The Day My Husband Would Not Help

I was in the hospital four days.

Here is the part that changed everything, and I did not do any of it on purpose. I want to say that clearly. I did not plan a lesson. I was too busy trying to breathe to plan anything. All I did was be gone for four days. That was all it took.

Because for four days, Dale had to run the house.

He had to take the days off his route that he would not take when I asked. He had to get three kids up and fed and to the bus. He had to find the lunch stuff and sign the folder he did not know existed and he had to answer when Sam’s teacher called about the thing Sam needed that Dale had never once in his life known about. He had to figure out that his mother takes a water pill in the morning and a heart pill at night and that if you get it wrong she swells up. He had to do her hair, or more likely not do it, because when I came home Lorraine’s hair had not been touched in four days and she would not look at me when I noticed. He had to do the wash and run out of clean towels and not understand why. He had to cook, and the kids told me later it was cereal three nights and pizza one.

And the whole time, his mother was watching him.

That is the thing I did not count on. Lorraine was there in her chair in the middle of it all, seeing her son run her daughter-in-law’s life for four days and sink under it. Seeing him snap at the kids. Seeing him stand in the kitchen at seven in the morning with a lunch box in his hand like it was a thing from another planet. Seeing what I carry, laid bare, because the person who normally made it invisible was two hours away in a hospital bed.

I came home on a Saturday. Pam drove over to get me because Dale had to stay with the kids, which was the first time in fourteen years a sentence like that had ever been true in our house.

I will not pretend I walked in the door full of fire. I walked in the door tired down to my bones and still short of breath and hooked to the idea that I would just pick my life back up and carry it again, because that is what I knew how to do. I even started to. I walked in and the kitchen was a disaster and I set my bag down and I reached for a dish rag, four days out of intensive care, out of pure habit.