Never get between a woman and her crazy

      “You’re doing it again!”

         “What?”

         “You’re getting between a woman and her crazy”

        

My wife and I just finished reading Men are Stupid, Women are Crazy, by Howard J. Morris and Jenny Lee.  While I didn’t love the book, pieces of it have seeped into our daily conversation. Especially their prudent advice, “Never get between a woman and her crazy.” It has taken the edge off a lot of very stupid arguments when she reminds me that this is just her crazy talking. At which point I back slowly out of the room and let her and her crazy go a couple of rounds with each other.

I’m smart enough not to air out any of my wife’s crazy in public. But….I might just be stupid enough to publicly take a look at my own crazy for your entertainment. The problem with my crazy, and perhaps male crazy in general, is that I can’t see my own crazy unless I’m right in it. My wife, on the other hand, can see her crazy quite clearly. She has even seemed to make friends with it and invites it over for a drink now and then. She is the master of her crazy. Me……..not so much.

In retrospect, I should have understood that men are blind to their own crazy for a perfectly good reason; we can’t handle our Crazy. Call it brave, call it stupid, I call it brave and stupid, but I asked my wife if she could tell me a little bit about my own “Crazy”.

Here it is in order of magnitude:

Crazy #1. I’m an approval junkie. 

         “What’s so bad about that?”

         “Well”, she said as she put on the kid gloves, “when someone asks you to pick them up at the New London Ferry, which is a four hour round trip, and your back is hurting, you take a bunch of Advil and spend the rest of the week crawling on all fours.”

         “But…”

         “and even if you get the approval you wanted, you resent needing it and it’s never really is enough, the approval lift you get for even the most outrageous acts of service you do has a shelf life of about twenty minutes!”

         “Umm, where did your kid gloves go?”

         “Honey, those WERE MY KID GLOVES!”

Crazy #2 The Clean Crazy

      “Okay, I get it. What else?”

         “I’m not sure where it comes from but every three months or so you notice the place is a mess and you go crazy”

         “What do you mean?”

         “I mean Industrial Strength Crazy”

         “But……”

         “It doesn’t really bother us, we just let you vent and have a good laugh at you afterwords, except for Tweedle One- it really gets too her”

         “Ouch”

         “The funny thing is, you don’t do it all the time. Most of the time you are as bad as the kids about leaving your stuff lying around…..but once every three months or so things go Boom and you need to yell and clean. I should probably piss you off more often, I’d have a pretty clean house”

         “You know what….let’s skip number 3”

         “Oh, but the next one is so cute, you know when  you…….”