The Day My Husband Would Not Help

Lorraine is Dale’s mother. She is seventy-nine and she came to live with us four years ago after her hip went and then her balance after that. She has her own room off the back, what used to be the den. She can get herself to the bathroom with the walker on a good day, but she cannot cook, she cannot bathe without someone close by, and she cannot be left all day without a person checking on her. That person is me. I get her pills into the right little cups by day of the week. I do her hair because her shoulders do not lift that high anymore. I sit with her in the afternoons and we watch her programs and she tells me the same stories about Dale’s father, who I never met, and I have learned to laugh at the same places every time, and I do not mind it. I love Lorraine. I need you to know that too, because of what she does later in this.

So that is the load. Five people, a house, a town’s worth of errands, and an old woman who needs me close by. I carried it. I had been carrying it for four years, and the laundry part and the kids part for a lot longer than that, and most days I did not even think about the weight of it. It was just the shape of my life.

What I was asking for, at four thirty in the morning with my lungs shut, was for Dale to carry it for one single day. To call in a sick day on his route the way he did twice last fall for deer season. To get the kids to the bus. To check on his own mother. To be the grown person in the house while I either got on top of this attack or went to the hospital and got on top of it there.

That was the whole ask. One day.

When the nebulizer cup ran dry, I was a little better. Not good. Better. I could get most of a breath in if I did not move too much. I turned off the machine and I sat there in the quiet and I made the decision I had made a hundred times before, which was that I would handle it myself. I would ride it out. People do not understand that an asthma attack is not a thing that happens and ends. A bad one can sit on you for days, flaring and easing, and the whole time you are one wrong breath from the ER. I knew I was in one of those. And I knew, sitting on that bathroom floor, that I was going to go through it with no one.