She’s Your Wife, Not Your Servant

My wife and her girlfriends all liked getting together for various holidays after college life ended. She had known her girlfriends since first or second grade and they all grew up together. On holidays such as the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, they’d make plans for everyone to get together with their significant others and eventually kids as they came into the picture.

My wife and I were the first out of her girlfriends to get married and we were the first to have a kid out of the group.

One of her friends got married a year or two after us and had a kid about nine months after we did. I always liked her friend, but I never liked her boyfriend (now husband). He was just one of those people you meet and you can’t figure out why, but you don’t like them. He gave off a bad vibe that I can’t describe. Even the wife’s friend at one point was uncertain if she should stay with him because of how he acted and treated her. He wasn’t physically abusive and he wasn’t really verbally abusive, but he kind of treated her as a mother figure and not a wife. He was always expecting her to drop what she was doing at any given time to do things for him, and he couldn’t be bothered to help out when she needed help. She stuck with him and married him. This story takes place about two years after their first son was born.

I like speaking my mind; it’s the one thing my wife is incapable of until she’s really pissed. She knows I don’t like her friend’s husband and she constantly tells me to not say anything and to be nice when we get together as a group.

Well, this time, my wife isn’t in the room and an opportunity presents itself.

It is a July Fourth get-together. My daughter is about three and my wife’s friend’s son is about two. Inside, at the dining room table, my wife’s friend has my daughter sitting on one knee and her son sitting on the other and she’s entertaining them and helping them eat. My wife is outside chatting with other people and I’m inside helping with my daughter.

From outside, in walks [Friend]’s husband. He sees her sitting at the table with two kids in her lap and helping them eat. I know he sees her because when he walks in, he looks directly at her, and then his eyes shift to me as I sit next to her and my daughter on her knee. He walks through the kitchen area, fills his plate with food, walks past the drinks — beer, assorted alcohol, and pop — and then walks back to the patio door. As he’s about to step outside, he stops, turns, and says to his wife:

Friend’s Husband: “Wifey, go get me a beer and bring it out to me right now.”

Friend: “Sure, I can do that.”

Me: *To the wife’s friend* “No, you’re busy helping the kids. You don’t need to stop what you’re doing to get a beer for him. He should have grabbed his own as he walked by them.”

Friend: “That’s okay. I can get him one.”

She goes to move the kids off her lap, but I stop her and shake my head no.

Friend’s Husband: “Now.”

I shoot her husband a nasty glare and finally get to speak my mind because my wife isn’t in the room to stop me.

Me: “No. She’s busy. You clearly see she has two kids on her lap that she’s helping feed, and you walked right past the beer on your way through the kitchen. You can get your own f****** beer.”

It felt so good to finally say something to that jerk.

He looked at me like a deer in the headlights, his face turned bright red, and he sulked out the door with his food. He never did get a beer from his wife that day, and in the nearly ten years since this incident, he’s avoided me at any gatherings.