Giving Up

Giving Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 5, 2015

The tree is up. Faux-pine and nuclear-green, it is a six-foot monument to the wonders of PVC and all things ersatz at Christmas. Ours is pretending to be a Norway Spruce. It stands unsteadily on our lounge carpet, tripod legs seeking terra firma beneath two inches of 1990’s plush pile carpet.

I bought our tree second-hand from a school fete. Fifteen Christmases have taken their toll. The tips of its branches have sloughed off their plastic skins to expose wire claws which rake your arm and sting like a cat scratch. Brush against the cellophane foliage and our tree sheds clouds of glitter.

This year I’ve abandoned my tree-trimming fantasies to allow my 8-year-old and his small sister decorating carte blanche. Clearly, they’ve inherited their father’s gene for dressing. They give no thought to proportion or colour coordination. They choke the lower branches with thick black cables knotted with our lumpish hand-me-down lights. Some strands they wind tightly around the trunk, some hang floppy and loose. Symmetry is ignored in favour of attaching a decade of kindergarten craft to the same five branches. An argument breaks out over whose lopsided paper stars are whose, and whether the toilet-roll Santa should hang next to his toilet-roll wife. A red globe blows and takes out its neighbours on either side. Our tree is both festive and fire hazard.

Already, a pyramid of presents leans against the trunk. These are the ones Santa allows me to buy for cousins and nannas. I am the Christmas shopper in our house. Somehow, the job always falls to me. The Grinch I live with abhors what he calls the ‘sad spectacle of materialism gone mad.’ He makes a sterling effort for birthdays and anniversaries, but I can’t enthuse him with a soupcon of Christmas spirit.

“What would you like the kids to get you this year?” I ask as he props at the kitchen bench with his morning paper.

“Socks and jocks,” he intones, without looking up.

“C’mon,” I plead. “You say that every year.” (What he really wants is someone to make a fuss over his December birthday.)

“Well,” I say to his centre part. “I know what I’d like. An extension ladder.”

His head jerks up.

“Only kidding. I’d like some lingerie.”

He rolls his eyes. This is the signal that this year, like last year (and the eight before that), I should buy my own Christmas present. I may even need to wrap it, on Christmas Eve, at midnight, with a pavlova still in the oven. Six hours later, I’ll feign surprise when I open it.

“You shouldn’t have!” I’ll say, throwing my arms around his neck.

Following the script, he’ll reply: “I know, darling. I hope you like it.”

This is the problem with gifting between couples: our expectations get in the way. I see Christmas as an opportunity to find my beloved a gift that symbolises our marital nirvana. He sees Christmas as an interruption to the sports pages.

In relationships, presents come loaded with assumptions, judgments and occasionally, disappointment. Givers guess – and hope to find – the perfect gift; receivers have to figure out the agenda behind the gift and then respond accordingly. It’s exhausting trying to be a mind-reader. Instead, I like to apply my first law of Christmas shopping: be gracious if your receiver is not delighted with your choice of present.

This time last year, I remembered my wannabe weather-man had admired an old ship’s barometer we’d seen in an antique shop window. And so I set about finding him one.

I scoured op-shops and auction lists until finally, a dealer handed me the card of a maritime collector up the coast. He gave me a fascinating hour on the history of ships’ instruments. He’d restored two barometers, one of which was a handsome piece with a circular timber mount and the beryllium and copper mechanism on display.

Back home, I smuggled my expensive treasure inside and wrapped it, folding hospital corners into the shipwreck-themed paper I’d found.

On Christmas morning, el capitan looked nonplussed as he peeled away the paper to reveal his prize. I watched a frown crease his forehead as he inspected his new antique. “It’s from 1907,” I said proudly. “Hand-carved oak and the original glass. See? Restored by a specialist. I drove to Yanchep to find it.”

He looked from the barometer to me and laughed. “You know, darling, there’s this marvellous invention they call the internet? Day or night, you can press a button and it’ll tell you everything about the weather!”

It was at that point I stood up, smoothed my apron and flounced away to check on the turkey.

Perhaps this year, I’ll get him his damned socks and jocks after all.

