Taking Turns

This morning, I had to drive Y to work, as my wretched excuse for a car was in the shop. We dropped the kids off at camp and hit the canyon - morning as usual for Y, except that I was in the car next to him.

It hadn't been a good night: we ate way too much after yesterday's fast, and the heartburn and indigestion woke us up on the off-hours that Ariel didn't. So we were tired and didn't talk much in the car.

Y is a devoted listener of The Jaime, Jack, and Stench morning radio show, which can get pretty raunchy and more than a little boring for my tastes. But it was his morning commute, so I left the radio alone, lay back, and wished a cup of coffee would miraculously appear in my hand.

At the commercial, I flipped stations, pausing on one. Y, from the control on his steering wheel, immediately flipped back to his show. It was still at commercial, so I browsed again. Shooting me a truly dirty look, Y went back to 98.7.

Hoh-k, I thought. Point taken. He'd been a little annoyed with me when we had left the house because I'd bitten his head off over eating Fruit Roll-Ups for breakfast and giving the kids the same. I need those Fruit Roll-Ups, or Elan's snake cake isn't going to have a tongue at the birthday party. Certainly you can understand my aggravation.

When we got to his office, he still hadn't spoken to me, and I hopped out of the car with him to grab some java before heading back into the Valley. I nudged him in the side. "Is everything going to be okay?" I asked, smiling. "Will you survive this terrible morning?"

"It's only about the radio, Mag." He replied sternly. "You can't just flip the radio station when I'm in the middle of listening to something. I listen to this show every morning on the way to work."

"Clearly, I've overstepped my boundaries, huh?" I replied, eyebrows raised. "First, by joining you in the car, and then by - dare I say it aloud - switching off Jaime, Jack, and Stench? I've intruded on your rituals."

Y finally smiled, because that was, indeed, it. It's an argument we have often enough, incarnated several ways: who holds the remote control, who plays DJ, and worst of all, who is the Master of the Thermostat. Sometimes, when especially freezing, I've wondered if it might actually be worth getting pregnant over and over again just to get the sympathy vote in the air conditioning wars. Nobody in their right mind - even Y - messes with a pregnant woman.

It's why a lot of people are so afraid to get married - the fear of having to compromise your personal comfort, and preferences, time and again, because you've been forced to share your space with another, entirely different, human being. And there's something to that, no question. Once you become parents, and spend most waking minutes tending exclusively to some very short person's needs, ignoring your own, it becomes that much harder to want to compromise even an iota of whatever freetime is left.

And yet, in order for your marriage to succeed, you've got to. Sometimes you've got to watch crap on TV because your husband can't miss "Remember the Titans," whenever TNT airs it [note: every three days], even though he knows, but just can't admit, that the locker room scene in which all the white guys and black guys sing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in unity is actually really gimicky and canned and not good at all.

And sometimes you have to put on two sweatshirts and pairs of socks over your nightgown and throw a duvet in your lap to eat dinner even though it's 75 degrees outside.

Compromise. Two generations ago, the wife was always the one to do it. In ours, however, women have come to expect more even ground from their husbands, as much take as give. And men have risen to the occasion, mostly, relieved from years of pent-up resentment from their martyr wives. It's progress - a good thing. It's compromise. Everybody's happy, I think.

But we should probably also qualify "compromise", calling it by its proper name: "taking turns." And since I'm leaving in a few minutes to pick up Y in West Hollywood, and I'll be the one driving, it'll be my turn to choose the station. And that, my friend, is what we call happy.

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With congratulations to Marnina and Noah on the birth of a baby girl today! I can't wait to meet her next week.