Debbie Wilkins Baisden was a butthole wife.
That is—until she no longer had a husband to be a butthole to.
In a piece called “Stop Being a Butthole Wife,” Debbie pens the realization she had the day her husband left earth for heaven, and “all of her marriage problems vanished.”
“I was a butthole wife. Until my husband died,” she admitted.
For her, it was always the laundry:
“I get it, the guy can’t find the hamper. It’s maddening. It’s insanity. Why, why, must he leave piles of clothes scattered, the same way that the toddler does, right? I mean, grow up and help out around here, man. There is no laundry fairy.”
What Debbie says she didn’t realize until it was too late, is that pile of laundry—constantly stirring chaos in her marriage—was a gift from God. Disguised just enough so that she had to lay down her own selfish ways in order to notice the gift in front of her.
“Marriage is designed to be a reflection of Christ’s love for His people. It’s supposed to be beautifully harmonious and intimate. How often I screwed that up with bickering and manipulating. I wanted a perfect husband who acted how I wanted, and if that didn’t happen, well, butthole wife was in full effect. If only he could understand how right I was and how wrong he’d always be. I needed to instruct him, question him and remind him of his shortcomings. After all, I was his ‘helpmate.’”
Looking back now, Debbie recognizes she wasn’t being the wife that he needed her to be, and she wasn’t helping her marriage the way she stubbornly believed she was. Though their marriage was good, and their love for one another was deep, it took losing her husband to realize all that it could have been.
“Days after his funeral, I stared at our dirty clothes basket that sat atop our dryer, knowing his clothes were inside. I sighed so deeply. Before me was the last load of laundry I would ever wash for that sweet man. There would be no more dirty socks to pick up around the house. Ever.”
The one thing that used to send her into a spiraling nag and salty eye-rolls was now a “priceless treasure.”
