The Journal of Best Practices

by David Finch

  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.”

  “Yay!” She ran upstairs and returned a few seconds later, reporting that Mommy had okayed the vitamins.

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

  I jogged back upstairs. I’d be eating cereal right now. Getting into the bedroom was easy enough, but at some point in the last thirty seconds, Kristen had locked the bathroom door. So I grabbed the pin that we keep above the door and jimmied the lock open. She was shampooing her hair.

  “Knock knock,” I said.

  “Dave, seriously?”

  “I’m trying to exhibit initiative.”

  “Well . . .” She stopped herself, finishing her response with only a sigh, a sigh that seemed to say, You’re failing.

  “Anyway, what do I give the kids for vitamins?”

  “Read the bottles,” she said. “It’s written on the bottles. Whatever the bottle says to give to them, that’s what they get.”

  “Okay, so a multivitamin, a D vitamin, a calcium, and a probiotic?”

  “You got it.”

  “Okay. Have a good shower. In fact, take your time this morning. I got it under control.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I went back downstairs to administer the vitamins. I was hoping to get my routine started without further interruptions, but it was only a matter of time before Parker started trying to tell me something. After five minutes of me not understanding what he was asking for, Emily translated for him: “He says he wants you to put chocolate milk in his orange juice.”

  What the . . . Is this what goes on down here in the mornings? “Parker, do you want Daddy to put some chocolate milk in your orange juice?”

  He nodded, as if to say, Duh! What have I been blabbing about this whole time?

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

  This time, even the bedroom door had been locked. The shower was no longer running, and I could hear the morning news blaring from the television so that Kristen could hear it over the roar of her h
air dryer. I reached for the pin above the bedroom door, but then I stopped myself. Initiative. Come on, man. Show her you can do this.

  I wasn’t sure what to do about Parker’s chocolate-milk-orange-juice, so I stood in front of the bedroom door, staring at my toes. “Kris?” I called quietly. No answer. I took a deep breath and headed back to the kitchen.

  “Okay, Parker, but just a little bit.”

  By the time Kristen came down, I had given up on servicing demands and had turned on our kids’ favorite cartoon, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! They sat on the couch in a trance, while I did what I could to salvage my routine.

  Kristen seemed none too appreciative of my efforts. I had been expecting her to say something like “This morning proves that we are in a fifty-fifty, full-partnership, enlightened marriage. I’m so proud of you. I love you.”

  What I got was “Why aren’t the kids ready to go to Mary’s?”

  “You didn’t ask me to get the kids ready,” I said through a mouthful of cereal.

  “I didn’t know I needed to ask, Dave.” She looked at the clock. Two minutes to eight. “All right, I need to leave,” she said. “You’ll need to get them next door.”

  Ah, geez, come on! Are you kidding me?! I was about to ask Kristen when I was supposed to have time to get ready, but my Best Practices rushed in to save the day: First of all, buster, this is just a little glimpse of what Kristen goes through every morning—and wouldn’t some empathy feel great right about now? Second, you’d never argue with your boss or with a customer. You would just say “Okay” and be done with it. You need to be that flexible at home, remember. Go on, now. Give it a try.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She thanked me, gave the kids a kiss good-bye, gathered her things, and left. It wasn’t the first time I had ever gotten the kids ready in the morning, but I almost never had to fly completely solo. Kristen was usually home to help, and if she wasn’t, she’d set out all their clothes and leave a note for me with detailed instructions.

  But there was no note, so during Kristen’s first session with a client, I sent her a barrage of texts:

  Can Emily wear her green dress?

  (No, it’s ripped.)

  Can Emily wear her blue dress?

  (Yes.)

  Can Parker wear the gray sweatpants?

  (Yes.)

  Do they need boots or are shoes ok?

  (It’s dry. I don’t care.)

  Emily wants to bring her backpack.

  (No response.)

  Parker won’t let me change him.

  (No response.)

  Hello??

  (No response.)

  It was clear that no more texts were forthcoming, so I called her. The first time, it rang four times before going to voice mail. The second time it rang twice, meaning that she had hit “Ignore Call.” Finally, my calls went straight to voice mail without ringing.

  That night, we talked. It was day one on the job for me as Mr. Tuned In to the Needs of Others, and I wanted some feedback from Kristen. She was working in the family room, submitting bills to insurance companies, but I figured she could make time for a brief mini performance review.

  “So, I thought this morning went pretty well,” I said.

  “That’s good,” she said, reviewing one of her forms.

  “It wasn’t a slam dunk, I guess. I could have used some help there toward the end. All those phone calls and texts, you know. I mean, you kinda blew me off, and I didn’t really appreciate that. You know?”

