A severe lack of detachment

Last year, I tried to give up drinking Diet Coke for Lent and made it through the entire first day, shambling around the house like something from Night of the Living Dead. My husband got home from work, noticed my blank stare and slack jaw, realized what my problem was, and told me he was having none of this giving-up-of-Diet-Coke thing.

"If you give up Diet Coke, you'll be miserable and then we'll be miserable," he said grimly, and rather unfairly, I thought. I mean, sure, I was a little out of it on Ash Wednesday 2008, but once I rinsed the jelly out of my hair and apologized to the robin outside the living room window who was building a nest in the tree and raising the most ungodly racket with all that insane chirping and....and....SINGING, I was fine, just perfectly fine.

"There's only so much sacrifice required," he told me. "And I'm giving up eating cheeseburgers AND I'll have to live with you and that is too much. TOO MUCH."

So, resentfully, I drank a can of Diet Coke and was able to focus my eyes and close my mouth for the first time that day. I gave up all sweets instead and it was really, really hard.

My husband did not give up sweets last year.

But he did give them up this year.

And you know that pretty speech he made me about how I'd be miserable and then he'd be miserable, yada yada yada? Well, next year, I plan to make it to him if he decides to give up sweets again because I'm telling you: Without candy or cookies or even licking the powdered sugar off one of those little Hostess donuts, he is as cross as a sack of weasels and we're not even two weeks into this SEASON OF HOLINESS and I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH MORE I CAN TAKE.

Edited to add: Husband was forced by the power of the collective will of his wife and two daughters to buy some cookies from the vending machine at work and EAT THEM so that he can come home in the evening acting like himself instead of Satan's little helper.