Another secret to surviving marriage in midlife is to share a hobby together, say the experts. It will renew your bond, and give you something to talk about over dinner besides the war in the Middle East or the irony of how your youngest kid resembles the mailman, they advise.
Since Hubs refused to join me in my favorite pastime (nagging him to have sex), I figured I would just let him decide which hobby we could share.
Vegetable gardening never really appealed to me. Since this leisure activity is reserved for people who can actually grow something besides mold and mildew on their shower curtains, I figured that I just wasn’t the right gal for the job.
However, Hubs is so good at gardening that he can plant a coconut and raise a palm tree in snow-covered Canada. I’m happy to rinse, dice, and smother with Italian dressing anything he’d like to produce, as long as I’m not the one elbow-deep in dirt at the start of a salad’s life. I don’t mind consuming the veggies, but not after nurturing them from sprouthood. I would feel like a cannibal. It’d be like giving birth, raising your babies to adulthood, and then serving them up as the first course at a dinner party. If I’m going to get my hands dirty by tending a living thing, I want it to grow up and become a doctor or a lawyer.
However, the resident Mr. Greenthumb recently drafted me into his passion, reminding me of our need to bond in midlife over something besides our mutual enjoyment of tormenting the kids.
It all started when I made the mistake of standing near his seedling bed one sunny summer afternoon, asking if I could help. To all husbands who are reading this, I want to make a point of something: wives never really want to help you do anything. We just want you to think we do, appreciate us just for asking, and send us on our merry way. Unfortunately, like most husbands, Hubs is not a Mars/Venus graduate, so he responded “Sure, dear. Here – stick this plant in the hole after I dig one.”
Excuse me? Me? Touch soil? I don’t think so. I know where soil comes from, thank you very much: millions of years of dinosaur dung, 12 years of a dog with irritable bowel syndrome, and God knows how much slimy earthworm poop and bug guts in the making! When the birds miss their target of our freshly washed car roof, does he think their excrement just dissolves into the atmosphere, for crying out loud? No! It lands right there in the wasteland we call our backyard!
And really – sheep manure as fertilizer? What genius thought this up? Some farmer with waaay too much time on his hands and not enough toys as a youth, to be sure. I know it’s ecologically responsible for humans to use every part of a useful and edible animal, but this is ridiculous.
Hubs handed me a pair of colorful gardening gloves, told me to get over myself, and plopped the living greenery into my hands. Okay, perhaps this won’t be so bad, I started to think aloud – that is, until I realized that the gloves gaped at the wrists, allowing my hands to become the Cave of Wonders for whatever multi-legged creatures reside in the depths of this excavated and, until recently, unexplored earth.
“Would you please just drop the d#@! seedling into the hole!!” Hubs demanded frustratingly. I suppose his back was sore from all that digging, making him a tad cranky, but he didn’t have to yell, for Pete’s sake. After all, I only wanted to help (cough, cough).
Turns out that my rookie years of aiming disposable diaper packages at the garbage can from 10 feet away (and sinking the shots every time) were apparently preparing me for this very moment. I tossed the plantling underhand at the hole, and SCORE!!! Root-side-down and all! The imaginary crowds cheered as I spiked my gardening gloves and jogged a victory lap around the backyard.
While Hubs nearly strained a cornea from eye-rolling, tenderly patting the dirt around the stalk of his new friend, I was asked to get the hose and give the little guy a drink. Little did I know that the water would come gushing out with supersonic force, thereby annihilating Hubs’ new buddy into oblivion. Pinning him against a thorny rose bush with the hose was just an accident, I swear.
Since scratching “gardening” off our list of midlife bonding experiences, Hubs had no choice but to bond with the kids and pass his knowledge and expertise along to them. Teen Girl excitedly planted a penny and hoped for a money tree. The Toddler planted a cookie bush by pushing an Oreo into a hole and watching for milk to fall from the sky. Middle child Pigpen, who considers the dirty garden his Mecca of boyhood bliss, just enjoyed unearthing and collecting specimens for some weird science experiment or, as Hubs suggested to him, my next Mothers Day gift. I wonder…If I plant my wedding ring, will I grow a new husband, considering most men are full of manure anyway?