Tracy Beckerman More Content Now

“I got a pedicure today,” I said to my husband, showing off my freshly painted toes that glimmered from beneath my flip flops. “What do you think?”

“They’re orange,” he said.

“They’re not orange.” I corrected him. “They’re cantaloupe.” He blinked a couple of times trying to process this irrelevant piece of information.

“Okay, he replied. “But they don’t match your pink fingers.”

I shook my head. “They’re not pink. They’re raspberry.”

“Does it really matter what you call them?” he asked.

“Yes. If you just say pink, they could be a soft pink, or a vibrant pink or a cotton candy pink. But when you say raspberry, you know exactly what color pink they are. They are raspberry-colored pink.”

He stared at me dumbly.

“Don’t you have anything you want to say?” I asked, fishing for a compliment.

“Yes,” he replied. “I wish I was color blind.”

I put my hands on my hips in a huff. Yes, I knew that in the grand scheme of things, clarifying my nail color to my husband was not going to solve the problem of world peace. But I felt it was my job to enlighten him on behalf of all the misunderstood manicured women in the world.

We had been through this once before, he and I. Before I decided it was cool to be gray, I had colored my hair for a number of years. I tried out a bunch of different browns including warm medium brown, chestnut brown, mocha brown, latté brown, and the ones that dare-not-be-named that made me look alternately like Elvis and Bozo the clown. When I tried to explain to my husband that there was more than one kind of brown and I needed to be clear about which brown I wanted or there could be dire consequences (see above Bozo reference), his eyes glazed over and he fell into some kind of boredom-induced trance that only a pint of Ben and Jerry’s could revive him from.

I realized eventually that this wasn’t something that was unique to him. After conversations with my brother and my son about my raspberry nails, I thought that this might, in fact, be a gender-related issue.

“Do you like my raspberry colored nails?” I asked my son.

“They’re pink,” he said.

“Yes, but they’re raspberry pink,” I said.

“Will they make my dinner cook faster?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then I don’t care,” he replied.

I was pretty much at the point where I thought that gene therapy was the only thing that would help bridge this gender gap. And then my husband decided it was time for us to get a new car.
“I’m looking at this model, but I can’t decide on the trim,” he said, showing me the car he wanted on the computer.

“What’s a trim?” I asked.

“It’s the features you can get with the car.”

“OK, what are the options?”

“We can get an LX, an LX-S, an EX, an EX-L, or a Touring.”

“They all look exactly the same,” I said.

“No they don’t,” he said. “They’re very different.”

“I don’t see it,” I said.

He sighed. “You can’t see it. It’s inside.”

“Ok. Whatever,” I replied. “Get what you want. Just don’t get it in Raspberry.”
— For more Lost in Suburbia, follow Tracy on Facebook at facebook.com/LostinSuburbiaFanPage or on Twitter at @TracyBeckerman.