on the seventh day…

Today’s a big anniversary for us. It’s the seventh day of my moratorium on yelling at my husband. Maybe there was an occurrence of "suggestion" snarled through gritted teeth in the last week, but that doesn’t count…because I said it doesn’t, that’s why! (Does it make ya nostalgic for how you were parented?)

I bow at the altar of hormones. I am but a tiny paper boat tossed about in hormonal swells. I am your movie ticket stub sloshed violently through the hormonal wash cycle in the pocket of your relaxed fit jeans… All right, you get the picture: Hormones = mean autocrat. Me = victim of above. Victims love company, and so whenever I can, I invite along my husband. Look, this shit is hard. Not a little hard. A whole fucking lot hard. Sometimes I just like to mix a little cocktail of complete exhaustion and misplaced anger and chill out for the evening.

One of our better arguments, before I gave it all up, was a little tit for tat that I like to call "the cookie incident." Mike was going to the grocery store. (We know how it works out when I go. Thus, this task has been relegated to my husband.) He asked if there was anything else that I wanted beyond the little list we’d created. Now, apparently, there is some link between sleep deprivation and sugar cravings. I know not of the details of this curious marriage, I only know that self-medication in the form of chocolate gets me by. So I told Mike I wanted cookies, please. He even asked what kind I wanted and I suggested a particularly tasty variety that he’d brought home for me in the past. I thought we had an agreement. Anyone in my place would have thought the same.

Mike came home from the store with frozen cookie dough. It wasn’t even the flavor I’d asked for. And it was frozen. I took in his misdeed calmly at first. He told me, this way, we could make a couple at a time and they’d last longer. Uh huh. I let him know that in fact it was not possible for me to make cookies during the day, ready-to-be-baked or not. And here comes his fatal mistake: Note to working partners, pay Very. Close. Attention. He asked me why it was that I could not manage to make cookies. Yes, that is what he wanted to know.

I’m fuzzy on the finer points, but something of a loud, chaotic scene ensued, which ended with me shrieking the line "…and if I have to eat a BAG of cookies EVERY DAY to get through these first months, that’s what I will DO!"

The next morning I woke up at 7:00 am with the resolve to try and stop yelling at my closest ally. A decision made slightly easier by the goofy, toothless smile on my baby’s sweet face, and the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the kitchen.