Nagging: A Female Force for Good

When I was a younger woman, I lived on hope and change and nagging. I used to hope that nagging worked and could change the speed at which the world moved.

When I say ‘the world,’ I mean men; okay, really I mean one man—my man.

 It took me a while to figure out that nagging was like all other expulsions of internal body gases—frequent, noisy, and rank.  Turning the most sympathetic of individuals into an unattractive nagging shrew surrounded by a cloud of toxic whining methane, not unlike a tent full of Boy Scouts farting the alphabet.

I can nag the alphabet. I’m that good.

I had a lot of raw material to work with in my husband, Sherwood the Great—Procrastinator. As a kid, he attended one Boy Scout meeting where they tried to make him pound a nail with a hammer. He never went back.  He decided he didn’t have to learn to pound a nail right that very minute. It could wait. He could learn to pound a nail with a hammer, later, much, much later. Like sometime, the last day of how about not right now! You know, later.

 When one of the heating coils burned out in the hot water heater that kept me in the steaming bath water to which I had become both accustomed and addicted, I grew determined to show the world and my critics (generally people who share my propensity for freckles) that I could make a reasonable request for repair work without a nag in sight.

I could do it. I could live nag free. I could quit anytime.

“Babe, I can only fill my bathtub halfway up with hot water. Then ice water pours out of the faucet, and even if I lay down flat on my back the water does not cover all my girl parts. Some stuff always sticks out.  It makes me sad and goose bumpy.”

 Rubbing his manly jaw he looked intrigued.  “One of the heater coil’s has probably burned out.”

“Should I call the hot water burned out coil man?” I crossed my arms over my chapped girl parts, hoping against hope that my husband’s monkey-man-brain had not snapped into stones-as-tools-me-fix-it mode.

Too late.

“Nope! Nothing to it,” he declared. “I’ll fix it.” 

“Dear, you should know I have made a solemn oath, covenant, and New Year’s resolution not to nag you on this critical repair work. I will not mention my unhappiness to you again about having to submerge my anatomy in a barely there tub of tepid water, in any way, shape, form, or language—domestic or foreign. So help me goose bumps.

I will not nag you about this.  I will not. I cannot nag you for I have oath-ed an oath.”

“Heater coil . . . got it.”

“No, I mean it. I’m on the nagging wagon.”

He looked skeptical and started making vague hammering motions with his hands. He appeared to be cracking invisible coconuts with an invisible boulder shaped tool.

“I mean it, Sherwood, I will not mention this to you again, and I will not fix it myself or employ anyone else to do so; why you may ask, because I’m a stubborn piece of work. That’s why. Consider it a psychological study in the socio-ramifications of motivating men with repetitive words of infinite negativity to get stuff done.”

He cracked more invisible coconuts.

“I’m serious; this is my last nag on the subject.” And it was.

A month passed.

I tried sponge bathing out of a bucket of steaming hot water. It was messy.

Two months passed. 

I gave a full body rotation method a try—first I’d lay on my back (front bits exposed), then I’d flop onto my front (back bits exposed), then I’d roll side to side (all kinds of stuff freezing off), and then back to my back. By the time I got back to my back, I was usually crying.

Three, four, and then seven months swirled away like the soapy water down the drain at the end of a luxurious soak, and still I nagged not.

I tried showering with my much taller husband but got smacked in the eye with his elbow so many times, I worried about retina damage, and besides he hogged the hot water.

Nine and then ten months passed away like the dew from Heaven. I remained a goose bumpy nag-less wonder: no request, reminder, or repetitive phrase passed my blue tinged lips.

Time continued to pass. He made no effort to bang on the hot water heater with tools or rocks or clenched fists.

How long did it take for my stones-as-tools-man to replace the hot water heater coil without the stimulus or benefit of my nagging you ask.

 I’ll tell you.

ONE YEAR! One frigid bone aching year, that’s how long.

Then when he FINALLY did change out the hot water heater coil he stabbed himself in the knuckle with a screwdriver, down to the tendons and sinew. He tried holding the gaping flesh together with a My Little Pony bandage. No go. It took six stitches to finally cover that knuckle tendon up.

Let’s recap. It took twelve months, six stitches, and the development of a goose flesh phobia on my part, that’s how long.

Abandoning my nag free experiment, I have since honed my harping to a fine and delicate art, surpassed only by my liberal use of satiric and scathing one-liners. I can nag in my sleep. I can nag in reverse. Sometimes I nag using only my eyes and a well-timed twitch. I can’t say that my husband moves any faster, but at least I can make my contribution feel like a sharp stick in the eye of any foot dragging male procrastination.  

Linda (Rub a Dub-Dub) Zern

Stalking the Wild Suitcase

I like my husband more than I hate traveling.