Older and Wiser

Older and Wiser
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 16, 2015

I spot a friend’s elderly father sitting outside the cafe with his coffee. A brisk north-easterly has turned Kirwin Street into a wind tunnel. A gust flaps his newspaper and whips a flurry of dry leaves under his table but he’s unperturbed.  

“Edward!” I say. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and have your coffee with me.”

He hoists himself up to kiss my cheek. We move inside to a table by the wall. Edward, dapper in a navy sportscoat and crisp shirt, sweeps one hand across his glabrous head, flattening a few token wisps to his pate.

“How are you?” I say. It seems an obvious question to ask an 87-year-old.

“Can’t complain,” he replies. “I can still read the paper without glasses.”

I detect a note of pride.

“But my teeth are wearing out,” he adds. “I’m going to get new dentures and have the teeth of a 20-year-old. That’ll confuse the ladies!”

I ask about his left knee. (Long pestered by arthritis, it was reconstructed last year). He gives it a slap.

“It feels brand new!” he says, then cranes forward as if to tell me a secret.

“You know, I was dying at 71. My aorta was leaking.”

He unfastens the top button of his shirt and gives me a glimpse of the scar he says bisects him from throat to navel.

“They fixed me up with a pacemaker and a new aorta made of Kevlar. Kevlar! Now I’m bulletproof. I could live for a thousand years. The question is: would I want to?”

I wonder what’s coming next.

“At my age, people die. I’ve said goodbye to almost everybody.” He rattles off a catalogue of three dead brothers, long gone friends, neighbours, classmates, colleagues, the dentist.

“People my age are only alive because death’s forgotten to visit.”

“But are you lonely?”

“Of course! No-one wants to be alone. I miss the warmth of another body sleeping next to mine. But my life is never dull or empty. The good thing about getting old is there’s finally time for thinking. I like to speculate on the nature of human beings. In the mornings, I lie snug in my bed for a long time.” He chuckles. “Because I can!”

“Would you like to meet someone?”

“Where would I find another Barbara?” he ponders aloud. “I was so desperately in love with Barbara.”

His voice trails off and I study my coffee foam to give him a moment to collect himself.

“She was a helluva catch. I was eight years older. She died of lung cancer at 65. She was just a kid, for goodness sake!” I hear the bitterness in his voice, but then he softens.

“That’s the unfairness of life, isn’t it? I’ve never recovered from Barbara’s death. I’m not sure I want to.”

I stay silent.

“A man is only the reflection of the woman he lives with,” he says with a smile. “She completed me. We were married for 45 years. She’s been gone twelve years. It feels like an eternity.”

He brightens.

“But a large family is a good shock-absorber: five children, eight grand-children, four great-grand-children. When I’m with them, life’s fantastic.”

I tell him about my middle son’s upcoming birthday and ask: “How do you think of the future?”

“I make plans. I want to putter down the canals of France in a houseboat; go places I’ve never been. In January I cruised from Sydney to Fiji. There were 2000 passengers. I went to a singles night but only four people turned up. And two of them had partners.”

We snort in unison.

“You know, time goes faster as you get older. But it’s not time that’s going faster – it’s me going slower. Old age is what happens as you wear out. Like the soles of your shoes – week by week, slowly, imperceptibly, and then one day they’re just too worn out to put on. They’ve outlived their purpose.” He quotes a Jaques’ line from As You Like It:

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

He inspects the mottled skin on his still manly hands. “I’m doing okay, compared to some. I’m gobsmacked by my own good luck. How have I managed to get this far in such good nick? My memory’s the problem now. I can feel the fine details fading out. I see people I’ve known for 40 years and I can’t remember their names.”

It’s time to go. I feel buoyant after my half hour with this insightful, perpetually youthful old man. He stands up to say goodbye. “Luck is everything,” he reminds me.

I sit in the car and reflect, wondering if he’s right.

In Another Life

In Another Life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 11, 2014

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be anymore,” said a woman’s voice. I swivelled to take in the two 50-something suburbanites at the next table. A busty redhead was resplendent in purple. Her friend, a diminutive blonde, was listening attentively. The cafe buzzed with the mid-morning coffee crowd.

