Creative Everyday

My husband always wakes me although I plead to let me sleep until the alarm sounds.

Here’s how it goes:

Sleepily, I mumble what time is it. 

“Tell me” he says.

It’s 6:37, we’ll get up at 7:00 I say.

“Tell me what?” he says urgently, demanding answer. It means what should he wear today.

Can I go to the restroom first? Go put on an undershirt and underpants, you know, the white ones I tell him.

“What does it look like?”  I don’t answer this one, I know that he knows the Jockey stuff.

Then he says: “No, you’re really good at that!”

To make a choice, even when the selection is simple like underwear in one closet drawer has a lingering question:

“What goes on bottom?”

I can’t image what it’s like to look in my closet and not have any idea what is appropriate to wear, where it fits on my body and how it fastens, buttons. Since he does not recognize his clothes, everyday his wardrobe is new to him. He never questions the outfits I pick for him as long as the pants are not shorts.  He has no favorite clothes. In the afternoon, he would no longer recognize a jacket that he had put on in the morning so his name is in everything.  If someone who loves you chose your clothes tomorrow, would it resemble something you might have selected for yourself and would you be comfortable?

Today I almost cried looking at the ‘learn to count’ books for very young children. Those pages with big numerals and pictures of two ducks and three pigs are filled with hope and a mathematical future to come.  My husband can no longer do simple arithmetic or read numbers in a sentence. It’s just gone. I make him read me the time on his watch, over and over again, until he comes close to being right and he doesn’t mind my repetitive question. He has lots of patience with me.