wdevoe, Thu, June 11th, 2009
I suspect it started late last year, when we put in a bid on our first home. The process was a long, stressful one, and quite frankly, my wife and I became somewhat distant at times.
I blame myself, really, for not being the man I should have been through the difficult time we had moving out of our apartment, living with my parents and, eventually, buying our house. I blame myself for not being the man that my wife, Jess, has fallen in love with over the past few months.
He is kind, thoughtful and giving. He is always there for my wife and has enriched her life in ways I once only hoped to achieve. He is attentive, knowledgeable, but kind enough to take a break every now and then to give my wife some space. He comes into our house every night while I’m awake and stays until well after I’m asleep.
He is HGTV, and there is no way in the world I can compete with him. Home and Garden Television, or HGTV as the converts call it, is the Mecca for home buyers and DIYers across the globe.
“Did you know that if you hang drywall horizontally, you could have up to 25 percent less taping to do?” my wife says to me one evening over the winter. She has this dreamy, faraway look in her eyes that I thought was due to our putting an offer in on what would become our new home.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, it was just something that was on HGTV last night,” she says innocently.
And that’s how it started. Innocuous enough, but I suppose how these things begin. Over the next couple of weeks, she drops the names of HGTV shows like they are friends she’s just made: “Divine Design,” “Spice Up My Kitchen,” and the most annoying one of them all, “House Hunters.”
From the HGTV Web site: “House Hunters takes viewers behind the scenes as individuals, couples and families learn what to look for and decide whether or not a home is meant for them. Focusing on the emotional experience of finding and purchasing a new home, each episode shows the process as buyers search for a home.”
I sure as hell don’t know why my wife was interested in “House Hunters.” We were living the damn thing. We spent a year looking to get the best house we could within our price range. We made offers, had them rejected, worked with banks and mortgage brokers and inept real estate agents. Made more offers, repaired our credit. Had an offer accepted on a foreclosure and real fixer-upper, and repaired our credit some more. Finally, we closed on April 27 — about five months after we made the offer.
In other words, we already focused on the “emotional experience of finding and purchasing a new home,” without the aid of HGTV.
Nevertheless, she loves that show.
One night a few months ago, I came home from work to find it on in our bedroom. The former owners of our house left it in terrible shape, and I had been there most of the day, repairing things for the FHA appraisal that needed to be conducted before we could be approved for our mortgage.
“This couple is trying to find a bigger condo in Montreal,” Jess tells me excitedly. “The found one with off-street parking, but it doesn’t have the deck space that the one they just looked at has.” She points to a woman on the screen. “She doesn’t like the color scheme of the first condo, but you can always repaint, you know?”
“Our house has a big hole in the floor where the crapper used to be,” I say.
I think she sensed my bitterness toward her relationship with HGTV. For the following few weeks, she kept talk of HGTV personalities Candice Olson, Clive Pearse and Taniya Nayak to a minimum. I thought I had nipped my wife’s tryst with HGTV in the bud, until one night about a month later, when I walked into our bedroom to find my wife quickly changing the channel on the television.
“Whatcha doin’?” I ask.
“N-nothing,” she says nervously, and lands on the SciFi Channel. “I think ‘Battleship Galacticons’ are on — you like that one, right?”
For the record, I do not like “Battleship Galcticons” and doubt it is even a show. My wife abhors science fiction, although I have gotten her to watch “Lost” with me. It was easy. One Wednesday night she asked my why I was so into a show in which no one, even the writers, it seemed, knew what was going on. I walked her to our sons’ bedroom, where our 6-year-old, Kevin, was using two plastic ninja swords to play the drums on his 18-month-old brother’s stomach.
“Why wouldn’t I be interested in a show where the characters are stranded on a tropical paradise without any earthly concerns?” She began watching that night.
But back to the affair:
“What were you watching?” I asked. She wouldn’t answer, so I picked up the remote off our (parents’) bed. I hit the recall button.
“Oh my god, Jess! ‘Carter Can?!’ In our own bedroom? With the kids right across the hall?! You have no shame,” I say, and I storm out. That is, I storm out about as far as one can when they are living with their parents: I walk down the stairs and directly into the kitchen.
My father is sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream.
“Want some?” he asks.
“Sure. I could use some,” I say glumly.
“Well, there’s none left,” he laughs. He notices me decidedly not laughing. “What’s the matter with you? You look like you just found out your wife is cheating on you.”
“My wife is cheating on me,” I say.
“Are you sure? That girl is better than you deserve — are you sure she’s messing around with some other guy?”
“It’s not some other guy, Dad, it’s HGTV. She’s been watching it nonstop since we put an offer on the house.”
My father studies the spoon he was using to eat the ice cream — now gone — and says, “So your wife is cheating on you…”
“Yes.”
He licks the spoon clean. “With a TV show?”
“Not just a TV show, Dad, a whole television station.”
My father looks at me sympathetically, compassionately. He gets up, puts the empty bowl in the kitchen sink, walks over to me and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re a moron,” he says. “Now go back upstairs and talk to your wife, me and your mother are watching ‘Carter Can.’”
I make the long walk up the stairs.
“Jess, we need to talk.” She’s sitting on our bed, reading. She has obviously chalked up my outburst to one of those mood swings that seem to accompany genius-level intellects. She has never told me this. “I don’t like you seeing HGTV. I think you spend too much time with that channel. It’s really tearing the fabric of our relationship. Tearing it so much, I’m not sure even Vern Yip could sew it back together”
“Honey,” she says soothingly, “you’re being silly. HGTV doesn’t have to be this intruder in our lives, it can be a good thing. They’ve got a lot of good ideas that we can use to make this rundown house we just bought our new home.”
“I dunno…” I grumble.
“We can buy you tooools,” she sings. I’m sold.
A little later, she’s drifting off to sleep and I lean over to kiss her.
“Goodnight, Jess.”
“Goodnight, Carter,” she yawns.