“I don’t know whether to be a walk-over or a ball-breaker,” I heard the redhead say. And then she caught my eye and harrumphed: “Now there’s a topic for your article!”

I was startled to be recognised, preferring to be an incognito columnist. But the redhead smiled and shuffled her chair towards me. “You know what?” she said. “I’m 51. Divorced. Worked all my life, own my own place. And the single men I meet? They want a maid. A hooker. Or their mothers!”

Her blonde friend trumped her: “My husband moved in with his mother when we split up. Then he took up with a much younger woman and is bringing up step-children. I just don’t get it. He wasn’t that interested in his family the first time round.”

I nodded. “The divorces are just starting in our crowd,” I replied. “Some of them come out the blue. And then you find out they’ve been miserable for years.”

The redhead snorted. “I never thought I’d say it, but I’m happier alone.”

It was an odd conversation to have with strangers. But I admired this pair of straight-shooters for sharing their marriage autopsies. The fairytales were over. Divorce was finally losing it sting. Warily, these two friends were improvising new lifestyles.

I too, thought I could choreograph my life. I’d skip easily into marriage and motherhood. If I worked hard, my career would go exactly to plan. I’d engineer good luck, circumvent bad.

In my twenties, I mapped out my television ambitions with the same precision that I applied mascara and blow-dried my 80s bouffant. As a current affairs reporter working in Sydney, I fantasised about Kerry Packer pegging me to succeed Jana Wendt.

The one time I saw him in the Channel Nine corridors, he was barrelling towards me with an entourage of suits in tow. I flattened myself against the wall and squeaked ‘Morning Mr Packer!’ as he passed. For a second, I saw his slitted eyes flick in my direction. (Later, I decided he must’ve been eyeballing the poster of Ray Martin behind me).

Aged 25, I made prophecies about Mr Right and how I’d have two kids, two years apart. I’d take motherhood in my stride, keep a nice house, win the Pulitzer prize.

I remember a girls’ lunch on the back veranda of our rented cottage in Shenton Park. I was married, aged 30. The first of our babies had arrived but I was still staring at blank windows on pregnancy sticks. I gazed longingly at a friend’s newborn. Then someone piped up: “So, if one in three marriages ends in divorce, one of us will be separated before we’re 40. Who’s it going to be?”

We cast sideways glances at each other, mentally calculating whose union we envied most, whose marriage would sag under strain. I thought: “Well, it ain’t gonna be me.”

Five years later my marriage was over. People gossiped. I’d become a conspicuous failure.

Working full-time and with a 3-year-old, I learnt resilience. I signed the divorce papers, hung onto the house. I scrimped to pay the mortgage, worked punishing hours. Only once did I miss a kindy concert.

But on those nights my little boy stayed with his dad, I lay in bed – bereft – and re-imagined where I went wrong. Guilt would tunnel through sleep, and I’d wake feeling queasy and drained.

Somehow, I’d followed the path of the one man I’d vowed never to emulate. My father was a serial groom: five children by three marriages. The fallout from his two divorces littered three states. His own nervous breakdown was amongst the wreckage. No-one plans such heartache.

In the cafe, my new acquaintances had waved their goodbyes. I surveyed the customers queueing at the coffee machine. Who was contentedly partnered? Who was lonely? Who thought they’d found ‘the one’ and now lived with disappointment.

My first marriage feels like a pale version of a previous life. Our treasured small boy is suddenly a gangly teenager. He has a kid brother and sister. A step-father who adores him. Will I tell my lad I planned it that way? Or that everything happens by chance. Or, if you’re lucky, with perseverance.

Last night, I took a moment to admire the pragmatist I met by happenstance at the pub ten years ago. Sprawled on the sofa, he was absorbed in the Grand Prix, but I interrupted him anyway. “Has your life turned out the way you planned it?”

“Too early to tell,” he said. “You’re blocking the telly.”

