Last night I was laying in bed, playing with a few new apps on the Ipad. When my wife finished pumping she came to bed and tried snuggling up to get warm, a fairly common routine, since I’m the human heater. In doing so, she rubbed against my elbows, which as of late, have been extremely dry and chafed. She immediately jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom and quickly came back to bed with a giant container of Vaseline intensive care skin moisturizer. It stands just under a foot tall – it’s like one of those Costco convenience size bottles that are only meant to be refilled once every decade. More about that in a second.
Women Gotta Goop
My wife, like many other women, is a moisturizing maniac. In our house, she calls her various creams and skin care products “goop.” She has goop for just about every part of the body, and for some parts – multiple goops. There’s the hand cream, the foot cream, the exfoliating scrub which is used before washing the face, and then there’s another cream for use only after she’s washed her face with soap. There’s the body scrub, which is followed by the body moisturizer, and then the body butter, which she then finishes off by any one of several fragrant body sprays, some of which contain flashy specs of glitter – because, you know, everyone needs a little glitter before bed.
Then there’s the cream used only on her cuticles, which apparently promotes stronger nails, though I’m not sure that one really works because it makes her hands smell like burnt plastic, and she always complains about broken nails. There’s eye cream to reduce wrinkles she doesn’t yet have, which in my opinion, is just a marketing tactic by the makeup companies, because they can say “see, after using our cream…no wrinkles.” She says it helps to stay wrinkle free for longer, but I say how can you tell if you don’t have wrinkles yet?
Shopping with my wife at the mall takes hours, and not because we buy alot of stuff. It’s because she stops at every goop kiosk to sample the cream. The vendors are pied pipers, and my wife is powerless against the promise of silky smooth skin.
Men rarely use these types of products, and for good reason. We don’t care about (or want) silky smooth skin, glittery skin, or wrinkle free skin. We want rough, worked-in, worked-out, calloused skin. It makes us feel rugged like the pioneers of the West (it also helps to grip shiny smooth glass beer bottles!). Even those of us men who do moisturize, and there aren’t many, we use special creams in brightly colored bottles which look manly and smell manly.
For instance, a couple years ago my knuckles were so dry they were cracking and bleeding. I was getting blood on my crisp, white shirt sleeves. I bought a 3 oz. bottle of hand cream from Gillette, the makers of my shaving cream, deodorant, and other manly products. The bottle was black and blue and the cream smelled like musky cologne that was rubbed in deer shit and shot with an uzi. After two years, I still have that small bottle – it’s about half full.
Now, even with such a small bottle of cream, I hide that thing like it was a prized Honus Wagner baseball card. I try to make sure it is not visible to the naked eye, or at least to the eyes that might be wandering around our bathroom – since we do entertain family and friends often enough to have people in and out. You know you look in your friends’ medicine cabinets, so don’t even try to lie.
Even single guys who use hand cream for things other than moisturizing their hands know not to leave the cream out, and that’s exactly why today is gonna be one of those days.
So, back to the beginning…last night. After losing an argument about why I shouldn’t use moisturizer, my wife put a generous serving of cream on her hands and worked it into my elbows. She used way too much lotion, certainly way more than my arid, manly skin could absorb in just one sitting – so now my elbows were all oily and I didn’t like the feeling. I reached over to grab a few tissues to remove the excess cream, after which, I admitted, my arms did feel much better. My snuggling wife was also happy, and soon thereafter we were fast asleep.
Enter the Maid…
The next morning, the baby woke up early and I was taking care of her while my wife got ready for work. She was extremely fussy this morning (the baby, not my wife), and threw up some milk once or twice, which she hasn’t done for months. It didn’t hit her clothes or even get on her face. In fact, the only reason I noticed the mess was because the dog was licking the carpet near where the baby had been playing. I immediately thought, it’s gonna be one of those days!
The baby continued to fuss until my wife left for work, and then she really let it out – full on crying and running around like someone had just taken away her crayons. After a short time soothing her, I finally got her down for a late morning nap, and that’s when the maid showed up to clean the house.
Our former maid want back to school, so this maid was new to us, and as it turns out, new to being a maid in general. We were her first home.
She dragged all her supplies in at once, and before I could warn her about the little one sleeping, she dropped the vacuum, which fell to the floor with a loud crash, and woke the baby up immediately. It took me about fifteen minutes to soothe the baby back to sleep, after which I exited the her room and found a nice pile of doggie puke on the floor, not too far from where the baby puke had been. Fantastic. It really was going to be one of those days.
I cleaned the area for a second time, and then instructed the maid to save the vacuuming for last so the baby would stay down. She started in the bedroom, and while she was dusting the blinds and making the bed I tried to pick up some of the baby toys that had been strewn around the floor.
When she made it to the night stand and saw the giant bottle of cream she paused for just a short moment. She was no doubt wondering what a man would be doing with such a large bottle of lotion – and placed conveniently next to a similarly large Costco size box of tissues. Then she looked down and saw the used tissues laying on the floor near the bed. Whatever doubt she had about what was going on in the bedroom was gone, and replaced by a wry smile that flashed for just a quick second. If I wasn’t already looking at her I would have never noticed it.
As you can tell from some of the pictures and articles I’ve posted on this site that I’m not a guy who gets embarrassed easily, but in this situation I was at a loss knowing there was no way to explain what had really happened. I blurted out something about the cream being my wife’s and it that belonged on her shelf with her skin care products…that were hers. Definitely hers and not mine. Hers!
I placed the unusually large bottle of goop back on the shelf where it belonged and exited the room quickly. Needless to say I don’t expect to see this maid out our house again. Nor do I plan to moisturize – it’s just not worth the trouble.
Ugghhh, it’s going to be one of those days.
