than me, so I might as well let him do that half of it, right?
Mind you, the kids have also, on occassion, mentioned that the ingredients that Tad selects for cooking do, sometimes, just a little, “taste like throw-up.” That actually hurt Tad’s feelings, too. Because he has no kids, so he hasn’t developed the extensive tough skin and heart callouses that I have, you see.
But I fixed it all up by teaching my kids a lesson about manners.
“It hurt Tad’s feelings when you called his cooking throw-up,” I told them.
“I didn’t mean his cooking. I just meant the grilled onions he put in it,” explained Dallas, age ten.
“Well, whatever. All I know is, if you hurt his feelings again, he’s gonna stop cooking for us, and then you’ll have to eat my cooking all the time, instead.”
So they haven’t said anything bad since. Voila.