Airing Dirty Laundry

Airing Dirty Laundry
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 28, 2014

My laundry is a showcase of my domestic shortcomings. A pagoda of clean clothes is stacked on the bench. Eldest son’s sports gear lies reeking on the floor awaiting fumigation. Suspended under the skylight is a dowel rail trimmed with dripping garlands of blue and white school uniforms. My husband’s favourite polo shirt, the lavender one with the chlorine stains, hangs damply off the door knob to the broom cupboard. A load of wet washing I forgot to hang out yesterday is crumpled in the washing basket, beginning to turn whiffy.

I am not a laundry-proud kind of person. My laundry is a sweat-shop that’s either stopped up with five peoples’ dirty clothes, or clogged up with clean ones. No-one but me ever puts anything away.

Of all the domestic duties that co-habitation requires, it’s the laundering that my live-in clothes horse takes for granted. Before bed, he unbuckles his trousers, liberating a roll of tummy. His fawn chinos drop to the floor. He daintily steps over them and untucks his business shirt from his underpants. He inspects his shirt front for soy sauce and coffee drips. Satisfied at finding both, he balls up the shirt and lobs it almost into the laundry hamper. Jocks and socks follow in alphabetical order. He knows it’s only a matter of time before these items of clothing will magically reap ear, spotless, back in his wardrobe.

On weekends, his gaudy, fraying favourites emerge from his chest of drawers. The burnt-orange tracksuit top is a permanent Saturday fixture. He usually teams it with the dung-brown trackie daks with a navy stripe and a saggy seat. These are the items of clothing that pass regularly through the laundry on their way to Bunnings, or to middle son’s soccer game. Another dad snorts in my husband’s direction: ‘Get dressed in the dark, mate?!” Later, after father and son’s obligatory post-match hot dog, I soak the tomato sauce stains out of the pants and dry the orange tracksuit top over a chair so it won’t shrink, because I know what love is.

My laundry is also a dumping ground for miscellaneous household items. I’m supposed to find a home for the secateurs, a container of ceiling putty and half a metre of air conditioning duct in case in case they’re urgently needed. I babysit an assortment of batteries (possibly live, more likely dead) lined side by side beside the washing machine. A lonely shin-pad waits for me to locate its mate.

On the highest shelf next to the dryer, I keep a stash of Allen keys. These keys sit atop an Ikea screwdriver kit, now on permanent standby after last week’s upstairs emergency.

In a huff, 13-year-old had stomped into his bedroom, slamming the c 1978 door. The outer door-knob flew off taking the spindle with it, and imprisoning teenager inside his room for forty minutes. (I congratulated the house for that stroke of genius).

I have friends whose laundries are more show-pony than work-horse. I don’t understand how their laundries operate with such efficiency. Even when I call in unexpectedly, their polar-white Corian benchtops are pristine. They must live in the nude.

When my kids are whining and husband is jet-lagged, I use the laundry as a safe-haven. No-one in my family expects to find me there. I make a start on folding t-shirts and re-uniting socks, but my mind is elsewhere. I fantasise about washing teenage son’s new black jeans with husband’s burnt-orange tracksuit and watching gleefully as the colours run. I peel a pelt of lint from the dryer filter and sweep up the gravel of spilled cat biscuits.

Yesterday morning, my husband was running late for a meeting and rummaging through the laundry clothes pile for his lucky lilac-checked business shirt. “This place is a sty!” he complained loud enough for me to hear from the bathroom. “Where’s that shirt?”

“I think your blue one’s dry!” I called back. He grabbed his blue shirt from the bottom of the stack, upending the pile. As he barrelled past me to get dressed in our bedroom, I braced myself for this month’s lecture. (He calls this talk a ‘minor marital adjustment,’ I called it a ‘blazing row’).

He swung open the bathroom door and poked his head around the corner, hopping on one leg to put a sock on the other. “We’ve been in this house for more than a year now,” he said. “Any chance you could get a system going in that wash-house of yours?”

Of yours? What a cheek! I was incredulous. Then furious. I bent down and retrieved yesterday’s purple socks and his lime-green running shorts. “Here you go!” I said, tossing them in his direction. “The laundry’s all yours. Let’s see how you manage in there!” And I flounced into the shower, grabbed the soap and got to work shaving my legs with his new razor.

