For the week and a half my wife Jill was in Europe with our son Jack for his school trip, not a day went by that I wasn’t asked by mulitiple people, “How are you suriviving without Jill this week?!”

In fact, this morning at church I had no less than half a dozen people immediately say to me, “I bet you’re happy to have Jill back!”…

As if it were just common knowledge that she clearly runs the “business store front” for our family, while I confindently manage the “party in the back”…

Here is what I learned: When my wife is here, I am naturally an enforcer of keeping everything tidy and orderly. You might even say I am passionate about reinforcing her careful eye for detail and beauty in our home. After all, I am the one who immediately directs everyone to take off their shoes the moment they walk in.

Yeah, well… after it just being a few days into her departure, the floors of our home quickly evolved into an obstacle course of laundry, shopping bags, and not to mention, our daughter’s scooter.

Meanwhile, the kitchen counter was fully occupied by all the food and dishes I use daily because, “Why put it away if I’m just going to get it out again tomorrow?”

If we needed to come up with a theme for those 10 days or so, I think it would be prettty obvious:

“When the cat’s away, the mice come out to play.”

My wife had banned kimchi in our house, as its aroma tends to be in direct contradiction of the farmhouse theme we have going on. In other words, it smells like raw garbage… as opposed to the apple cider scented candle that serves as the default scent for our home.

But while she was out of town, the smell that escaped from our open fridge door was enough to kill flowers… because the kimchi (briefly) returned!

At our wedding reception back in 2008, as part of my dad’s Best Man speech, I remember him specifically saying how before Jill, I was never one to jump up and start doing the dishes; but how clearly I had changed for the better with her in the picture. She had brought out a new side of me he had never seen before.

And that holds true. Since we both work from home, I make it my mission to attempt to do the dishes throughout the day, and I can’t allow myself to go to bed if there are any dirty dishes in the sink.

Now I know, once Jill is gone for a few days, I resort to my old ways!

Let’s just say that the morning we left for Atlanta to go pick her and our son up from the airport once they got back from Europe, the way our daughter Holly and I franticially yet efficiently got the house back in order was basically like a 1980s sitcom where they speed up the camera as the characters scurry to clean up the mess. Then, once everything is back to normal, they immediately fall onto the couch, in complete exhaustion.

I also think of the classic line by Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie “As Good as It Gets” when he says to Helen Hunt’s character, “You make me want to be a better man.”

Yeah, I definitely see truth in that. But in my case, I would have to add, “As long as you don’t leave for Europe for a week and a half.”