Marriage and Cherry Pitters

By Veronica Mitchell

“Honey, what’s my most annoying quality?”

He blinks at me.

“I thought I could turn it into a post for the new parenting blog.”

He considers for a moment. “Definitely the midwestern mumble when you are walking away.”

This has bothered him for years. When we are in public, I don’t want to be too loud or draw attention to myself, so I speak quietly to him. Sometimes I am walking away while I talk. He cannot hear me and it drives him crazy. Of course, his late father had terrible hearing, but deafness has nothing to do with it, according to him.

“Not the way I leave food on my plate? I know you hate that.”

“No. I have decided to view that as a bit of pagan piety. You are simply leaving an oblation for the gods.”

We have been married almost thirteen years, which is not very long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough to know each other’s foibles and make some sort of peace with them. He, for instance, leaves his enormous shoes anywhere but in his closet, and I trip over them. I hate that. It tests my commitment not to use foul language in front of the children. Sometimes I fail the test.

When we were first married, we had an argument over a cherry pitter. I had a hard time learning to share an apartment with a 32-year-old man who had accumulated a lifetime of stuff. I hated his stuff. It was everywhere. I loved him and never wanted to live without him, but sometimes I thought to myself, Maybe the bright side to widowhood is having my own closet again.

So one day I was in the kitchen putting things away, and I began to mock his collection of useless kitchen gadgets. He acquired them like lint. I picked up an unfamiliar cherry pitter and said, “What is this? Have you ever even used it? Why do you keep so much junk that you will never use?” He admitted he had never used it, but insisted that it would come in useful someday. We retired to our respective corners.

Three weeks later, I was baking a pie, and I needed the cherry pitter. It made pitting the cherries so much easier. I finished the work in less than half the time it would have taken me otherwise. My husband saw me, and he was triumphant.

“Ha!” he said. Then “Ha! Ha!”

Ever since, he has loved that cherry pitter with a special love. It is his symbol of marital victory. If ever the man designs his own coat of arms, I expect cherry pitter rampant to feature in the heraldry.

Now that we have children, the opportunities for disagreements have increased. How to potty-train, when to put the kids to bed, whether they can watch another movie, when and how should they be disciplined, etc. These are all potential disagreements with chances for us to annoy each other. But by now we are veterans of the marital argument and we handle it much better than we would have thirteen years ago. We get angry less and forgive more.

And I am more likely to admit to being wrong than I was when we first married. Though sometimes, maybe, I mumble it as I’m walking away.

Veronica Mitchell also blogs at Toddled Dredge.