What a week! It started last Monday when I was introduced to pain through plumbing. I called my wife to check-in on her only to discover she was having a migraine. I raced home to rush her to the doctor’s. I burst through the door, ran through house collecting kids, socks, shoes, and and sloshed through a puddle in the middle of the downstairs playroom.

Wait a minute. A puddle in the playroom? When we got back from the hospital I found the results of one super sudsy load of laundry seeping up through the carpet downstairs. We chalked-up the mess to a load of towels we’d used to sop up a mess of bubbly dish soap water Joel spilled all over the living room the night before. No matter. I got out the carpet cleaner wet-dry vac, sucked up the mess and went to bed.

The next evening I came home to an even bigger puddle in a much wetter carpet. I spent the next several hours vacuuming up water. Not even the floor fan on full speed through the night would produce a dry floor. So, between calling plumbers I spent the next day tearing up carpet and carpet pad to reveal a nice backed-up drain. Aaarrg!

I spent the remainder of the day cleaning up backed-up sewer gunk (i.e. “brown water) off our basement floor. I hauled stinky soaking carpet pad to the trash. I bleached everything that wasn’t fabric and dried everything in sight. Then I rested and contemplated the task before me.

And I contemplated.

And I contemplated.

And I procrastinated.

Finally, my wife gave me the motivation I needed by telling me she was planning to have a get-together at our house by suggesting our playroom would be the perfect place to plop the kiddos while mommies planned MOPS activities upstairs.

Happy Mother’s Day! That’s right. I spent Mother’s Day afternoon purchasing plumbing, plugging drains, rolling carpet and painting. Monday I took the afternoon off work to rent a carpet stretcher to finish the carpet job (ugh!), and move furniture and toys back to their homes.

My wife called me today to let me know she was taking Sammyball to get his allergy shot. For some reason the “gathering” wasn’t mentioned so I brought it up.

“How’d your MOPS thing go today?” I asked.

“Oh fine.”

“Just fine?” I asked. I was holding my breath hoping the molding wasn’t popping off the walls.

“Yeah. Only one person showed-up. Everyone else canceled for some reason or another.”

Oh well, sometimes you just need the right motivation to get a daunting project started – even if the reason for the motivation doesn’t pan out.

My wife and I (it’s a good thing to put one’s wife first) watched Hitch this weekend. She’d seen it before, but wanted to watch it with me so I finally relented.

I put off watching the film not because I wasn’t interested in seeing it, but because I had a good idea about how I’d feel watching it. Oh boy, I’m sure that didn’t come across right. What I mean is, it’s difficult to watch “relationship” (stay with me here) movies because the underlying tension is well, painful.

Not that I don’t like tension. I’ll gladly live with the hokey confrontation atop Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest to soak in the tense cornfield scene. (You know the one – where Cary Grant stands on the empty highway for what seems like an eternity).

But relationship tension is fingernails on the chalkboard unbearable.

The whole undertow of disappointment is what gets me. You know it’s coming – the set-ups in these types of films are always obvious, some event creates a major obstacle the leading man with have to confront to win the girl. As soon as I see what it is I spend the rest of the film cringing, waiting for the disillusionment to happen wanting to just get to the resolution already.

And maybe that’s why men (in general) don’t like “chick flicks.” It reminds us of that terrible uncertainty where a seemingly innocuous slip-up sends the woman of our dreams packing. We just want to navigate the obstacles as best we can to plant a flag on the certainty of a yes or no answer.

So while I’m squirming in my seat, my wife sits comfortably next to me. Why is that?

I think it’s because she packed for the trip, not the destination. I’m beginning to understand (and I hope I’m not too far off course here) women see relationship tension as an opportunity to learn about the other person’s character. Unless the tension comes from an off-limits place such as cheating it makes the journey interesting and allows women to either invest or divest their interest in the relationship.

The journey also helps a woman learn more about herself – and because she’s learning as she goes there’s not the one shocking conflict she has to overcome. I guess that’s why in the movies it’s the leading man who has the crisis he has to face to win the girl.

So I get it, but it’s still be nice to watch something with large explosions once and a while.