Marital Blitz

Both in our fifties, HoneyBunch and I met on an Internet dating site.  It matched us by age and interests. We married after three months, so there was no time for HB to learn the truth that all of this was not natural beauty.

After the wedding, I kept up appearances for a while by disappearing one day each month to visit my hairdresser.  It wasn’t until I got sick and couldn’t keep my appointments did he learn the truth - I dyed my hair, grew a healthy, robust unibrow, and had an unruly cowlick the size of a Category 5 hurricane.

As we near our eleventh anniversary, all my beauty secrets have been lain bare. All of this has been nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

He tries not to laugh each time I have had to prepare for a colonoscopy – smiling at him one moment, running to the bathroom the next. He cautiously fed me Sprite and soup the week I contracted the Asian flu – fluids went in and flowed out from every orifice. Then there was the time I had my rotator cuff surgery and I slept sitting up for six months, and learned to bathe and comb my hair with the “good” arm.  He helped me with the contraption I had to wear that made me look like a cross between Igor and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. There was no combing the cowlick during any of this.

As I get older, it gets harder and harder to keep up all of this.  Most often it takes all the energy I have to look presentable, much less attractive, and nix trying for sexy, so God bless HoneyBunch for sticking through it all. 

While I am confessing all my physical shortcomings, I might as well admit I snore loud enough to set off a car alarm.  I have the propensity to lead when HB and I slow dance, and I have a serious milk allergy that makes me no fun to be around.

Last week I got a fever blister the size of Rhode Island.