Just DO IT

D hates sitting still. He's one of those annoying souls who always likes to be "doing something." He doesn't care if it's something fun, or pleasurable; in fact, the more horrid the task, the more he feels as though he's "done something." Once, when I told him to please relax, he freaked out and told me that if there's one thing he hates, it's when people tell him to relax. "I don't need to relax!" he'd yelled. Which, to me, made his need to relax painfully evident, but I don't use that word around him anymore, just to be safe.

D especially hates weekend mornings where the kids watch Treehouse while I sit around with a book, my only goal being to drink an entire cup of coffee before its temperature plunges to that of an iced tea.

"C'mon, c'mon, let's DO something!" he growled at me this past Sunday. I looked up from The Tiger's Wife and blinked.

"I am doing something," I said. "I'm reading."

He did that little dance of rage he does whenever the printed word has replaced him in my hierarchy of needs, which is kind of often. "Kim, reading a book is not DOING anything. We never DO ANYTHING! I hate books!" And he stomped out of the room making as much noise as his croc-clad feet would allow. The front door clunked shut; the screen door slammed.

My sister, who was visiting for the weekend, rolled her eyes. She's really good at rolling her eyes. I shrugged and took a slurp of my coffee. The kids remained blissfully absorbed in the acid-trip antics of Toopy & Binoo. D would find something to do, and hopefully leave us in peace for another hour. We got about three and a half minutes before the front door clunked open again.

The cupboard where we hang all our keys jangled violently; D stomped back in the room and ordered the kids to get their shoes on and turn off the TV. They were going to the park, dammit! Well, he didn't actually say "dammit" but his eyes were blazing and his nostrils were flared and I'm pretty sure he wanted to say "Dammit!" or "By God!" or "By Crackie!" or something equally commanding. Instead, he glared at my sister and I and said, "We're going to the park. You two can sit here all day. But we're DOING SOMETHING."

The kids wailed and complained and eventually got suited up and hauled out the door. I looked at my sister. We did a simultaneous eye roll, which is something siblings who have lived with a demanding and unreasonable parent learn to do very well.

Long story short, my sister and I were supposed to go to the cottage and visit my aunt whilst D entertained the kids by DOING SOMETHING. Instead, we fell asleep, waking only when D's car pulled up in the driveway. I won't print what he said to me, but I ended up promising him that we would DO SOMETHING together as a family later that night.

I thought he'd punish us with an evening of hoeing sweet corn or digging trenches. That the SOMETHING turned out to be biking down the 6th Concession hill and swimming at the public beach was a happy surprise. The water was beautiful, the beach practically deserted. The kids were gung-ho and the sandbar was shallow enough for them to navigate by themselves. I sighed with happiness as I stripped off my shorts and shoes and squished Dylan's arms into his "wife-jacket." Sometimes my husband DID SOMETHING right.

And then D took off his shorts.

I heard my sister's sharp intake of breath; I turned to see him heading for the water with Jade in tow. I wondered for a minute why he was wearing a pair of my black panties. And then I knew: he was punishing us by wearing the dreaded speedo. In public.

"Oh my God," whispered my sister. "I don't know where to look." We stood there, frozen in the sand by the sight of my husband's daring attire.

D has been teasing me about purchasing and wearing a speedo for as long as we've been dating. "Don't you think I would look sexy?" he'd ask. "Really Kim, don't you want to see me in a speedo? I bet you do."

When he actually produced one a few summers ago, I was convinced he was joking, just taking the piss out of his naive wife. He'd dangle it in front of me from time to time, but he never wore it outside the house. I figured a boy from Bruce county would never, ever wear a speedo in public anyway. Would he?

The answer to that question bobbed around the waves of the 6th. D splashed, swam, played with the kids, and hung out (not literally) on the beach, unperturbed that his manly bits were snuggled in a very small piece of material in an area in which he "might know someone."

Since he's usually pretty shy about this type of thing, I was pretty shocked. D's expression wavered somewhere between nonchalant and smug. Even when he glanced down the beach and saw another guy playing with his dogs and said, "Oh man. I know that guy from work," he didn't rush to put his board shorts back on. He was the master of his domain, and he'd definitely DONE SOMETHING that weekend: reduced his wife to speechless wonder, having humbled her with a banana hammock.