The Pros of Having an Absent Husband

I spend a lot of time complaining about the fact that my husband is gone allthefreakingtime.  Generally speaking, I’m a silver lining kind of girl, but the last year has been full of dark rain clouds, and not the kind that hover over Pooh’s honey tree.  

HOWEVER, in the last month, I’ve started moving out of a pretty significant life slump (less David Ortiz’s 2009 hitting slump, more Curse of the Bambino kind of slump).  And in an effort to stay positive in the face of my husband being gone for the next six months, I’d like to give a Positive Polly list of the good things that come from having an absent husband:

1. At night, I wash my face, put on pajamas, and climb into a giant bed that doesn’t have one ounce of man sweat.  I sleep through to the morning without having to scoot all the way to the edge of the bed to get away from the sweat monster.  Sometimes I even stretch out to take up the whole bed, reveling in the glorious, cold, DRY sheets.
2. It takes approximately 40 seconds to fix my bed in the morning because unlike the sweat monster, I sleep in one place, leaving the majority of the covers undisturbed.
3. When I brush my teeth (always the first thing I do, even before peeing), my toothbrush head is always on the electric toothbrush.  No switching it out because he was the last one to use it.  This saves me AT LEAST five seconds, which added to the time I save in the bed-making process, gives me a whole one minute of extra sleep--bonus!
4. When I go downstairs to fix Will’s lunch for school, the orange juice and/or milk are not spoiling on top of the refrigerator (this has become a major issue in recent months, as Scott apparently only wants to drink whatever is in the very back of the fridge, and thus pulls everything else out, places said whatevers on top of the fridge, and then forgets to put them back).
5. In planning for dinner, I never have to worry about timing it right for his arrival home.  In fact, I don’t have to plan at all because the kids never question me when “dinner” is slices of cheddar cheese and a bowl of grapes.
6. I finally get my money’s worth on Netflix.  Instead of waiting weeks at a time because he “really wants to see that movie, so don’t watch it without me,” I can watch movies and put them back in the mail in the same day (that’s normal, right?).  AND I can watch all the romantic comedies I want. (I know this is a list of pros, but a related con is that I haven’t seen a horror movie in about seven years because every time I try to watch, I don’t make it five minutes before I’m running around the house making sure all the windows and doors are locked.)
7. I can have girls nights, when my friends come over and drink wine and talk about boys and pillow fight and such.  Of course, that plan kind of went out the window this time around because all my friends are either nursing, pregnant, or trying to get pregnant.  Oh well!  More wine for me?
8. Once the boys are in bed (between 7:00 and 7:30), I have HOURS--HOURS!--of me time.  Lots and lots of me time.  The kind of me time that other women dream about.  The kind of me time that feels like forever.  The amount of me time that forces me to write blog posts about how incrediblyfreakinghappy I am to have me time.  ME TIME.

So, here’s to six months of sweat-free, fresh orange juice me time.