You too can be a Desperate Housewife

My domestication was like a big slap in the face, I wasn’t prepared and it became the most overwhelming month of my life. Our house had been pretty much functional as an evening hang out, prior to moving in. But now that we actually lived here and had to adhere to marriage protocol, i.e. providing lunch and processing laundry, we found that we were missing thousands of items.

In order to grill our first chicken, I had to go to the supermarket four times. I now know, that only red onions are used for cooking. Well, someone should’ve bloody written that on the list. I’m not psychic. Also, I’ve become an expert technician in the inner workings of Gas-Electric combination ovens.

Needless to say, lunch consisted of sandwiches, eaten on the kitchen floor with 8 different instruction manuals spread around and a lot of peering into the oven. After much consulting with one another, as well as with the naked chicken, obediently sitting in it’s brand new oven dish, Henrietta was finally grilled by dinner time.

Doing laundry was also a big adventure. The last time I did laundry, was in Boston, in the basement of my building. I was 18-21 and excited about putting quarters into the big machine as it spun my clothes towards mountain freshness. I had moral support from Esmat, and we ate Doritos as the clothes dried and then played “Roman Times” with the bed sheets. This was usually done at midnight while normal people slept. After three years of waltzing around with underwear on our heads in the laundry room, we discovered the security camera.

In my new house, after a few weeks back, I received my new washer and dryer, an exciting house warming gift from my uncle. Finally, I can wash my own clothes and not drag a huge hamper sack home every Friday lunch.

Doing the first load of laundry took 5 hours. I spent 2 hours alone in the supermarket staring at all the different things I could put into my washing machine, and all the magical smells and cool effects that they would produce. After sniffing everything, I called Mama’s hotline, and discovered that Comfort was only a softener and not a detergent. After being mocked and laughed at, I bought all the right ingredients and went home.

The test drive involved towels and inexpensive items such as old socks and worn out tank tops. This process also involved a lot of sticking my head behind the machines to make sure everything was connected and that no water was going to gush out onto my kitchen floor and ruin everything.

According to the salesman, this washer has a sixth sense. Wonderful! This machine was actually designed and built to protect itself from the freshman housewife. It will pre-wash when it feels necessary and rinse and spin as it pleases.

“I have nothing to do with it, if your shirt is now 3 sizes smaller. Whirlpool did it.”

Choosing the linens was a very stressful time in my life. It was like doing the SATs. I would touch one fabric, then put it back in the plastic and open another pillowcase and inspect the stitching. Would it be weird if I put my cheek on it and closed my eyes? Can I open it up and snuggle with it for a while? Aren’t I entitled to a mini-simulation? You know, we are going to be sleeping together.

And as for pillows, I came from a bed that was a little smaller than a full size. However, it was populated with 8soft feather pillows. I HATE foam pillows. I want to kill them. They are offensive and insolent bastards and a punishment to your neck. No I don’t think I’m a princess. But my pillows have to be the way I like them, or I just sit up all night stewing in anger. You can imagine my horror when my lovely groom introduced me to his stiff foamy pillows, which he says he loves as opposed to the annoying feathery ones. Well fine then, I thought, we shouldn’t have a problem. If he doesn’t like my pillows, he won’t want to use them. Oh, how I was wrong…

Now that we are sharing a bed, jealousy has started to rear its ugly head. Although I only have four now, and he also has four, including his foamies from home, someone is starting to question the system.

“How come you have all the nice pillows and I only have these ugly ones? And why are you setting up your pillows around the edge of the bed, are you building a fortress?”

“They’re my pillows. And it’s a low bed, I don’t want any ants wandering into my ears.”

Well, it’s true, I can’t sleep with all this open space around my head. The other day I found a squashed ant, near my head. What was it doing??? Who squashed it??!!

Several times, Nayef was caught red handed trying to steal my color-coded pillows. I had a strict system of pillow case identification. You don’t want to know about the big identifying party that happened after laundry day when all the pillow cases were switched around. I sat there for 20 minutes cursing as I unstuffed and restuffed into the correct pillow cases. I did not rest until all my beloved pillows were back in their clothes.

“They’re MINE!”

Nayef loves Bree on Desperate Housewives, but he doesn’t realize that I have some of her crazy and none of her domesticity…

No pillows or husbands were hurt in the writing of this post

How to lose a bed in ten days

When one has a large dependence on an everyday object, it is very difficult to have to deal with the sudden malfunction of this thing. Many of you might be familiar with the feeling of having your car break down for the first time, after years of safely delivering you to and from your destinations. You feel betrayed. “Hey, I thought we were friends…” you may mumble at your engine, through the smoke as passing vehicles smugly looked over at your misery, glad that it wasn’t them.

Well, there are degrees of importance in the roles of our daily inanimate partners. For example, your AC, your shower, your hairdryer, your car, your telephone, your microwave…and last but not least your bed, they all have different percentages of love, dependence, whatever. I mean, you can pie-chart it and the biggest chunk always goes to Mr. Bed.

