The two percent

This 'two percent' is a shorthand way of describing the following: my sister Cynthia got 98% for maths. She proudly told my dad this, and he asked, rather witheringly: "So? What happened to the other two percent?" It is of course when you fall short at the final fence (rather than at the first!)

 This happened: my aunt apparently kicked her husband when they were both old. I imagine Auntie Madge must have been about 70 and he was about 80. (He was her second husband, not the father of her children).  I remember my mother telling me this with a shocked expression on her face: "Aunt Madge kicked poor old Hancock - such dreadful abuse. But of course your Auntie Madge was always strange and difficult. I never warmed to her!" [She was my father's sister. I didn't like her because whenever she phoned my father she would talk for ages about things that interested me not one bit. I would just have to listen to this barrage of words. Eventually I'd get an "I'll call him, Auntie Madge" in edgewise.]

And I nodded along with her, thinking that's terrible. Really it is. That poor helpless old man, suffering in the clutches of such a woman. What both my mother and I didn't think of, was all the days and weeks and nights she was taking care of a senile old man - washing him (did she wash him tenderly?), cooking his meals, cleaning up his poo when he couldn't make it to the toilet, and ... and having no life of her own.

I could well be more like Auntie Madge than I want to admit. I am 65 and my poor darling husband is only 71. He is frail. He is so frail that when he walks around the swimming pool he almost falls in. He walks slowly. He manages a lot of things in spite of being so frail. He can open jars for me when my arthritic fingers can't. He makes copious cups of coffee - lovely espressos with a machine: at least four a day. Occasionally he cooks a meal. He still drives - to the doctor, or to fetch the grandchildren from school. What he can't or won't do is legion. It is everything else. He can't: clean the house, do the washing and hang it out, buy the groceries, think about what meal to cook, clean the pool, do the garden, organise people to fix the fascia boards or paint the window frames to stop them rusting to bits, pay the accounts, think of things to buy for the house and garden and buy them, look up without falling over, (I know!) and, almost daily, he is growing weaker and weaker.

He does the things he needs to for himself. Now, he is strong enough to get out of the bath. It was not a permanent thing, only an illness. He got better. He sorts out his own medicine. He manages his life okay.

He is a dear man and I love him dearly. But what I am doing more and more, is exchanging my life for his. And I am a curmudgeonly type of woman. I like my freedom. I like to be able to not eat a meal if I feel like it, or to stay out all day without explaining where I'm going and what I'm doing, and visit my friends without worrying about him. And he stubbornly refuses to think. He will not think about what would happen if I die. He won't even think about hiring someone to do something like cut the lawn. If I don't, it doesn't get done. He passively sits on the couch all day, looking at his phone, or the computer, being entertained or possibly educated. Sure, I would have the same amount of stuff to do were he not around and I am eternally grateful he thought about acquiring pension, so that we have enough to live on. But I have to look at the money and decide what we can afford and what we can't. He simply won't (or can't?) think. He has no input. Is he deeply depressed? Is he sicker than I can possibly know? Or is he just bloody passive? Who knows?

 

But you see there! I was talking of the two percent being when Aunt Madge lost her temper! What I should have looked at was our relationship as a whole, then I would have realised that my perceiving of Geoff's passivity is wrong. His passivity is actually only two percent!  Two percent of a pretty wonderful character. He is kind and generous, he is reliable, he is honest and very amusing. Over the years, he has beavered away, burdened with 98% of the input into our relationship! Yesterday he cooked the supper (for eight people by the way - he made a potjie) packed the dishwasher and made coffee and tea afterwards. How's that? AND: how would we have been able to retire comfortably, had he not slogged away at the same job for over forty years? (Well, luckily our daughter-in-law persuaded us to invest it somewhere else other than the people at Momentum, who claimed it may keep us in funds for two years if we are lucky!) So how I see it now:  HE put in 98% of the work in our marriage, I put in 98% of the work in our marriage, and together it all adds up to 100%  -- ho ho ho.