Thank You, Drew

Your daughter’s first birthday party – remember that day? You probably don’t, what with all the beer you were drinking with your buddies while you watched the game and avoided the kids. But I remember that day, will probably never forget it, for that was the day my infant daughter needed a diaper change and I asked you where the changing table was and you claimed not to know, adding, in a loud voice aimed at your buddies, that changing diapers was women’s work.

Thank you for that, Drew. Though your remark was intended to amuse your friends at my expense, you spoke so loudly that many others heard it too, including my wife. And if you could’ve seen the look on her face as it dawned on her that you had never changed a diaper in your life, and probably never would, while her husband was changing a diaper, and in fact had changed hundreds, maybe a thousand by that point, sharing that parenting burden without complaint, even when mocked by Neanderthals like you, well, Drew, let’s just say that nothing I could’ve done on my own would’ve produced such a look of adoration and appreciation. Suddenly I was super-husband. My sins were forgiven. Any doubts were forgotten. All she had to do was think of you, and she loved me more.

And you didn’t stop there. The way you handled your family’s finances, all the bank accounts and credit cards in your name, keeping your wife on a short and penurious leash by giving her a meager weekly allowance while you routinely blew thousands on weekend trips to Vegas with your buddies, well, what can I say except thank you so much for turning me into a paragon of kindness, generosity and virtue in my wife’s eyes.

Or the way you made your wife get up early to make your breakfast every day, even days when you had to leave for work before the dawn, or the way you’d call your wife from work and dictate the menu for that night’s dinner, waiting until after lunch so you could ensure that your dinner harmonized with your lunch, or the way you’d compare your wife’s cooking to your mother’s, unfavorably, and loudly for others to hear, well, let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for obliterating any possibility that my wife could ever think of me as a high maintenance husband. You perished those thoughts.

Unfortunately, I cannot thank you for your extramarital affair, for though you’d think reports of your straying would further boost my wife’s esteem for her ever-faithful husband, it just convinced her that all men are slime. It took me weeks to claw my way out of your muck and back into her heart.

And I cannot thank you for your habit of critiquing your wife’s body, urging her to lose weight in her bottom and gain it on top, comparing her to the surgically-enhanced hotties in your comprehensive collection of porn, all while your beer-filled belly bulged ever bigger, no, I cannot thank you for this now that your wife finally agreed to get the boob job you always wanted and, the day after you paid the bill for the procedure, left you for the T-ball coach, taking your kids and your boobs and permanently depriving me of the greatest contrast agent ever.

Without you, I will rise and fall in my wife’s eyes only on my own merits. So I’m doomed. Thanks for nothing, Drew.