‘That’s different’: Learning to live with household rules
BURTON W. COLE, COLUMNIST
By Burton W. Cole
For best results, a household must follow a few basic rules.
That was the first rule of my wife, who, for some reason, gets to invent our household rules. She claims wives must do this because husbands unchecked are too hard to distinguish in behavior from the children.
For the sake of domestic peace, I follow the house rules — when convenient.
Here, then, are the house rules as I understand them.
* Never throw away laundered clothes.
It doesn’t matter how many holes pepper the socks, if they hit the laundry instead of the trash, they must be worn again. There will be no unnecessary washing conducted in our house.
However, if SHE tosses a laundered item, that’s OK. Why? “That’s different.”
* Never break a washed dish.
See above. No point in washing a dish if it’s just going to be broken anyway.
* Should the father figure attempt cooking, he must restrict himself to the recipe as written.
Adding a random spice here and a clump of surprise ingredients there will result in the cook eating his uncharted new dish himself over the next three days.
This is my favorite rule because if there is a dish I am particularly fond of, all I have to do is sprinkle in my hot sauce, and it is all mine while the rest of the family eats peanut butter sandwiches.
* If the mother figure enhances a recipe, everyone is required to eat it with smiles on their faces, washed down by a mess of compliments.
Why hers and not mine? Simple: “That’s different.”
* The offshoot of this rule is children won’t be fed any foods that repulse the parental cooks. So between the two of us, our kids will miss the pleasure of peas and the brunt of beets. Well, maybe beets, because, you know, “That’s different.”
* When sorting laundry, ignore the color wheel as taught in kindergarten.
“Whites” include all towels, even the burgundy ones, and the whole rainbow of children’s underwear. However, black socks and red T-shirts, which technically classify as underwear, are “colors.” Pink socks and heather gray sweat pants may be “whites,” unless they are of a particularly dark shade, only discernible by a woman’s eye.
Should pink and heather occur in a blouse, they are dress clothes and must be divided into “darks” and “lights.”
I once stuffed a medium blue shirt under the bed for three weeks because I couldn’t decipher if it was white, colored, light or dark. It wasn’t different enough for me to notice.
* She who introduces a cat, dog, hamster or other household pest into the family also must feed, clean up after, share their own plates of food with and sacrifice their own favorite chairs to said pet.
This was my contribution to the household rules, but it didn’t catch on.
* That’s different.
This is my sweetie’s loophole to leave her own shoes in any room, snatch a cookie before supper or to change the channel right in the middle of a crucial third-and-seven play in the fourth quarter.
It’s why a pile of my stuff on the corner of the table is unsightly junk and hers overflowing the other three corners is important papers that must be there to command attention.
“That’s different” is the simplest rule of all in that it can be invoked anytime, anywhere for any reason. But only by her.
And it’s the toughest for me to understand. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and all that, right?
Nope. She insists “that’s different” is constitutionally protected for wives. All other household rules must be obeyed, she says.
“But you ignore my pet decree,” I argued.
“Now, Honey,” she gently replied, “that’s different.”
Break Burt out of Household Rules Jail at burton.w.cole@gmail.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or at www.burtonwcole.com.