A woman walks into a room and stops short, stunned. The camera cuts to the kitchen counter, where a disaster has occurred: the top of the blender fell off mid-blending. There’s unidentified red goo all over the kitchen counter, dripping off the cabinets, pooling on the floor. The kid and his dad look up at Mom with guilty looks on their faces, while the dog sits at their feet, lapping up the free treat. The camera cuts back to mom, and she smiles, shakes her head. You can just hear her saying “Oh, my boys. Can’t do anything right.” Then she grabs the row of paper towels and, still smiling, begins cleaning up the mess, miraculously needing only one paper towel to clean the entire kitchen.
We have seen dozens of iterations of that same commercial while watching TV. Whether somebody is selling paper towels or socks or whatever, the commercial features a husband/father who is at best an enabler and at worst a buffoon, then shows the wife/mother who loves her man despite his many and obvious flaws. And it bugs me.
We men are fully capable of operating a blender without supervision, and it almost always results in something aside from abject disaster. We can do laundry without shrinking clothes or staining something pink most of the time. We are fully capable of making dinner as often as is necessary to keep everybody in the house fed and sane, and just because I have two pizza delivery places programmed into my phone doesn’t make me an exception. We are not buffoons. For the most part, I don’t think our wives would have married us if we had been, or at the very least they wouldn’t have made babies with us. So stop insulting us, random paper towel brand that I can’t remember meaning I can’t look up the commercial and link to it here. Us men are fully capable.
I mean, sure, there are some days where I’m sure Nicci shakes her head at what I’ve done and wonders why she puts up with me. There have been many days where I’ve dressed Aric, went to the kitchen to pack my lunch, and came out to see him wearing different clothes. Sometimes it’s because I dressed him in shorts on a 40 degree day, or put him in a sweatshirt when it’s going to be 90. And sometimes, it’s simply because I’m colorblind and come on. Just look at how I had him dressed!
Most mornings, though, I am able to very successfully and efficiently give Aric his breakfast. This morning, though, it happened. I picked up Aric’s milk to slide it closer to him, only I hadn’t screwed the cap on tightly enough (read: at all). Disaster. Milk everywhere. All over the kitchen table and kitchen floor, plus all over Aric’s pants and hands. So I grabbed my handy paper towels (Target brand, yo) and started sopping up the mess. While doing so, the dog came over to “help” on some sections of the floor right about the time I noticed something on Aric’s foot. Looking closer, I had to ask him out loud: “How did you get nutella on your foot?”
Just as I asked him that question, as milk was dripping off the table onto my wrist and the dog was licking the floor clean, I heard the baby gate blocking the basement stairs swing open. Busted. Nicci was coming upstairs from the shower. I froze and looked up at her. She walked into the kitchen and stopped and surveyed the scene. The dripping milk. The dog. The toddler with nutella on his foot, shoving a waffle down his mouth. The dad, on his hands and knees, surrounded by wet paper towels. I was living a paper towel commercial.
Only I didn’t get the exasperated sigh, the defeatist smile, or the shaking of the head. Nicci just said “Oy” and kept walking to the bedroom.
See? Those commercials are completely unrealistic.
) (also, as I’m writing this, I just yelled at Tim for buying the wrong kind of potato chips after he did the grocery shopping, which I normally do, so add that to the list of guilts). The guilt I feel for not being as completely head-over-heels excited like I was for Aric.
