Happy Anniversary to Us!
Mon., September 2, 10:47 AM
It sneaks up on you – thirty-four years. It was Labor Day then too. More than half my life… Oh, sure, I knew when I married him that he still had not grown up. It was to be expected from the type of childhood he had. In my naïveté I believed I could just bring him up with the kids. Now the kids are grown up, and I still have a seventy-plus-year-old child.
I’m telling you, he’s a laugh a minute. Husband definitely started going downhill when he retired, and he has kept himself virtually housebound since he broke his hip a few years ago. He’s living in his own little world and paying very little attention to the rest of us. He’s not incapacitated. There’s nothing that keeps him from getting dressed and going out for a walk except sheer inertia. Once or twice a month he requests a ride – to the bank, to the barber, to the store – but he wants to do it all in one day. I tried to break it up once, suggested he do the barber one day and the store the next. “You mean I gotta go out twice in one week?”
So he shuffles around the house – think Tim Conway’s character – from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen. He almost never goes into the cellar any more, which is probably just as well. In order to keep him out of some things – the trash, cat food, extra groceries, for example – I store them downstairs. It’s like little kids; when they don’t understand “don’t touch,” you just put things out of their reach. He has this old compulsion about garbage, that you must consolidate it in order to save bags. So he sticks his hands in the trash to tear things up and “make room,” or to save containers we don’t need. We have more than enough bags (I used to say they’d last till the turn of the century; they did and beyond), but he can’t get beyond the time when there weren’t enough.
If I stand back and look at each situation, it’s funny. (Even though it’s annoying as it occurs.) Example: I’m experiencing a rather violent nosebleed and I’m leaning over the wastebasket when Husband walks into the room. “We need milk.” That is, he needs milk; no one else drinks it. Realizing that he doesn’t see me, I say “I’m bleeding to death here.” And he says, “You don’t have to go right now. Later…” I could be having a heart attack; he’s still in his own little world.
Or his hearing. I was in the bathroom – just in there, with the door open. I hear him getting out of bed, and when his door opens, I call out, “do you need to get in here?” No answer. I call a little louder, “do you need the bathroom?” Still no answer. Eventually he shuffles the five feet or so down the hall and looks into the bathroom. “Oh, shit, you’re in there.” We did get him a hearing aid a few years ago, but he won’t use it. Too many batteries.
The bathroom itself is an amazing constraint. I don’t know how we used to get five people out to school or to work each morning. Husband has now forgotten that anyone else will need the facilities. We will remind him that he can’t stay in there long and still expect to have to wait fifteen to twenty minutes. He’s doing what he thinks is important – cleaning the cat box, making sure we have enough t.p. (If he thinks we’re out, he issues an order; I buy it by the case, but it’s in the cellar.) One morning I tried to get in – “I’ll be out in a minute” – and he still took so long that Cat was knocking on the door!
One reason I still go out to work is to remind him that I’m not at his beck and call. (Well, not completely.) When I typed at home, I never could teach him that I was on someone else’s clock and that I couldn’t stop to chat just because he wanted something. Y’know, I married him for better or worse, but not for lunch.
I know I shouldn’t laugh at him so much – at least not in his presence. I remind myself that we’ve had more good years than bad, that he was a very good husband and father, and that he was thrilled at having his own family at last. Who but I can remember him coming home after a day’s work to a screaming baby whose mother had no milk? He walked the floor with that baby while I napped, and I had milk after half an hour or so. He didn’t consider it heroic, though I did; “It hadda be done.” He took care of us all when the kids were little, and he never tried to stop me from going back to work or anything else I wanted to do. I guess we did okay.
