Eli McCann: My husband is one proud papa. Just check out his new baby: those speed bumps.

I bought my home in Salt Lake City in 2014. I lived alone, which meant I could do whatever I wanted at all times, such as throw outrageous parties like teens in a ’90s sitcom in which the parents went out of town for the weekend. I was so free. So alive.

Two years later, my now husband, Skylar, moved in and began asking a lot of unfair and intrusive questions like “Why do you throw your clothes on the floor instead of into the laundry basket?” or “Why don’t we have a smoke detector?” or “Why do you watch so much TV?”

He went about “fixing” things for a time, bringing a level of organization to our home that is so robust it almost feels like a flaw. Did you know there is a “correct” way to load the dishwasher? Well, there is. And even though the dishes always got clean enough before he came along, I was apparently doing it the “wrong” way.

Sometimes he’ll tell me I need to change how I’m doing something in the house and if I refuse, he’ll accuse me of weaponized incompetence, a popular therapy phrase that describes how a spouse will purposefully perform a hated chore poorly so the other spouse will just do it next time. I’ll then argue that I’m not doing the chore poorly, just differently from him, and that he is weaponizing weaponized incompetence to try to get me to do it his way. Eventually, he’ll win the argument by frowning at me, which scares me into compliance.

Fortunately, a number of years ago Skylar apparently decided the house was sufficiently in order so he turned his attention to the outdoors and made everyone who lives within four blocks of us his next victims of his unsolicited project management.

A cause is born

It all started when we learned a child on our street had been hit by a speeding car and would have to undergo several surgeries and significant physical therapy. (The child is now doing well, in case you’re worried.)

“We must do something about this,” Skylar said after he told me what had happened.

I wasn’t surprised he had learned this information. He’s the type of person who stops to talk to strangers if they happen to be outside as he’s walking by. Usually the conversation starts by Skylar complimenting the person’s home or yard. Then, five minutes later, he has somehow downloaded our neighbor’s life story.

For the next three years, Skylar’s entire personality revolved around trying to get the city to install speed bumps on our block to slow down the ever-increasing speeding traffic and hopefully prevent this from ever happening again.

He started by going door to door, asking all the residents on our long street for their thoughts on speed bumps. The vast majority supported them. A few were apathetic. A couple of people said they would prefer some other measure.

The most significant effect of his efforts during his early neighborhood polling was that he made a lot of friends. We live in an area with many elderly residents. I work from home, and for several months I began receiving an onslaught of retirees showing up at our house during working hours looking to visit Skylar, only to appear disappointed when I explained he was at work and only I was home.

Skylar eventually moved his advocacy to community and City Council meetings, where he learned about the onerous process for submitting infrastructure project requests. This included, among other steps, a requirement that he have dozens of our neighbors sign a petition. He was already known around our area as Guy Who Collects Signatures, having done so on a number of occasions for various political causes. On a recent morning, we walked by a woman sitting on her front porch. She waved to us and Skylar shouted to her, “Don’t worry! I don’t have anything for you to sign today,” prompting her to shout back, “thank God.”

As we walked away, he told me, “She usually refuses to sign my petitions, and she sometimes yells at me, but we’ve become friends anyway.”

‘I should have led with the baby’

When I tell you the speed bump project became an obsession for him during this period, I mean it. Last summer, a friend came to visit. Skylar picked her up at the airport and brought her to our house. I was in the kitchen and overheard him say to our guest just as they walked through the front door, “Oh, by the way, we’re about to have a baby.”

The friend gasped and then responded, “Why did you just spend 20 minutes telling me about your traffic-calming measures and not that?”

“Yeah,” Skylar said, “I should have led with the baby. I’m just really excited about our speed bumps.”

His popularity in our neighborhood dipped last fall when, thanks to his advocacy, city crews showed up and dropped several large (very ugly) concrete barrels onto the street as a quick fix. The barrels funneled traffic into a single lane to slow down speeders. They were hit by cars almost every day. Several of our neighbors complained, each asking me some form of “Can you please get him under control?” I would respond, “I’m just happy he’s so distracted with this that he forgot to force me to demolish our bathroom for a remodel I’m unqualified to perform.”

The barrels eventually were removed. It was around this time that Skylar got word the speed bump petition had been approved. He responded like he had won an Oscar, listing all the people he wanted to thank, including God and his mother. (I was not mentioned in the speech.)

It still took several months for the bumps to show up, but a crew appeared early this spring and began to work on them. He watched out the window with glee, tracking their daily progress. Once the final touches were added and the workers departed, taking their orange cones with them, he wandered to the street, full of wonder, like the Munchkins exploring Munchkinland after Dorothy’s house flattened the Wicked Witch of the East. He then jogged two blocks, admiring each of the four speed bumps with any neighbor who happened to be outside.

We were passing one of the speed bumps on our evening stroll recently with our two dogs and baby. Skylar was pushing the stroller as I held onto the leashes. One of our neighbors saw us walking by, so he stepped out onto his front porch and shouted, “I’ve been meaning to congratulate you.”

“Thank you,” Skylar said. “It was a lot of work, but I’ve noticed the speed bumps have already slowed down the traffic, and I think they also look really nice.”

The man appeared bewildered. “I was congratulating you on the new baby,” he clarified.

“Oh,” Skylar turned a little red. “Of course — the baby. Thank you so much. I guess I’m just excited we made our neighborhood a little safer for him.”

Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.