I blame it all on the move that I made from one town to another one when I was in fifth grade, smack dab in the middle of the school year.  I must’ve missed something in that transition because there are things that I never learned.  Roman numerals, for example.  Shouldn’t I know them?  My theory is that my fifth grade class in my town of origin was not following the same game plan as my fifth grade class in the new town and somehow or another I missed some important academic lessons in the relocation process.

That certainly hasn’t ruined my life but I do wonder, at times, why I never learned certain things that other people seemed to have.  Of course, I do know a lot of things that other people don’t know but I didn’t learn them in school.

My former boss, a math teacher-slash-mayor, once asked me, “How do you know that?”  I countered, “How do you not know that?”  Of course, we weren’t talking about math or city government, which we were supposed to be discussing, but something significantly more important, such as who was whose first wife, once removed.  That is my area of expertise: Connecting the dots.

Fifth grade uprooting aside, I seemed to have also missed some classes (Where were they given?  Would I have gone had I known?) that many, if not all, of my female friends seem to have attended.  Based on their performances as wives and mothers, they apparently gobbled down that information like it was savory chocolate and have never veered from what they were TOLD TO DO.

Frankly, I don’t know who did the telling—perhaps some anally, priggish home economics teacher, who secretly hated all women and all men, but nevertheless cow-towed to the “superior” sex, determined in her abject misery to set these naïve young girls on the fast track to subservience so they could be just as miserable as she.

I didn’t know you were supposed to pack your husband’s suitcase. He doesn’t pack mine, why should I pack his?
I didn’t know that the metal burner things came off of the stove top so you could … clean them.
I did kind of know that the wife, that would be me, was supposed to do the cooking but even knowing that didn’t stop me from enthusiastically handing over the spatula and frying pan to my husband, who decided he was willing to take this on. Thank God!  I was sick of cooking.

People, mostly women, especially my mother, blanch and hold their hand to their hearts, as if they’re about to have the big one, when they find out that my husband does the cooking.  Oh, get over it, I say.  I handle the money.  He handles the mayonnaise.  It works for us.

I do distinctly remember my junior high home economics teacher, who was so fashion savvy (said in jest) that she wore stripes with plaids and, trust me, this wasn’t any progressive fashion statement on her part.  She announced in front an entire class of apron clad seventh graders that I was the dumbest student that she’d ever had. Apparently, I hadn’t creamed the peas to her satisfaction.  Nothing like being singled out in a crowd.  When I read her obituary in the newspaper, many, many years later, I thought, well, good enough for you!  Actually, in retrospect, I am grateful that I missed “those classes” whatever they were; wherever they were given.  There are some things that you just don’t need to know.