The Journal of Best Practices (20 page)

Fuck this. Maybe they are better than us. Comically better. Painfully, obviously, woefully better than us.

Then I turned my thoughts to Kristen.
Why isn’t she outside helping me? Why can’t she buy
us
matching hats?
My internal grousing was interrupted by one of our kids screaming inside, then a loud thud, and then more screaming. Through the front window I watched Kristen gather Parker up from the floor as she sent Emily, crying, to sit in time-out. I looked back at Andy’s house. As I stared into the bright red nose of that cocksucking, smug little reindeer, it was easy to imagine their children inside, calmly reading books or practicing long division in a fragrant cloud of homemade gingerbread. Or perhaps from behind a frosted windowpane they’d sip eggnog and delight in watching the doofus next door tripping over himself.

Kristen opened the door and the screams of our children’s tantrums echoed off nearby houses. “How’s it going out here, Dave?” she asked. She didn’t mean for me to give her an update on my progress, she meant,
It’s a zoo in here, I need your help, pick up the pace.

I shrugged.

“It’s going shitty, isn’t it?” She rolled her eyes and slammed the door.

Perfect
.

Two months later, at the end of January, our Christmas decorations were still up. Andy and Mary had been the first on the block to take theirs down, on New Year’s Day, and one by one the neighbors followed. Wreaths were removed from doors, illuminated plastic candy canes were plucked from snow-covered lawns, lights were pulled from rooftops and returned carefully to their boxes. But over at the Finch house garland clung to the porch posts, a wooden nutcracker cheerfully greeted visitors at the door with all the relevance of a month-late sympathy card, and sprays of holly hung by large red bows from our garage lanterns. I hadn’t gotten around to taking it all down. Or shaving, for that matter, or visiting my customers. I had finally taken Kristen’s advice and was trying to shift my worldview—not to align precisely with hers, but enough to meet somewhere in the middle. If our perfect was in fact all around me, then I wanted to be able to access it. Since December, all of my mental energy had been invested in understanding how I might accomplish that.

The challenge lay in overcoming conventional logic: only perfect is perfect, so any other marital circumstances would be—by definition—imperfect. The only solution I could conceive of was to redefine
perfection
. At first that meant erasing any value I had previously assigned to the word in relation to marriage.
Constant bliss
—gone.
Traditional division of labor
—outta there.
Easy, painless, matchy-matchy
—see ya. This exercise wasn’t exactly easy. The only reason I was able to shed my longstanding definitions of
perfection
was that I had absolutely no other choice. Reality was going to stick around for a while, whether I liked it or not. I realized that if I was going to appreciate the gifts of my marriage and stop coveting my neighbor’s life, then redefining
perfection
would be the only path to get me there.

Taking a closer look at the meaning of
perfect
provoked a number of questions, such as
How did we end up here?
and
Wasn’t our relationship indeed perfect back when we were dating?
It was easy to see that reality and my intentions diverged the moment Kristen and I said “I do.” When we were dating, everything felt perfect, yes, but then again I hadn’t expected Kristen to come over and do my laundry, cook all my meals, and dust underneath my bed. A girlfriend didn’t do those things, per my definition. Kristen never led me to believe that she was Susie Homemaker, yet I had assumed that a wholesale shift in her priorities would come with time, marriage, and kids. Besides, I couldn’t get over how lucky I was to be with her. I was not at all focused on what I thought she should be doing. I was simply focused on making myself better for her.

More interesting still were the insights about myself that resulted from a month and a half of feverish journaling. For one, I quickly realized that I had no business holding Kristen to any standard of homemaking because I had clearly failed to deliver any sense of normalcy myself. It’s safe to assume that Kristen didn’t spend her childhood dreaming of someday marrying a guy who would tote around a personal instruction manual reminding himself not to melt down when her family reunion goes thirty minutes longer than the invitations indicated.
Kristen is no June Cleaver,
I wrote.
But then, I’m no Ward. So if she’s not June, and I’m not Ward, how can I expect us to be all Ward-and-June-Cleaver like my parents or Andy and Mary? If anything, we’re like a heterosexual adaptation of
The Odd Couple. (There you have it, folks—the single most imbecilic personal breakthrough in recorded history.)

While my neighborhood was busy putting the Christmas season to rest I had finally made some progress. Andy sent me text messages asking me to keep the lights up another three weeks because he had bet money on the middle of February.
Whatever
. I didn’t mind being judged by the neighborhood. If I was going to be the asshole with the gauche decorated house and the enlightened path to a joyful marriage, so be it. I wasn’t trying to get laid by the neighbors.

Undefining
perfection
seemed like a supreme victory in my quest to learn how to go with the flow. But having discarded all troublesome preconceptions about marriage, I found myself eager to redefine it. I mentioned this to Kristen one evening, and as usual, she encouraged me not to try so hard. “You’ll find perfection if you’re not looking for it.”

Later that night, Kristen suggested that we should treat ourselves to an overnight stay in Chicago without the kids. It would be our first night alone together in over three years, and before she could finish asking if I was interested, I told her to book it. The next day, we made arrangements for a babysitter; a few days after that, we were checking into our hotel with only one suitcase, which we’d packed with pajamas, a change of clothes, and a couple bottles of wine.

With the entire glowing and twinkling city at our fingertips, Kristen and I wound up under the covers in our pajamas, watching television. And it felt so . . .
perfect
. So us.