In Loving Memory

In Loving Memory
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 1, 2014

I pull into the driveway of his brick bungalow and there he is, waiting for me. He’s propped in a folding chair in the sun, shielding his eyes with a soldier’s salute.

Three months ago we’d been strangers. “I want you to write what it’s like to grow old,” he’d emailed me, “always looking at life over your shoulder. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada. Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following Sunday, I’d sat with Carl in Ada’s room, acutely aware that a bedrail was all that divided this sick woman from my well self. Carl held his wife’s limp hand and whispered fighting words in her ear, trying to replenish her health with his. “She’s not coming back to me, is she?” he asked. Three days later, Ada died.

Carl and I have kept in touch. Now he ushers me inside the three-bedroom home he bought for Ada in 1972.  Her shower caps are still strung along a makeshift clothes line in the laundry. A tray of her earrings is lying open on the kitchen table. The treasures of half a century of marriage compete for space on every surface. “She’s keeping her eye on me, so I haven’t changed a thing,” he says.  

I notice a framed photograph of Carl and Ada leaning against a navy-blue Mercedes saloon. “Aaah, my two darlings,” he says, “except one of them never got her licence. She loved being chauffeured around. I sold that baby two years ago – ‘Hearse or limousine’ I put in the ad. The postie bought it for his wedding.”

Carl leads me into his study. It’s crammed with towers of browning newspapers, old VHS tapes and a spaghetti junction of electrical oddments and gubbins. “Ada wouldn’t come in here!” he beams. A sign on the door reads Litter Den.

I ease a dusty book from a row on a shelf: How To Help Your Husband Get Ahead, 1954. On a dog-eared page Ada has underlined the chapter heading: Make Mountains of his Virtues, Molehills of his Faults. Carl snorts gleefully. 

I see she has folded a square of toilet paper to bookmark Chapter 9: How To Get Along With His Secretary.

We take our tea in the sitting room. “Ada had 57 falls before they told me I couldn’t look after her anymore,” he tells me.

“57? You counted?”

“I’m an accountant.”

We trade smirks. He turns to pour the milk, and I realise he is hiding watery eyes.

 “She left me behind, my Ada. What happens to us – the ones left behind? I’m 87, what’s my future? To die of a broken heart? How can I start again?”

Below a window looking over the backyard, there’s a 1960s credenza with sliding glass doors. It’s filled with cut crystal. Carl has printed on one of the glass panels with a black marker: Remember the good times you had with Ada.

Her favourite armchair squats alongside. The upholstered cushion is scalloped where she once sat. Draped over the headrest, a blue checked tea-towel is embroidered with a row of dainty tulips. I can still make out the indent of her head in the fabric.  

Carl has recovered himself and is rummaging around in a filing cabinet. With a  flourish he pulls out a plastic sleeve and lays a handwritten letter on the table. “Please read it to me” he says. “I want to hear her voice again.”

The letter is dated April 2, 1974. “My darling,” I read to him. “Once again, I have to resort to pen and paper to get my point over.” I scan ahead nervously, realising Ada has written in fury. I look sideways at Carl but he knows what’s coming and begins to chuckle: “Keep going, you swine!” he says to me and puffs out his chest proudly. “This one made me sit up!”

“I have never been sorry having married you. You have been a wonderful provider and a good husband, but lately you are becoming one of the biggest bast–ds I can think of.”

He slaps his thigh and cackles.  I’m shocked but giggling too at the secret mechanics of this marriage. And then Carl’s mirth is again overtaken by sobs. He leans into me and says: “Always kiss your man before you fall asleep – even if you have to force yourself through gritted teeth.”

It’s time to pick up the kids from school. He hands me a carton of eggs and stands waving in the driveway as I reverse onto the street. I wait until he turns and walks safely inside before heading for the highway.

