Um, in case you’ve noticed, I’ve been AWOL the last couple of days.  While I don’t usually post seven days a week, I’ve been regularly hitting five or six posts a week, making my absence two days in a row feel strange. 

But I’ve been off my game this week for two reasons.  One, I’ve been really busy at work.  (I know.  Every lame and lazy blogger in the world says that. I HATE that excuse.  It is, nevertheless, sometimes true.) And, two, Mr. Mom vetoed  yesterday’s post.

See, that’s the sometimes sucky thing about marriage.  It’s a give and take.  I’d like to take all the time, but Mr. Mom doesn’t ask for much so the guilt is nearly unbearable when I ignore his infrequent requests for a favor.

Three nights ago, he said something really funny to me.  So funny that I wanted to share it with you, my beloved readers.  You see, I’m an open book.  If I didn’t have to worry about my family’s respectability or protect my paycheck, I’d tell you anything and everything.  But Mr. Mom doesn’t share my immodesty, and since his comment was of a personal nature, he asked that I keep our private life just that.  Undeterred, I wrote about it anyway using the age-old writer’s device called the metaphor.  There’s nothing I love more than a writing challenge and I thought my metaphor was really funny -- funnier than the story would have been unmasked.  And I also thought it was obscure enough that only the enlightened would get it and everybody else would walk right past it unknowingly.  And what writer can pass up the opportunity for that?  I get to be funny and risque without risk, right?

I guess not.  Mr. Mom still didn’t like it.  And he stood by his request to kill the post.

I felt a little like Denys in “Out of Africa” when Karen forbids him to take Felicity on his next Safari.  “You have no idea the effect those words have on me,” Denys says, eyes narrowed and jaw clinched.  Asking a writer to bury her story is . . . well . . . it kills me.  It enrages me.  It crushes me and deflates me and represses me because let me just say it doesn’t come easy.  Only when you spend every waking moment trolling the minutia of your life for material, then sweat and fret and agonize over every phrase, every word, substituting word after word after word until you get it just right, massaging every nuance until your touch is absolutely perfect, only then do you understand what it feels like to bury a story.  And the funnier or more clever you think it is, the more you long for it to see the light of day.  To hear the collective roar of laughter you just knew you could provoke.  In comedy, only the laugh is sacred.

But oh well.  I guess I don’t get to make you laugh.

So I sure as hell better still get laid.

P.S. Since there are no laughs in Mayberry today, I encourage you to head over to Evil Chef Mom’s place.  Her MADOF post should do the trick.  Krysta, I know you’ll understand why I caved.  MADOF.