It’s a bold statement in this ‘men are dogs’ world of ours—I know. But it’s true. He’s a bunch of fun to be with, except when he isn’t.

And he isn’t fun to be with when he’s waiting at the bottom of the baggage return in the Sidney, Australia airport, because then he’s a hyena, waiting for the lions to gut a water buffalo. Retrieving luggage for him is primal. Waiting. Watching. Tensing. And . . . then the pounce, knocking other hyenas (i.e. passengers) out of his way without regard to their advanced age or bone density. He’s a maniac about “catching” the suitcase before it slips past him.

In the background a person might be able to hear the faint sounds of me yelling, “But, honey, it goes in a circle. The suitcase comes back. It really does.”

And then me apologizing, “I’m so sorry. He doesn’t mean to be a mad dog. It just comes on him in spurts.”

When it comes to nature, I’m an evolutionist, of sorts. I totally believe that creatures adapt and change. I’m just not convinced it takes twenty trillion years. It only took my husband a couple of trips to the Far East to grow a giant backpack hump across his shoulders. It’s filled with all manner of defensive weapons, useful in knocking down competitors at the baggage return. His backpack hump contains two computers, cordage cables, adaptor stuff, plugger things, power jumpers, downloader catchers, our garage door opener, and possibly attack spines. When he swings to the side, his backpack extends thirteen feet into the hyena crowd. The crowd parts or it goes down.

Then it’s me again in the background calling out, “Babe, careful there. You just knocked down that nice old lady with your enormous backpack hump. She has daggers for eyes.”

He says, “Hunh? What? Which?  Er . . . got to go. I’ve spotted our suitcase. It’s getting away.”

Adaptation is a wonderful process. His backpack hump doesn’t slow him down one bit as he leaps over small children and races next to the endless migration of the stampeding luggage. He’s a wonder of evolution and change, single minded in his instinctual need to chase, catch and claim. He is king of the carousel and no suitcase is safe when he is on the hunt.

As his mate, I find that watching him plow through a herd of passengers after a fourteen-hour flight across an endless ocean makes me long for my own evolutionary adaptations. I want a set of wings for early disembarking and chameleon skin that allows me to fade into carpet. With wings I’d be able to jump off the airplane any old time I wanted, and chameleon skin would allow me to fade into the airport carpet after my husband had maimed or injured someone. But I ain’t got twenty trillion years.

So I’ll just stay home and work on pretending that I adore sitting still for fourteen endless flying hours. I have a hard time sitting all the way through church. I must really love that man—hump and all.


Linda (Are we there yet?) Zern

 














      

I Hear What I'm Saying

“YaYa, why you talk you self all time?” Zoe’s four-year old forehead attempted to form wrinkles as she pondered one of the great curiosities of her young life—adult insanity.

“What makes you think I’m by myself?” I said, distracting her with a bright, shiny lollipop. 

Talking to myself is a way of life for me, providing a multitude of benefits and advantages. I cannot help it if society is still suspicious of the diversity that constitutes “talking to one’s own self” in a manner resembling Sally Fields playing Sybil.

Society is a stuck up girl wearing chipped nail polish.

I talk to myself because I’m the best listener I know, and I’m smart enough to understand what I’m saying.

Sometimes when I’m talking to those people who come and eat my poorly prepared hamburger meat on the weekends, I can’t even finish a sentence. I’m not even near the verb in the sentence before they’re jumping all over what I’m saying with both feet and throwing their opinions around like people planning a revolution while standing next to a guillotine. It finally got so nutty I had to institute the Zern family conch shell policy.

It’s simple. If you’re holding the conch shell, you can talk. It’s a kind of “Lord of the Flies” deal. If you’re holding the conch shell everybody else has to zip it and listen. My husband brought the Queen Conch shell back from a diving trip to the Bahamas when he was a teenager, and it was still legal to rape the oceans. That’s how old we are, so talking to myself is probably not as big or weird of a deal as one might think. 

      

Sometimes I give speeches and then give myself a standing ovation. It’s very gratifying.

Sometimes I practice what I would say on David Letterman should I ever go on David Letterman, but don’t tell anybody.

A couple of times I’ve been able to say to myself what I wished I’d said that time, if I’d had a minute to think about what I was saying before I actually said it. You know what I’m saying?

Once, I told the IRS off, but I don’t want to talk about it.

Finally, I got tired of telling myself clever anecdotes, which are short accounts of some interesting or humorous incident, and started to write them down, making me an anecdotist and not some crazy lady who wanders around her house wearing a raggedy jeans vest, rubber barn shoes, and mumbling to herself.

Linda (Vests Have Handy Pockets) Zern