  Kristen looked up at me and nodded.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’d like to hear your first impressions.”

  She pressed her lips together, leaving only a tight crease where her mouth had been, while she continued staring at me. It was as if something was causing her physical pain. For a few seconds, anyway, because suddenly her face relaxed and she smiled, almost chuckled.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she said, setting her forms down. “I guess it depends on what you thought you were trying to accomplish this morning.”

  I explained that I thought I was taking care of everything so she could have time to get ready for work without rushing around. “I was trying to take initiative,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t like getting blown off.”

  “Okay. And at what point did you start taking initiative?” She was asking this as if she already knew the answer, like a trial lawyer.

  “When I came downstairs—”

  “No.” She shook her head. “That wasn’t it. Running into the bathroom a hundred times to ask me what to do isn’t initiative. When did you start to take initiative? When did you take control of the situation?”

  I caught my reflection in the glass door of our entertainment center and took a moment to hate myself for not knowing the answer.

  “Was it when you turned on the television and let the kids watch cartoons?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Was it when you interrupted my first kid’s session with fifty calls and messages?”

  “Oh. No. It was after that.”

  “When I blew you off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then.” She let the point swirl around in my head for a minute before she continued. “Part of me was just fed up with answering your questions,” she admitted. “But I knew the only way to get you going was to cut you off. I would never just ignore you for the fun of it.”

  I told her that it would have been so much easier—I could have gotten to work before lunch—had she just told me exactly what to do, and she reminded me that she had no one to call when she had to figure stuff out.

  “You just get in there and you do it,” she said. “If you’re paying attention to what they need, and you’re making their needs your highest priority, then you’re probably going to make the same decisions that I would make.”

  Just like that, we were back to empathy. She picked up her forms, tapped them a few times against her knee, and got back to work. For about twenty minutes, I stared at the faceless wooden figurines of a man and a woman holding an infant on a shelf by our television, trying to imagine myself as a spectacularly tuned-in dad. I could see myself supervising breakfast with Emily and Parker and getting them through a typical day without any help, but then I tried imagining the steps it would take to get there and saw nothing.

  “I’m going to have to start journaling this thing until I figure out how to assess the needs of toddlers,” I said.

  Kristen punched some numbers into her calculator, nodding, if only to acknowledge that I was done speaking.

  “You know what I mean?” I said.

  “Dave . . .” She set her stuff on the coffee table and turned to face me. She looked like she wanted to kick me in the teeth, but then she took a deep breath and her face softened. “Look, normally I wouldn’t shortcut your learning process, but I can see this dragging on for months, so I’m just going to help you now.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “Hang on while I get my journal.”

  When I got back, she told me to make a list: “Put down you, me, and the kids.” Next, she told me to write down what I thought each person had needed that morning. Oh, I see where she’s going with this. I completed my list and read it back to her:

  MORNING-TIME NEEDS:

  Me—water, breakfast, medication, vitamins, shower, get ready for work, orderly start to my day, give Kristen time to shower

  Kris—shower, get ready for work

  Kids—breakfast

  Written down, it was hard not to see where my focus lay.

  “Wow. So, I don’t need to eat breakfast?” she asked. I added breakfast to my Kris line, and she continued: “And all the kids need to do is eat breakfast? Hmm. Parker doesn’t need his diaper changed? They don’t need some time to cuddle with us and get their engines started? They don’t need help getting dressed? They don’t need someone to explain to them what they’re doing that day?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, shaking my head, try
ing to keep up.

  “See what I mean?” She smiled.

  “Hang on . . .” I finished writing down her comments and immediately started thinking. How was I supposed to get through my day without focusing entirely on myself? If I wasn’t going to be allowed to assign the highest priority to my own needs, then who would? No one?

  Suddenly, the simple task of giving Kristen time to shower seemed like the hardest thing ever. I’d spent the afternoon at work explaining space vector modulation to eggheads. That task wasn’t without its challenges, but in terms of relative difficulty, it couldn’t hold a candle to this particular Best Practice, a Best Practice that essentially translated to Pay attention to your family.

  “I am a piece of shit,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re not a piece of shit, Dave. You’re just focused inward. Meanwhile, there’s a whole world that exists outside of you and sometimes you just don’t see it. Not unless somebody shows you it’s there or reminds you to see it. We’re all out here.”

  “So if I’m not naturally aware of other people’s needs, then we need to define a process that will help me overcome that. Right?”

  Kristen looked at me blankly for a second, then explained that there was no process, that it was just a matter of engaging with people and putting my needs at a lower priority. It seemed so simple to her, as though I’d told her that my eyes were drying out and she was instructing me to blink. “In the mornings—or anytime—you just have to remember that there are other people who are trying to have a life, too.”