Fall on Deaf Ears

Fall on Deaf Ears
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 1, 2014

Between man and wife, listening is an art form. It is an elusive skill, requiring mental endurance and an air traffic controller’s concentration. (In our house, most conversations are near misses between my mouth and his ears). Moreover, listening requires self control – the word listen contains the same letters as the word silent. My family has no restraint. Usually, we’re too busy interrupting one another to hear what’s being said.  

The man of the house, however, has turned marital listening into an exercise in subterfuge. He has enough rat-cunning to convince me he’s paying attention to my every word, while really, he’s keeping track of the cricket score over my shoulder.

At stumps, I poked my head into his office and said: “By the way honey, what did you decide about tomorrow night?” He flashed me a meretricious smile: “Whatever you like, Blossom. I’m easy. You’re the social secretary, remember.”

And then our conversation degenerated into this tiresome patter:

“(Sigh) You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Depends…”

“Depends on what? Geez! Do you ever listen to a word I say?!”

“I was listening, I just didn’t think it was important enough to remember.”

Listening is now a prickly aspect of our relationship. I admit I do most of the talking, but he does most of the ignoring. To help himself annoy me more, my husband has mastered a second language: a vocabulary of eye rolls, gruntlets, exasperated head shaking and a raised right eyebrow (of doom). He uses these to stymie all conversation so he can continue reading about Nigella Lawson’s cocaine habit in peace.

I get bored unless I’m talking. I like to fill the gaps between conversations with  commentary. During the Sunday night movie I get in trouble for asking perfectly legitimate questions: 

“Hey! Is that Terence Stamp? Man! He’s aged hasn’t he? No, no, it’s Alan Rickman, isn’t it? Yup, it’s Alan Rickman. He was so good as the bad guy in Die Hard, remember honey? He had that amazing German accent.”

And then my bloke rocks his head on his neck and his right eyebrow strains to push up a forehead wrinkle:

“No, it’s not Terence Stamp and it’s not Alan Rickman, it’s Charles Dance. Now will you please be quiet. I’ve proven to you I’m listening, all right?

And then I squeeze his hand and snuggle into his hairy left thigh because I know Alan Rickman when I see him.

Of course, we now have another listening problem creeping into our  relationship. Apparently I don’t just have a talking problem, I have a hearing problem. No matter that my bloke has a mumbling problem.

He likes to mumble with his back to me. He talks to me sotto voce from his office down the hall. He thinks his conversation is so riveting I should be craning my neck to hear what he has to say. I’ve now been forced into a speech pattern that begins with “Pardon?” And he’s cheesed off with having to repeat himself.  

I wonder if my years in radio damaged my ears? I always wore the cans lopsided, covering my right ear, exposing my left, so I didn’t have to hear myself booming in stereo – mono was disconcerting enough. Maybe my right ear got sick of listening to my voice? Maybe my left ear went out in sympathy?

My teenage son likes to mock my hearing by playing me high frequency tones on his iPod. While everyone in the house is screwing up their faces and sticking their fingers in their ears, I blithely continue stacking the dishwasher. (Raising three children gives me enormous tolerance for high-pitched shrieks and wails).

And then 13-year-old son guffaws: “Hey Mum! Can’t you hear that? Are you deaf? It’s hurting my ears!”

So now I’m being dared to have a hearing test because my husband mumbles and my son plays stupid test-tones only dogs and flappy-eared children can hear.

I have no trouble hearing the 60 decibel repartee of my two best girlfriends. We oracles know each other so intimately we don’t even call it listening: we call it waiting our turn to talk. But I was nonplussed the other day, at our favourite cafe, when one of my besties leaned into me and said: “Luvvy, I think you may be shouting.”

“I’m not shouting, I’m just excited about getting a hearing aid.” Should the espresso machine compete with some really important news, I make sure my smiling and nodding more than compensate for any lack of listening.

So in the interests of marital harmony, I have bowed to familial pressure and agreed to get a hearing test. I’m not too worried – I had one five years ago and got a near-perfect score. Selective deafness, the audiologist whispered to his assistant. He thought I didn’t hear him, but I’m brilliant at lip-reading.

