The Journal of Best Practices (24 page)

Kristen’s voice trembled as she told me how she had felt alone and depressed in these moments. Her grip on the notebook had tightened and I saw that her handwriting on these pages was uncharacteristically frantic. Certain words had been underlined multiple times—
high maintenance
,
and
TOO MUCH DRAMA
!!!

“I do not appreciate all your little comments about Mary raising our kids. Mary is not raising our children, Mary is
watching
our children. There is a difference. I am raising our children, Dave, and I happen to work. In fact, lots of moms work. It hurts me when you say shit like that, and it’s not fair . . .”

She went on, and I started feeling overwhelmed. It was not only the cumulative weight of all these painful experiences but the urge to make up for them as soon as possible. I couldn’t erase five years of relative neglect and misunderstanding, but I could make sure it wouldn’t happen anymore. Enough was enough. But first I had to stop her.

“Kristen?”

She set her notebook down. “What?”

“I’m sorry for interrupting you. But I need to take notes.”

“Go right ahead.”

The Best Practices worked because I wrote them down. I worked through my thoughts on paper, and I distilled them into rules I could follow. Once an idea existed on paper it felt more tangible. I could touch it, stare at it, carry it around with me, or put it away when I needed to. It couldn’t disappear as mental notes sometimes did. At work, I wrote everything down. Why wouldn’t I make the same effort at home? Nothing could have been more important than what Kristen had chosen to share with me—honest emotions and insights into how my behaviors had hurt her and driven a wedge between us. We had laid the groundwork over the past eleven months, and whether she knew it or not, she was presenting me with what I’d come to know as my “advanced topics”—goals that would have been far beyond my reach a year before. Goals that would elevate our relationship to new heights. Here Kristen thought she was just venting, but because I’d chosen to listen, she was actually giving me direction.

I grabbed my journal and over the next hour, I took three pages of notes on areas where I wanted to show improvement. Three more pages to add to my Journal of Best Practices.

Of all the people I know, I’m the only one who would ever take notes during an ass-kicking. But it was the greatest thing I could have done. Taking notes allowed me to slow down the discussion, to understand her points. It also provided some emotional buffer. Rather than getting overly emotional, I could respond constructively and focus on decoding the underlying problems and solutions. It allowed me to be proactive rather than defensive. Slowing the emotions down by taking notes was the best way for me to process what she said and use it to influence real change in my behaviors.

The upside was that by the end of the evening I was holding in my hands a road map to marital happiness. The downside was that real action would be required to pull it off—none of the comments suggested I rest on my laurels or take more naps. From everything she’d told me that evening, it was clear that if we were going to move forward, then I was going to have to become a well-functioning, fully autonomous man. Or, as I discovered during our laundry fiasco a few months earlier, I was going to have to become an adult. She had been right after all; this was not going to be easy.

Kristen fell asleep not long after we finished talking. I didn’t want to go to bed without a plan for turning things around once and for all, so while she slept, I analyzed my notes in an attempt to extract some kind of strategy:

The single unifying concept seemed to be:
Kristen and the kids need you to be able to manage yourself by yourself.
Sitting on the bed, with Kristen sound asleep, I once again found myself with a worthy goal and no idea how to define the first step toward achieving it. I was ready to call it a night when one of my notes leaped out at me from the page:
Help lighten her burden by showing
initiative
once in a while.

There it was. I realized that if I could take initiative when it came to things like stabilizing my moods then Kristen would be able to go about her day without having to worry about what might set me off. With a sense of initiative, I might actually vacuum once in a while or take the kids to the grocery store so that Kristen could enjoy some downtime—downtime that would be sweetened by the fact that she didn’t have to ask for it. Initiative could make me seem more empathic.
Boo-yah
.

I wrote the word
Initiative
on a scrap of paper and taped it to the bottom of my mirror in the bathroom. I would see it whenever I washed my hands, brushed my teeth, or shaved, and it would remind me of what I needed to do that day to be the husband I knew Kristen deserved.

Give Kristen time to shower without crowding her.

T
he next morning, I woke up at seven o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual. I looked around the empty bedroom, heard the kids playing downstairs, and it occurred to me that Kristen had been downstairs with the kids for an hour and a half.
Oh, shit,
I thought.
I have a new stack of Best Practices to work on.

With that, I headed straight for the bathroom. I meant to study the features of my face for a little while, but there, taped to the mirror, was my scrap of paper:
Initiative.

Damn it.

After washing my hands, I shuffled over to my nightstand and pulled out my notes from the previous evening. In determined handwriting I had scrawled
Kristen needs time in the morning to shower and get ready for work.
Compared to the more advanced topics on the list, such as
Be more present in our family’s moments
and
Take a break from your own head once in a while,
the shower-time thing seemed relatively easy to master. I’d start there.

Normally on workdays, Kristen would wake up at five thirty or six, a few minutes before the kids, and try to take a quick shower. Inevitably the shower would wake up Emily because her room was next to our bathroom. Emily would toddle past me, sound asleep in my bed, to join Kristen in the bathroom until she finished showering. Then they’d wake up Parker and go downstairs for breakfast. After breakfast (so I’m told) Kristen would play with the kids before returning to our bathroom to finish getting ready, while they crowded her and played at her feet. All I ever saw of this process was the tail end, when Kristen would emerge from the bathroom to kiss me good-bye and tell me she was taking the kids next door to Mary’s. That’s when my day would begin.

