Head of household, most of the time

One of the biggest day-to-day adjustments I’ve had to make since my husband moved out is relinquishing the freedom of having another adult in the house to attend to less pleasant tasks. Spider-removal, dog-vomit-cleaning, sump-pump maintenance -- these all fell under Matt’s sphere of operations. (To be fair, the man never once picked up a toilet brush, so it ended up being a reasonably equitable arrangement.) Over the past five months, I’ve become fairly proficient at not only the physical piece of getting the job done, but I’ve also surmounted the emotional hurdle; after I while I realized that if I didn’t catch that spider, no one would catch that spider, and it would spin a giant web that would span the whole of the house, lay thousands and thousands of eggs, which would hatch into offspring which would then run rampant through the house, eventually leading me to stop cleaning and cooking and washing my hair, and then the Animal Cops would come and feel sorry for me and my spider-hoarding illness and I would be taken away screaming and I would die alone. Therefore, I learned to get off my butt and stop waiting for someone else to take care of the jobs. They’re my jobs now.

The one place, however, where I part company with this outlook, is shoveling snow. I HATE to shovel snow. Just the sight of a shovel makes my toes cold and my back ache. When I woke up this morning to a quiet house, my first thought wasn’t about coffee and a magazine, or sleeping a few extra minutes -- it was about who the hell I was going to get to shovel the snow that the Nor’easter had dumped in my driveway last night. Not just snow, but wet, heavy snow. Back-wrenching snow. I don’t like this part of the arrangement.

Perhaps I'll just wait for it to melt.