Alibis

Before my wife and I levied another hungry mouth against the world's dwindling resources, entertaining friends at our house was an incredible ordeal. This was mostly because my wife chose to adopt the manic cleaning standards of her mother's middle-class, homemaker generation, for whom house cleaning was a competitive sport on the order of kick boxing or alligator wrestling. At the time, we had two enormous dogs and three cats who were capable of shedding nearly as much as their canine step-siblings. My wife and I are also hopeless clutterers; our house is ordinarily peppered with books, papers, unopened mail, misplaced CDs and all sorts of other crap.

At times, I would wonder if it was even worth it to maintain friendships, given the hours of vacuuming, dusting, mopping, and reorganizing that such friendships seemed to require. To no avail, I would argue that by going to these lengths, we were offering an inaccurate portrait of our actual lives -- a standard that we could not possibly sustain and which, therefore, would someday lead to disappointment as our friends discovered who we really were and how we actually lived. My wife's attempt at a counter-argument would be to claim that I'd be perfectly happy to entertain guests by throwing a bag of chips and a bucket of salsa into the middle of an filthy carpet. I lost every argument, of course, and -- I'll admit in the end -- I'd wind up feeling somewhat grateful that we'd restored the house to its utopian glory for at least a day or two before the reefs of clutter emerged from the surf once more.

Now that we have a toddler, we have been offered a tremendous gift by the universe -- we have been offered the perfect alibi for not making extreme efforts to clean our house before guests arrive. I repeat: We have a toddler. We have a tiny human being who scatters toys like Johnny F*cking Appleseed, who requires impossible quantities of attention from her parents, and -- most importantly -- does not object yet to being used as the Great and Central Excuse for everything we cannot or do not want to do.

I have discovered over the past few months, however, that my wife has not sufficiently absorbed this important and perhaps all-too-temporary fact. We continue to have friends over, and we continue -- at her insistence -- to treat these occasions as if a membership at the local country club were riding on the state of our living room. And I continue to lose the arguments. And soon enough, our daughter will be old enough that we won't be able to use her as a feeble alibi for our -- OK, my -- laziness.

What a missed opportunity....

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Alibis

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