How can I make time for her to get ready without interfering with my own routine?
I wondered, sitting down on the edge of our bed.
Maybe she could wake up a half hour earlier, say five
A.M
.?
I didn’t think that would work.

Another option was to wake myself up a little earlier, shorten my own shower, and use the extra time to get the kids ready while Kristen did whatever she needed to do. But shortening my daily soak wouldn’t work either. We’d tried it once, a long time ago (long before my diagnosis), after I’d taken an hour-long shower and left her with no hot water. “Are you kidding?” she’d yelled at me, shivering under the stream of chilly water. The next morning she took action, intercepting me as I meandered naked toward the bathroom.

“Okay,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing in there for an hour, but today you’re going to learn how to shower from head to toe in less than five minutes. I’m going to show you.”

Five minutes?!
“Who showers in five minutes?”

“Come on,” she said. “Chop chop. Time’s a-wasting.” She opened the shower door and turned on the water.

“Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?” I asked, reaching for her shirt.

“No, I’m going to stand out here and help you.” She batted my hand away and folded her arms. “You need to learn how to do this.” Disappointed, I stepped into the shower, and she shut the door behind me.

“Start washing your hair,” she instructed.

“I don’t start with my hair.”

“Your way takes an hour. Start washing your hair.”

She had me there. Kristen typically gets ready in about a tenth of the time it takes me—hair, makeup, sixteen outfit rearrangements, and she’s out of there in ten minutes. I decided to go all in and follow her instructions, knowing all the while that I’d be discombobulated for the rest of the day. I must not have told her how important my shower routine was to my daily functioning. I must not have known.

She continued guiding me through what she called a “normal process”: get in, wash, and get out. It was all business and nowhere near as enjoyable as my typical shower: wander in, stand with the hot water on my back for ten or twenty minutes, soak my head when the moment feels right, see which patterns and words emerge from the square tiles, write some thoughts in the steam on the shower door, recite the contents of the soap bottle and wash my torso, recite the shampoo ingredients and wash my hair, and so forth.

With Kristen’s help, I completed the shower in four minutes. She was beaming.

“You did it,” she said. “How does it feel?”

“That was fucking horrible,” I said, scowling and drying off. “What kind of maniac showers like this every morning?”

It was the first and last time I took a shower that short.

The notes I had taken the night before were screaming at me:
Let
her
decide when she’ll take her shower!
I grabbed my phone and texted Clint at work:

Morning looking dicey. Will probably be late.

Then I headed downstairs to see how this was all going to work out.

Kristen was setting the kids’ plates down on the kitchen table, and I could see that she hadn’t showered yet. Emily and Parker climbed up into their chairs, ready to eat. The box of frozen waffles lay empty on the counter next to the toaster, its inner plastic pouch resting not far away, near the sink. The soy-butter container was still open, a crumby butter knife sitting atop its rim. Little dollops of syrup dotted the countertop, and for some reason, Emily’s doll was lying facedown in the sink. Normally, I would have shaken my pillow-creased head, thinking,
Can’t you keep this kitchen clean in the mornings?
but I was determined to show only initiative.

“Hey, Kris,” I said, “I can get this. Why don’t you go upstairs and get ready for work?”

“Oh,” she said, stopping in her tracks with a bottle of orange juice in her hand. She looked stunned. “Okay. Thanks!”

I blinked my eyes, and when they reopened, she was already upstairs, the bottle of orange juice practically suspended in the air where she had been standing.

I looked at Emily. She looked at me like I was a substitute teacher.

“Mommy says I can have some more orange juice,” she said.

Orange juice. Orange juice
. I looked at the clock: 7:36. The request was outside of my comprehension. More to the point, it was outside of my routine. Normally, I went downstairs in the morning to accomplish only the following: drink a lot of water, take my ADD medication and vitamins, eat my breakfast in front of the television, and then scurry back upstairs for my luxurious shower. Like breathing, this process was essential to my getting through the day alive. I couldn’t be interrupted or bothered, or else I’d get thrown off. When that happened, I’d melt down and we’d all lose. Hadn’t Kristen explained all of this to our two- and three-year-olds?

“Umm . . . okay, hang on,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I shuffled back upstairs, where Kristen was getting undressed. She partially covered herself with her shirt when I opened the bedroom door.

“Nice!” I said. She rolled her eyes and I continued. “Can Emily have more orange juice?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Okay then.” She nodded. “Anything else?”

“No. All right, have a good shower.”

I shut the door behind me, wishing that Kristen would call off this whole experiment on my behalf and go back to taking care of everything.

As I poured Emily’s juice, she advised me that now would be a good time to hand out their vitamins. “The orange ones, the purple ones, and the white ones,” she specified.

Vitamins . . . Vitamins . . .
Parker dropped his waffle on the floor and burst into tears. “Parker, it’s okay, bud. Daddy will get it, just a second.”
I haven’t taken my meds yet. Everyone calm down.

Emily repeated her request for vitamins, and I couldn’t take it. “Sweetie, go upstairs and ask Mommy if it’s okay. Daddy needs to concentrate on picking up this waffle.”