Whither the arm candy?

I hate ironing. It is the absolute bane of my existence. I've never liked it, even as a small child when dreary domestic stuff seemed sort of neat and exciting.

Whenever I am carrying out the dreaded task, I always feel as though I'm trapped in some kind of existentialist horror novel. Didn't I just iron this shirt the other day? What is the point of doing it again if it keeps coming back at me?

When I was single, I remember once dressing hurriedly for work one morning. I had this beautiful suit and needed a blouse to wear underneath. The problem was that I'd done the laundry but hadn't done any ironing. Checking my watch, I realised that I wouldn't have enough time to iron my white blouse, so I quickly ironed the cuffs and collars, buttoned the jacket and presto! I looked fabulously professional.

Later on at the office, I was dying of heat because we were at that dubious point in the year when building maintenance staff err on the side of caution and don't shut off the heat and turn on the air-conditioning. Everyone was walking around the office in shirt sleeves and several colleagues repeatedly suggested that I remove my jacket. As I knew my blouse was a total disaster beneath my jacket, I frantically declined, insisting that I was fine. This despite the perspiration streaming down my face.

The whole experience reminded me of that universal warning all moms give their kids about ensuring that one is wearing clean underwear at all times in case one gets into an accident.

When I first met my husband, his standard daily uniform was a pair of Edwin's baggy jeans or khakis, a button down Oxford-type shirt and a pair of deck shoes. He was the picture of immaculate preppiness. His shirts and jeans were always ironed perfectly, so despite the fact that he was dressed casually, he looked good.

As we began to have more children, I started suddenly looking at ways in which I could lighten my domestic load. Naturally, I turned to my least favourite zone -- the ironing pile. Despite all of my efforts, that damn pile never seemed to get any smaller. Worst of all, none of the clothes in the pile were mine! I started counting the items in the pile and realised that my husband was wearing about seven to ten pairs of pants and ten to fourteen shirts a week. This was just too much, so I started to scheme up ways in which to lighten the load. (Dry cleaning wasn't an option since I just couldn't justify the cost).

I started small. I began by attacking my husband in a subtle way.

"Exactly who irons their jeans? That just seems a bit too anal and fastidious. Jeans are meant to be worn unironed. Can't we just hang them up carefully after they've been washed to produce that crease?"

Unconvinced and skeptical, my husband insisted that I could never recreate the razor sharp crease. However, when I simply refused to iron his jeans, he had no choice but to capitulate.

Step two of my grand plan involved convincing my husband to wear shirts that didn't require ironing. Like long sleeved polo shirts or t-shirts.

Step three involved the khakis mysteriously disappearing.

Eventually I managed to get my ironing pile down to a manageable minimum -- the occasional dress shirt several times a year. I was in heaven.

Last week, my husband and I made arrangements to meet up somewhere. As I sat waiting for him, I noticed this very unkempt man approaching me in a pair of unfashionably creased jeans and a crew neck shirt. With a shock, I came out of my reverie long enough to realise that the man was my husband. While I sat there wondering why he looked so awful and so completely removed from the preppy, clean cut man I'd married (Geez, he's really let himself go, hasn't he?), it suddenly occurred to me that I was singlehandedly responsible for this vision.

Earth Mother's moral is that "Behind every untidy man, lies a lazy woman".