Earlier this year I made a commitment to eat healthier. Part of that commitment: vegetables with every meal. That sounds simple enough, but let’s be honest—sometimes you can’t figure out how to pair broccoli with pancakes and other times you’re too tired (or lazy) to cook more than macaroni and cheese with hot dogs.

I haven’t figure out how to make broccoli and pancakes work yet, but I’ve mastered the mac and cheese and dogs conundrum—peas. Grab yourself a bag of frozen peas, pour them in, and viola! Veggies with dinner. Last month I made such a dinner; one digestive cycle later, however, and I had a predicament.

After the necessary rigamarole of eating, digesting, and eliminating dinner, I went about my business. Because I work from home, I tend to drink a lot of coffee, then drink a lot of water to counteract the acidity of the coffee. You see where this is going? Back to the bathroom. No big deal. I’m used to it. What I’m not used to, however, are peas floating in my toilet.

That’s right. I don’t know if I consumed too many peas, failed to properly digest them, or my plumbing failed, but a stubborn cluster of peas floated through the toilet. It didn’t concern me though. Surely they’d drown in my excess of coffee and water.

But they didn’t.

Huddled together, clinging to the surface, those peas tormented me through my coffee break, lunch, afternoon snack, and the next dinner! I had no choice but to warn my husband and ask for his assistance. Oddly elated to be asked to help in such a situation, my truck driver husband swelled with pride at the knowledge that nothing could survive an encounter with his digestive output.

BUT. THEY. DID!

Those stupid tiny veggies-I-had-to-have-at-dinner mocked me as they swam laps around my commode. But what if they weren’t mocking me? What if the peas were suffering (what I can only imagine must have been a torturous existence) because of our bad plumbing? We know our house has some issues that we’ve been saving up to fix, but it never occurred to me that our decision to be fiscally responsible would lead to the unnecessary anguish of innocent pisum sativum.

There was no time to test the theory, though. After dozens of flushes, the peas remained, and the cleaning lady was coming! I had a choice to make: my pride or my strainer? Being the frugal woman that I am, my strainer won, so when the cleaning lady arrived I had to explain the Pea vs. Plumbing debacle. I don’t know what she did or how she did it, but that afternoon I enjoyed a pea-less toilet.

The moral to this story? Sometimes we have issues in our lives that we can’t figure out. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame—the mutant peas or the failing plumbing. What matters is how you respond to the situation. Are you willing to risk your pride to ask for help? I’m glad I did (though I’m hesitant to eat peas anytime soon).

Hangry: When you are so hungry that your lack of food causes you to become angry, frustrated or both. (Urban Dictionary)

For the first thirty years of my life, I had no concept of the word hangry. It never made sense to me. If you get hungry, eat! There’s no reason to get upset. Just grab an apple, and get back to work.

And then I met Yooper Stewart. Hard working, handsome, sweetest-guy-you’ll-ever-meet.

I won’t lie: the first several years of our marriage were hard. We didn’t live together before we got married, so it wasn’t just being married that we had to figure out. We had to learn all about each other’s habits and living styles (and let me tell you—as one of three daughters—living with a man for the first time opened my eyes to whole new levels of clutter and body odors).

One thing I never would have anticipated: an adult man who’s incapable of identifying his body’s hunger cues. Someone who could wake up a confident, capable man, then regress to toddler-like logic and confusion by lunch time.

For years, we argued. I tried to reason with my overly sensitive husband, but he always found something else to whine about. His whining annoyed me. My annoyance frustrated him. His frustration made me anger. Eventually there would be yelling and tears.

More than a decade later, I’m starting to figure him out. This past weekend*, for example, went something like this…

YS: (holding an empty plastic storage container) I don’t know what to do with this.

Me: We don’t use it for anything. We could get rid of it.

YS: (sigh) I guess I could use it for my Lego store.

Me: I thought you were closing that, and you already have stacks of containers.

YS: Fine! (throws container into recycle bin)

Me: We don’t have to throw it away. We could donate it.

YS: (cue toddler voice) But then we’d have to wash it!

Me: What the heck? So we wash it! What are— (realization)

Me: (pours a bowl of cereal, pushes it toward Yooper Stewart, slowly backs away)

TEN MINUTES LATER

YS: I’m going to run to the store, then get started in the yard and work out in the garage. Do you need anything?

Crisis averted.

And that, my friends, is why I carry snacks with me everywhere.

*Yooper Stewart would like to go on the record as saying that he’s pretty sure I was hangry this past weekend, and that I may have been overreacting a bit too. (Doubtful, but I promised I’d let you know.)