Defining terms in my marriage

I've been mulling word meanings lately. Like marital and martial and even martian. Three similarly-spelled words with three distinctly different definitions yet ironically-interconnected. Marital as in marital bliss, marital harmony, marital discord. Martial as in martial law. Martian as in inhabiting an inhospitable foreign environment. I have now become MORE than casually acquainted with ALL of these terms...often on the same day...occasionally in the same moment.

Case-in-point: There I was, the picture of domestic bliss, baking banana bread. Feeling productive. Pleased that I was providing a homemade baked good for my husband...when HE (accusatory tone...like a detective unveiling the perpetrator of the crime) walked in. Sniffing the air appreciatively, Brad asked if I was baking cookies. COOKIES! How DARE he!!! Enraged, I lit into him.

Let's see how our words apply. Marital: A husband returns home after a long day at work to a wife, busily bustling about the kitchen, baking banana bread. Martial: Husband is thoughtlessly off-the-mark, olfactory-wise, and the kitchen transforms into the OK Corral. Martian: Husband THOUGHT he was returning home only to discover he had landed on another planet occupied by a hostile species.

Another example: There we were, harmoniously making omelettes together. As Brad diced vegetables, I readied the frying pan and brought out the toaster. "You picked the wrong-sized pan," Brad announced as though he were the ancient knight guarding the Holy Grail. I broke eggs into a bowl and shrugged. "Pour the melted butter into the right one." Now, obviously I was setting my husband up to fail here. No one, in their right mind, would needlessly dirty an extra dish in the midst of a global pandemic. Walking on egg shells, Brad eased forward cautiously. "No...I'll make do," he announced dramatically as though I were sending him into surgery with garden shears instead of a scalpel. "It's not like I did it on purpose," I stated, beating the eggs that I wished were him. There was a SIGNIFICANT pause in the kitchen. Furious, I broke another egg into the bowl, watching shattered shells rain down into the mixture. This was a crucial and telling moment in the marriage as my somehow-completed-despite-the-wrong-sized-pan cooked omelette lay safe by my elbow...and then he said it. "Is that your idea of a garnish?"

Let's review. Marital: A couple cooking together. Martial: Be glad it was egg shells and not shotgun shells. Martian: An alien must have taken over Brad's body because that is the ONLY explanation for the "garnish" comment.

Two Sundays ago was a marital/martial/martian day so we were particularly careful this past Sunday. No sudden movements. Nothing said that could even remotely be misinterpreted. We approached the bakery case in the grocery store and Brad let out a sigh of relief behind his burglar mask. There were fritters. Okay. That was the FIRST major hurdle. Actually, my not hyperventilating as Brad wrestled me into my mask was the FIRST hurdle. I Darth-Vader-breathed my way from the bread aisle to the blueberries, suffering only some residual light-headedness and double-vision. "Amy, I am NOT your husband," Brad droned, as I gasped for breath like an out-of-water Gungan. How rude!

Fritters in hand, we then drove off on this drizzly day to find a nice spot by the water. What we found, instead, was an errant bull planted in someone's front yard. "Should we warn the homeowners?" I asked, (and by we, I obviously meant he...throwing our interpretation rule out the window before we could rock/paper/scissors this rodeo). Brad eyed up the crooked horns of our adversary while the bull seemed to be eyeing up my fritter. "Well, this is just a bunch of nonsense," I said, "if you're not going to take any initiative with this matter, we may as well go" (I didn't actually say that...I just wanted to cleverly weave disguised bull-related puns into my writing. I helpfully highlighted them in green. I've been self-isolating for over a month. I'm bored. So sue me.). 

Leaving the bull behind us, metaphorically, Brad drove us to a secluded spot by an abandoned bridge. It looked like the setting of a crime scene. With the unprecedented ups and downs in our relationship recently, I wondered if I should be worried. "You go first," I told my husband, carefully walking around a circle of discarded condoms laid out in some sort of ritualistic pagan pattern. Whoever said Brad Mosiman wasn't romantic? He made his way down a littered trail to the river while I kept a keen eye out for a carcass. I wasn't disappointed. "Oh dear," I said, pointing to the pile of bones. "You mean Oh deer," Brad corrected. Either way...not appetizing. We took our fritters and fled the scene.

After all that high-adrenalined excitement, I would have been happy to eat my baked good in my living room but Brad was determined to find us a scenic spot. As we watched the waterfalls and the river rolling by, listening to the steady beat of the windshield wipers, I thought about those words again: marital/martial/martian. After thirty years of marriage (marital), it has come down...these past few weeks...to Brad and I against the elements of the unknown...battling together (martial) fear, uncertainty, stupidity, loneliness, and boredom.  And me, grateful...WARNING! CORNY CLICHE COMING!!!...grateful that my marriage is out-of-this-world (martian).