Be mindful of asking your husband to clean out the freezer.

Because he then may toss EVERYTHING from its depths (except for, apparently, an old cupcake in a ziplock bag which is somewhere between the ages of 2-years ago we moved to Des Moines and ehhhhh, maybe a month). That “everything” might include your vacuum-sealed pieces of wedding cake intentionally saved for your one-year anniversary.

…

Oh. Yeah. You felt it, right?

I wouldn’t necessarily call the emotion anger. Because I was definitely crying. But I was also so upset that I could barely breath and all the voice that was attempted from my mouth deepened nearly 3 octaves and echoed across our first level open floor plan when I spoke of The Disappointment.

WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?!

Apparently, I missed this error by only one day.

During The Disappointment, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried in the shower for what felt like the length of my relationship. Why was this stupid tradition affecting me so terribly when I have a wonderful husband who cleans all his dead (also vacuum-sealed) meat from the freezer when asked by his beautiful wife to do so? Oh, I didn’t explicitly tell him ONLY the meat and, you know, men are not mind readers and WHATEVER YOU THREW OUT OUR WEDDING CAKE.

Tradition. That is not a word that I would use to define our wedding nor our relationship; however, the cake. It was made by a local gluten-free bakery who can make me a delicious sugar frosted almond flavored cake any time I’d like. We were together (my husband and I – not me and the baker) for 8 years before we decided to get married… well, I guess technically we decided a bit earlier than that but nonetheless, we married on the 8th anniversary of our first date. St. Patrick’s Day. We found a lovely lady who does mobile elopements and could marry us at home on our back deck in under 60 seconds with our two witnesses and a homemade dinner of corned beef and cabbage and potatoes and a passed bottle of Irish whiskey back when I cheated on potatoes and drank whiskey… a lot has changed in one year. Like that cake. The cake morphed to the dimensions of the air-sealed plastic but sat relatively undisturbed in the door of our massively-sized freezer. Like that chocolate peanut butter cupcake on the shelf in direct sightline every time you opened the freezer door. Until the husband threw it away. The wedding cake, of course, not the cupcake. I’m sure he had reasons for this selective behavior.

Did I mention that I have an amazing husband who not only cleans out the freezer when asked but while I was suffering the emotional breakdown of someone who lost the one-and-only photo of her and Spider-Man when she was one-years-old, that very husband dug through the trash bins in our garage and found the sealed pieces of wedding cake and placed them back into the freezer.

And do you remember the day when I rolled my eyes at his purchase of this dumb machine that sealed things in plastic when things like Zip-loc exist?

What’s great about vacuum-sealing is that it not only keeps moisture out of whatever you intend to food store, but it also keeps things like… oh, the other gross disgusting things that sit in your garbage cans, OUT of the sealed containment. It was also somewhat convenient that our garage is not insulated in the slightest and the temperatures hadn’t gone above freezing in the weeks prior. See, when the husband found the cake in the garbage, they were still completely frozen pieces of warped cake in plastic. And so, it was like they went from one freezer to the next – albeit a little grosser, more disgusting and probably definitely filled with used cat litter.

Well, damn it, I finally ate that cake last night while celebrating our one year of marriage. And if adventure is what you want in a marriage, well I certainly have that and then some. I have a man who is willing to go to the depths of the garbage to see me happy.

And I couldn’t be happier.

(And yes, I apologized to my husband. But I definitely made him use Purell for the following three days.)