Unexpected flash

 “Oops!” 

I had trained my camera on my husband. He had been lying in bed beside me, head propped up on a pillow while our black cat draped herself over his shoulder like a scarf. I hadn’t hidden the camera, but I had every intention of being furtive in this particular photographic pursuit for posterity.

The room was dark except for their faces, which were illuminated by the word puzzle he was playing on his phone.

The flash had given me away.

My husband laughed at my predicament more than his own.

I had intended to quietly record a different moment in our lives. 

Not just the one in which a sweet feline affectionately paws for his attention, but more pointedly that this serene moment is happening with wires and monitors taped to his face, torso, and index finger. 

Here we are finding a new-age way to fight the dying of the light. 

So many of our stories overlap. Husbands and wives, and parents and children. … That they do is not surprising. But what is often shocking to us is how our shared experiences often diverge.  

A month ago, when he was trying to schedule this sleep test, I was sitting in a waiting room waiting for someone to call my name so that I might be screened for new and more frightening diagnoses.

Instead, his doctor’s office called my phone looking to track down his preexisting conditions, leading me into a testy exchange in which I enquired as to why they had called me instead of him. 

They didn’t think they needed to let me know they were having trouble reaching him. They definitely didn’t think that they needed to remind me I was next of kin.

For better or worse, our stories are all jumbled together. 

For example, the time I took a three-year-old and a five-week-old (by myself) to Maine (while he worked) and the newborn spent four-and-a-half of the six-hour drive crying inconsolably. When I tell the story, I feel like its hero, having survived the arduous journey. But he only hears only that he is a zero for not even playing a minor role in such a major undertaking.

When he tells the one wherein I broke up my relationship with vegetarianism to feast on a foil-wrapped plate of airline chicken, I remind him that is essentially my story and his experience of it mocks me.

 

Not that I mind exactly. 

But he knows what I mean. 

Even these little vignettes can have so many perspectives it can be difficult to focus on the ones from other vantage points. 

Like the stories I tell out of earshot of my kids … the ones that recount cutesie quirks like toddler mispronunciations and silly dances. Youth offers its own richness of embarrassments, they don’t need me laughing about my memories to make them feel foolish. 

It seems like it should be a simple thing, knowing where a story will go … even when it seems straightforward. But it's not always so. Often it’s the unexpected flash that sheds light.