The Journal of Best Practices (15 page)

Kristen has often suggested that I try a little
less
when I set out to accomplish something, that perhaps it would make things easier on me. But that philosophy doesn’t compute at all. Everything I want to accomplish is done with the precision of a military operation. It’s exhausting, but it’s the only way for me. This is where Kristen and I differ. To me, a task is a puzzle comprised of a million tiny pieces that must be arranged properly. Usually I find myself more appreciative of the procedure than of the outcome itself. Kristen, on the other hand, sees the process only as the means to an end. I see the trees, in other words, and Kristen sees the forest. Or, more to the point, I see a handsome genius declining involvement in an excruciating process, while Kristen sees a fully grown, half-naked man, covered in a towel, rummaging through a major home appliance for a pair of underpants.

We were midway through our movie, and the laundry had yet to be put away. Kristen appeared to be enjoying the film, but I was busy ruminating and had tuned it out completely. I was trying to find some insight into my laundry aversion so that we could discuss it further. I knew that folding wasn’t an obsession of mine. I knew that I would make the process painfully difficult for myself. But I also knew that those obstacles could be overcome with willpower. The biggest challenge was this: I couldn’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t have been the one doing laundry in the first place.
That’s her job.
This was not the sort of thing a guy could safely announce to his wife, especially during a Hugh Grant movie, but it felt like such a significant factor. I should have let the matter go, but instead I kept digging.

“I’d like to blame this on my parents,” I said.

“What? What are you talking about?” Kristen paused the movie, and now I had Hugh Grant grinning at me from inside my television, as if he were thinking,
Right, now
this
ought to be entertaining.

“The fact that I don’t fold and put away the laundry. I always assumed . . . I mean, I figured that once we were married . . . Anyway, I think it’s their fault.”

Kristen rolled her eyes. “I know you think it’s the wife’s job, Dave. Just say it. And yes, that may have been your family’s system, but you’re an adult now. Right?” She continued the movie—I swear I saw Hugh Grant wink at her—and I returned to my introspection.
That went well.

I never intended to live like a male chauvinist. I don’t consider myself to be one, yet prior to 2008 my de facto philosophies on the division of family labor would have suggested otherwise. My childhood seems to have had a lot to do with that.

My parents weren’t chauvinists, but they were very traditional, in the traditional sense of the word. They each had clearly defined roles. They both worked—my dad was a farmer and my mom was an elementary school teacher—but it was understood that Mom was the domestic champion of the family. If women in Mayberry or Stepford did it, then my mom did it: cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening. My brother and I only had to mow the lawn and help Dad around the farm—that was the extent of our contributions.

My dad didn’t have to do much in the way of household chores. He would repair a toilet or wire a new outlet in the laundry room, but you’d never find him brandishing a toilet brush or sliding an iron across a pair of slacks. Although, in fairness, a few times a year I would spot my dad at the kitchen sink, doing dishes for my mom on the evenings when she could be found lying on their bed, tightly curled in on herself, suffering a migraine. I would stand silently in the doorway that separated the hallway from the kitchen, rubbing my fingertips along the glossy white molding, and watch him. He would first rinse a dish, then scrub it clean with soap and his bare hand, then repeat the process several times, making the dish spotless before setting it delicately and quite deliberately into its designated place in the dishwasher. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner for four people could take my dad all night; it would have taken my mom about ten minutes. Everything done in a certain way—like father, like son.

Then there was laundry. The laundry system with which I grew up was simple in terms of my participation therein. I’d observed that my mom almost never washed items left on my bedroom floor, but the tall wicker hamper that she placed in our bathroom was serviced regularly—at least twice per week, usually more. So when I needed something washed, it went into the hamper, and a few days later it would appear with its buddies on my bed, the whole lot of garments individually folded and stacked into neat piles. If she saw that the hamper wasn’t quite full, she’d go out of her way to find me and ask if there was anything else I needed washed. Later that evening, my à la carte laundry order would be delivered to my bedroom, perfectly folded by my wiped-out mom.

“Here you go, sweetie,” she’d say, handing me the clothes and kissing my forehead. “I’m exhausted. Good night.” Then I’d set them on top of my dresser, knowing that by the same time the following day, as if by magic, the clothes would have made their way into their respective drawers.

That’s
what I call doing laundry, and for the longest time, I was puzzled that Kristen didn’t operate the same way.

When we first moved in together, I tried making things easy on Kristen by instituting a hamper system similar to the one with which I’d grown up. However, my married-adult hamper system differed somewhat. For starters, I located the hamper in the bedroom closet rather than in our tiny master bathroom. The other difference was that Kristen didn’t seem to give a shit about my clothes or my hamper.

I would load it up until it became a massive, unstable heap. I’d let a week go by without mentioning it, having learned that people who aren’t my mom get sensitive about demands for personal service. My patience ran out whenever I’d find myself without clothes to wear to work, at which point I’d ask Kristen, “Were you planning to do the laundry at some point?” What can I say? The question always felt innocent enough, though looking back now it seems outrageously manipulative. I didn’t mean to be passive-aggressive. I wasn’t willfully imposing my antiquated worldview on her. I just thought that was how things worked. But how else was she supposed to have interpreted it? Had we known back then that I wasn’t naturally equipped to adapt to someone else’s system, this whole laundry situation might have been resolved sooner. As it was, I looked like an ass. I constantly found myself confused.
Am I an ass for assuming she’d do my laundry? Why
wouldn’t
she do my laundry? The purview of a wife has always included laundry, has it not?

