March 31, 2017 – “I am the CEO of this household . . . .”

          . . .  was the opening line of a letter from my Mom.  I chuckled.

          It was my weekly letter from Mom and I’d just gotten in from work and snatched the letter up from the mail splayed out on the kitchen table and opened it.

          With an opening line like that, I knew this was going to be a good read.  I kicked off my high heels and stretched out on the couch.

          Mom was now retired, and Dad had been retired for a little while.  They’d had a clash on how Mom was washing the kitchen floor.  Dad had never really paid attention to her washing the kitchen floor in her many years of housekeeping as he was either working, or out doing yard work, or gardening.  Now that they were retired he was “underfoot” more often and Dad decided while she was in the middle of floor washing to critique how she could do it more efficiently. [Dad had been a plumber for years, but his last job before retirement was a Janitor at a local school.]

          Between the lines of Mom’s letter I could hear the “snarling and spitting” of my tiny mother of about 5 feet with snapping brown eyes [probably on her hand knees washing the floor as was her custom] and could envision my large framed Dad relaxed in his easy chair next to the archway between the kitchen and living room taking her comments in stride.

          The letter was vague on what Dad had suggested, but her letter spouted off that she’d been washing the kitchen floor for 40+ years and she did it HER WAY and wasn’t going to change now.  She stated in her letter that she ended the little domestic entanglement with her announced to Dad:

          “I am the CEO of this household and the yard and gardens are your business; the household is my domain.”

          I imagine Dad, knowing she had won the battle, silently escaped out the living room by the cellar door, down through the basement, and out into his peaceful gardens, into his domain.

          The letter was of such quality – fire and spit – that I read it out to my husband and we had the best laugh.   At the time I thought, ‘So that is what retirement is going to be like.  Retirement is being so close again that you rub each other the wrong way on occasion.’

          Since that time I have used Mom’s famous line:  “I am the CEO of this household” on more than occasion. I don’t over use it – as my husband knows the origin of the line and knows I am plagiarizing it.   It usually ends a little dispute that is baseless and we both know it as we both smile and remember who coined the phrase and understand its real meaning.