The Male Mystique

The Male Mystique
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 24, 2013

I live with a man who inhabits a different relationship to mine. Our marriage is a his-and-her version of the same conjugation. I can never tell what my husband is thinking because he’s master of the poker face. On weekends, having tried (and failed) to read his mood, I’ll squeeze in beside him on the sofa and inquire: “Honey, what are you thinking?”  

“Nothing.”  

I like to press him further: “You know, it’s impossible to think about nothing. Even nothing is something if you can’t think of anything.”

“Okay then,” he sighs. “I’m thinking about what a plonker that Hayden Ballantyne is.  And if I’ll have time to scarper to Bunnings at half time. And whether they’ll have a sausage sizzle out the front. Happy now?”

He shoots me a look that’s either bemusement or incredulity but I can’t tell because I can’t read his mind.

I’ve spent years trying to get inside his head. I have tried to follow his man-mind by over-processing everything he says and does. I look for hidden meanings in his shrugs and read far too much into his harrumphs.

Here’s my theory: my husband has a one-track mind. His brain chugs along the straightest possible route from A to B. He stays calm, measured and entirely predictable. As far as I can tell, he neatly divides his day into work, football, family, newspapers and sleep. (On weekends, in reverse order). And if the gentle hum of domestic life with a wife, three children and a cat turns into bedlam, he seeks refuge in the dunny.

On Saturday mornings, the bathroom floor is littered with newspapers. The sports section is in disarray, and the liftouts have had pages torn out willy-nilly. No amount of my shuffling can get the paper back in page order. I can hear contented rustling as I walk past the john on my way to the laundry. The fan is a muffled roar. The kids are yelling for their dad to teach them table tennis.

I’m expected to respect his hide-out by declaring: “Papa’s ducked out to the shop to get milk!” And then I fumigate the hallway with lavender spray to throw them off the scent.

Why do I protect him from his own children? For love, apparently. What’s a wife worth anyway? I’ve become as ever-present and useful to him as fresh air.  

Sometimes, marriage and its chores are stultifying. For every man who dives for the dishcloth after dinner, there are plenty who push back their chair and announce: “Delicious, darling.” Then they ignore the kitchen carnage and settle into the sofa to watch Four Corners.

It’s never 50-50 in domestic work. It’s 60-40 or 70-30. Or worse. One party works tirelessly to keep the household juggernaut rolling, the other takes advantage of the smooth ride.

Every six months or so I like to give our relationship a litmus test. I prop against the door of the study and casually enquire: “So, honey, should we go out to dinner, just the two of us, and talk?”

“Talk about what?” he says.

”The state of our relationship.”

And he’ll reply: “It’s chaotic. There. Now can we stay at home?”

It’s the same answer every time. No man wants to talk about his relationship. Every woman likes to dissect hers.

My husband thinks my working week involves sitting around with my housewifey girlfriends drinking pots of tea and gas-bagging. It’s the kind of ignorant accusation that infuriates me and my two best pals when we meet on Friday mornings to discuss the latest Nielsen poll and why our husbands are infuriating.

I admire those women who tell their man to shape up. Instead, I have a happy husband by default. I pretend I don’t mind him always getting his own way because I don’t want to sound like a nag. Instead, I only come unhinged every few weeks. The resentment backs up and explodes at inopportune moments. Usually on turbulent school mornings when he’s swanning around after a 20-minute sabbatical in the shower.

The sexes also divide over fine detail: I like a nicely made bed with hospital corners, my husband cuts corners by shutting the bedroom door. After dinner, he’ll earn an adoring glance from me by announcing: “Sit down Blossom, I’ll do the dishes tonight.” And then he’ll put the last four plates in the dishwasher and leave the crusty lasagne dish and a burnt saucepan on the sink.

Marriage is the accumulation of thousands of nondescript conversations held over thousands of unremarkable breakfasts. It’s the kindness of a husband who lets me have the first shower, and the tolerance of a wife who picks up the five socks scattered across the bedroom floor. But next time the kids are screeching for their dad on a Saturday morning and I can’t find the newspaper, I’m going to give them a wink and point them in the direction of the lavatory. I hope they annoy the crap out of him.