To Kristen’s credit, I’m still alive. Also to Kristen’s credit, she would reply diplomatically to questions like mine, suggesting that if she was washing her own clothes, then I could throw my stuff in with hers. “Or, if you have clothes that need to be washed right now, you know how to do it,” she’d always conclude.
Yes,
I’d think, standing there in my bottom-of-the-barrel emergency clothes (brown corduroy pants, a tight blue polo shirt, and black socks),
I know how to do it . . . but that’s not the point!

Due to what Kristen calls a “ridiculously high rate of sock-changings,” I was constantly finding myself barefooted during our first year of marriage, so I eventually started washing my own clothes. That, too, became a problem. I was washing only my clothes, not hers. It didn’t occur to me to wash everything together—why would it have? I don’t wear her clothes, I wear my clothes. This easily could have been one of the questions on that Asperger’s evaluation:
Do you need to be told explicitly to wash your wife’s clothes if you’re doing a load of laundry?
The follow-up questions being
Do you need to be told explicitly to fold the clothes when they’re dry, even though you can explain the theory of relativity?
and
Wow, seriously?

Perhaps a more telling question would be
Do you find it almost impossible to shed precepts and adapt to new ways of doing things?
Thanks to my Asperger’s brain, the answer is an emphatic yes (especially when adapting means I’ll be personally inconvenienced in some way), while an Asperger’s-neutral question such as
Does it make sense that a person’s gender dictates how they contribute around the house?
would garner a logical no. And yet, there I sat one evening, face-to-face with the lovable Hugh Grant and the realization that I had expected Kristen to do all the housework, just as my mom had.

Later that evening, well after the movie was finished, I would write in my journal,
Housework was my mom’s job, but that doesn’t mean it’s Kristen’s job
. I’d give serious thought to areas in which I could contribute. I would deem the toy room too chaotic for my involvement and therefore leave it to Kristen, but I would commit to continuing my responsibilities around the kitchen. I would design an hour-by-hour schedule for housework that would help me to stay on track, a list so unrealistic and unwieldy that we’d never be able to maintain it:

Ultimately, grimacing, I would commit in writing to folding and putting away the laundry.

But that would all come later. The movie was over now; the credits were rolling and I had some damage control to do. Kristen was sitting next to me, and next to her was a motley stack of linens topped with a bra. Because my previous attempts at talking had failed so miserably, I picked up my phone and texted her:

Her phone vibrated and she picked it up while I pretended not to look. A second later my phone buzzed:

Kristen slowly extended her hand in front of herself, as if she were reaching for something.

The phone buzzed in her hand and this time she understood. Laughing, she lowered her hand, and I took it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For assuming that you would be responsible for all the housework.”

“It’s fine, Dave,” she said. “Everyone has expectations. But you have to understand that there are other ways of doing things, and you need to learn how to open up to them.”

“I will do more around the house. I just need to practice it, that’s all.”

“I’m not asking you to do much,” she said. “I’m just saying that when you see clothes that need to be folded, you can fold them. When you see dishes that need to be washed or put away, you can do that. If there are toys on the floor, pick them up. That’s all I’m saying.”

You need me to be autonomous and learn how to adapt. You need me to be an adult. Ugh.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it. I’m going to figure out a plan and then I’ll get started working on it.”

“I don’t want you to spend a lot of time making plans and worrying about this,” she said. “Don’t make this a bigger deal than it needs to be. Just pick up, fold, put away. Help. That’s it.”

“Okay.”

“Without pouting,” she added.

“Pouting?” I picked up my phone.

Go with the flow.

B
efore we were married, Kristen and I lived with roommates for a year. They were friends of ours, and it seemed like such a good idea. It was one of those opportunities that neurotypicals might look forward to: a chance to celebrate and bond and party as only young, unmarried people with decent-paying jobs can—a yearlong last hurrah, and I missed it completely.

I wish I had enjoyed it more. Who knew living with friends could be such a disaster? They were, after all, good people, and as roommates go, they really weren’t so bad.

I’ve had bad roommates. One of my college roommates, Derrick, wanted to kill me. That’s not an exaggeration. He waited for me one morning in our room, and when I returned from my early classes, he shouted that he couldn’t take any more of my shit and threatened to murder me if I didn’t move out by the end of the week. “Can you give me another week at least?” I pleaded, holding up my calculus book with both hands to protect myself. “It’s midterms.”

“Fuck you, boy!” he boomed. “Fuck you, locking me out of the room at night!”
But I thought I made it clear that I lock the door at eleven thirty sharp, no matter what!
“Fuck you, waking me up every morning and telling me you’re leaving!”
Isn’t that just proper roommate etiquette?
“And fuck you for moving my shit around the bathroom! You don’t touch another man’s things, bitch! Fuck you!”
But your system was all wrong! Bar soap doesn’t belong on a sink and toothbrushes should never be stored in a shower caddy!

Derrick was strikingly muscular and I was mostly ribs and hair. Something about the volume of his voice and the way he was pacing the room, telling me that I didn’t know who he was or where he came from, or what it was like to get “beat by an insane motherfucker”—it all seemed to suggest that he meant business. A couple of days later, after acing my calculus midterm (A+!), I moved in with a kid so inclined to talk about the time he’d spent working at the Target store in Eagan, Minnesota, that within a few weeks I’d started to reconsider my decision to move away from scary-ass Derrick.