Extremely important, in allowing you to enjoy all the other activities in life, sleep is a precious, precious thing. When a virus invades your motherboard and your computer becomes a paper weight, you can cry, shout, scream and have a glorious breakdown, but when you are chock full of valium and eventually escorted by a sympathetic relative away from the rubble of technology, it will be to your bed.

However, when it is the bed who has “et-tu-brute’d” you, where the hell do you go? I mean, let’s face it, you can’t have a breakdown on your microwave. So my friend, you are now, without peace.

As you are gathering, my bed-disaster in 2004 was very traumatic because I have a rather special relationship with sleep. I had 8 categorized pillows. The Royal Four, which were feather goose down, had been with me since 1995 when I was in Boston studying, and I was in love with them. They were supposed to come with me when I got married. The Secondary Two were “pity” pillows, to fill up the space left over and block sinister looking gaps between the headboards. The Final Duo I somehow acquired in Bahrain, in my days of pirating and pillaging my sisters’ rooms. I think I was trying to create a crowded feeling in the bed.

Ah yes, single hood… good times.

Next came the bed which was a funky hand carved redwood and something-else-wood piece of art done by a “self-proclaimed insane” Egyptian artist, which I managed to acquire by whining and whimpering for 3 working days at my father’s feet about my plight as a single struggling artist readjusting to the customs of Bahrain with nowhere fashionable to sleep. Eventually I wore him down, so he grumbled all the way to the exhibition, bought it and left.

I was ecstatic. It was soooo me. Something my bed has today, ceased to be. It was only last year that I started to get bed troubles. One night, at around 2:30am, I decided that nothing exciting was happening on my left side so I turned onto my right side and faced the wall; a routine exercise. Just as I was settling into my new cosy spot, I suddenly..Booov! Houston, we have a problem. My middle has collapsed.

Too tired and sleepy to get up and investigate, I just pretended that nothing happened and continued to fake-sleep until I got over the adrenaline rush and actually dozed off. The next morning I had post-rodeo levels of lower back pain. It was expected since I had camped on hilly terrains. So I hobbled off to work, and dealt with the crash bed later that day.

It soon became routine. Turn over one too many times and the bed will tell you to shove off. It turns out that my traditionally designed bed had boards that decided to shrink and topple over under my mattress. I eventually had to bring a carpenter home to bang it back into shape. It doesn’t collapse anymore, but sometimes I feel it’s just waiting for the right moment to piss me off again.

Several months later, I had another domestic disturbance whilst nesting late at night.

It happened while I was enjoying a particularly funny book in bed. The type with knee-slapping, loud laughter, causing siblings to look around the wall and check if you’re still sane, kind of book.

I was tired, and sleepy and about to drop the book and retire as I noted something moving to my left. Dismissing my initial instinct, I told myself, “Oh its nothing”.

But when the “nothing” moved again, I sprang on all fours, into full alert mode smashing the living daylights out of it with my novel. Needless to say, the not “nothing” was unaffected. The dark brown tick like creature eventually fell between my bed and the side table. But as always, the bastard had family.

And that was the end of my relaxing night of deep slumber. The next five hours consisted of a full scale war in my room and dismantling my bed, followed by sitting on the couch like a zombie, wondering where I had gone wrong with personal hygiene and why I had the same pest problems as the common mongrel.

For the next week, I felt like a refugee. I called work that morning and calmly explained to my boss, while still delirious from being awake 24 hours that I can’t come to work today, because I was busy all night overcoming insect trauma.

That was too creative to be untrue, so I got the day off. I put this free day to use supervising the intensive disinfecting and boiling of my bedding. My bed was taken apart, washed, vacuumed and suspiciously looked at. Pest control companies were summoned to, at once, assess the situation and assure me that there is a chemical compound strong enough to rid the world of the rude invaders, without killing me in the process. During the previous night’s war, a sampling of prisoners were captured, which I handed over in their little glass jar. I needed evidence to justify the freaked out state I was in.

I was soon assured that the “bed bugs” were there through no fault of my own and can in fact be exterminated swiftly, however I will have to find shelter else where for the next two days.

The day after the spraying, I was to sleep for the first time in my pesticide stinking bed since the invasion. I lay in bed with my eyes wide open and my bedside lamp on. The light was supposed to trick them into thinking that it’s day time, and I’m not there. After obsessively frantic research, I knew enough about them to write their biography. The sneaky freaks only come out at night when they sense human body heat and they can survive for years without food.

THEN. WHY. WERE. THEY. HERE??? The streets would’ve had the same options. Some food, or not so much food. Why am I a buffet???

Some blamed the exotic wood from Egypt, some said mattresses stored in old warehouses often come with unwelcome guests, but we never really knew where they came from.

I wasn’t quite ready to put the past behind me and it was a long time before I was able to sleep happily again, in the dark. I moved out quickly after that, before they could return. Little did I know that I was to be introduced to the exciting creatures of Jasra, where it's a bit more wild.

Last week our house maid, Emily claimed that a crocodile broke into her room. The only other witness at the time was Whisker and she didn’t look too alarmed. I pointed out that there were no nearby marshes or swamps, but only after half the workers in the compound, turned her room upside down, was she reluctantly able to go inside again.