I asked Kristen what she thought Andy and Mary would be doing had they been the ones vacationing in the city that evening.

“Who cares?” she said, handing me her empty wineglass for a refill. A few minutes later, she asked, “Did you figure out what makes me perfect yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But I know you are, somehow.”

“Even though I’m totally not the homemaker you thought I’d be?”

“Yeah, even though. I’m sorry that I expected that from you, and I’m sorry that it took me so long to get here.”
That
felt good to say.

“I don’t blame you,” Kristen said. “Heck,
I’d
love to have a wife like Mary.”

Then she asked me if I knew why I was perfect for her, and I drew a blank. “Is it because you have to tell me how to function like a normal person?” I asked.
What girl doesn’t love that?

“No. It’s because I know you’d do anything for me, you get me, and you make me laugh, which makes me happy.”

She nestled up against me and I looked down at the tip of her cute nose hovering above my chest. I settled back and my mind wandered off to a moment earlier in the evening, when Kristen had instinctively placed her pillow on the window side of the bed because she knows I’m afraid of heights and being close to a twentieth-story window would bother me. Then I thought of all the times she was patient and guided me when I needed help, whether I knew it or not:
Just relax and enjoy this with me. Stop looking, and you’ll find our version of perfect. Please come talk to me, whatever’s on your mind.
I thought of all the difficult tests we’d survived and how she had never left me, how she remained loyal and supportive and willing to love me. Then I looked to our future and easily imagined us doing whatever love might call us to do for each other, no questions asked, time after time. To be for each other that one person who makes the other’s life the best and brightest it could possibly be. Then Kristen burped and started laughing, and there it was: our perfect was revealing itself to me, moment by imperfect moment.

Be loyal to your true stakeholders.

I
am so lost right now,
I thought, rocking backward in my chair.
Seriously. I have no idea what we’re talking about.

It was the middle of February and I had been sitting in my manager Clint’s office for what seemed like an eternity. Clint was conducting my annual performance review, and I was having difficulty concentrating on what he was saying. It had been two weeks since my getaway in Chicago with Kristen—our first blissful weekend together in years—and my mind was still there, loitering in the moment.

Clint had been talking at length about something—something important, no doubt. Had he told me to pay close attention, I would have been leaning forward in my chair, taking copious notes. I would have responded with affirmative comments and asked detailed questions. I would have given serious thought to the resources and the actions necessary to accomplish whatever the hell he needed. But he never said to pay attention.

My entire life, my Asperger’s/ADD/obsessive-compulsive brain has focused on whatever it wants, often at the expense of things that other people think I should focus on: critical work assignments, for example, and the needs of my wife and children. I have to be reminded to focus on things like these. Clint hadn’t reminded me. When I entered his office and took my seat, he had started talking without any warning and instead of processing the point he was trying to make, I concentrated on the sound of his voice, its timbral qualities and the severely Iowan way in which he formed his vowels. This often happens, which is why I occasionally chuckle or grimace at odd times during a conversation; in the midst of some benign or somber moment the speaker might hit a word with strange emphasis, and I’ll begin wondering how they stumbled upon such a hilarious pronunciation (“Last night, in line at the car
warsh,
my husband suffered a fatal heart attack.”
Warsh? Ha!
). The downside of my preoccupation is that at some point the listener is bound to realize I haven’t been paying attention. The upside is that my profound awareness of how people say and do things qualified me as the top impressionist in my office, a skill that came in handy whenever I needed to make people laugh—which, given the awkward situations I routinely found myself in, was almost all the time.

There was the sound of Clint’s voice, and then there were the visual distractions in his office. My reflection in the window behind him, for instance.
(Hmm. This is how I look sitting in Clint’s office, totally confused. I wonder if he likes the shape of my head.)
Or the picture frame on his desk, featuring a figurine of a golfer at the end of his swing. Inside the frame was a picture of Clint’s wife, striking the same pose as the figurine. I’d never been able to figure out which came first—the photo or the frame. It seemed impossibly dumb luck to have found a frame that perfectly matched the picture; remove the luck, however, and the whole thing just seemed impossibly dumb—to have found a frame, then to take his wife to the driving range with a bucketful of balls, snapping picture after picture until she got it right. Then again, sitting atop my desk was a Post-it note reminding myself of a few ways to improve my marriage, so who was I to judge what other couples did?

I managed to tune into the conversation when Clint said the words “Keep up the good work.” As it turned out, he had been congratulating me on surpassing all of my goals for the year. I would receive a raise in addition to my full bonus and commission, which amounted to nearly 20 percent of my salary.
Sweet,
I thought, before my mind wandered off again. Most people would find it easy to focus on something as important as their bonus and commission payout, but I wasn’t too concerned. I knew that I had earned the full amount that year because, for all my quirks and focus issues, I displayed remarkable skill when it came to my job. Which was strange because my job required me to be very social, and it wasn’t something I had ever intended (or wanted) to do for a living. It should have been a recipe for failure.

When I had started working for the company ten years earlier, I was a lowly laboratory engineer, fresh out of college. A lab rat. My job was to develop electronic circuits and software for our lower-tier customers. The career ladder for laboratory engineers had three rungs: lab rat, manager, and director. I was the youngest in my department by at least twenty years, and the odds of beating out a dozen other senior-level engineers to become one of two managers seemed rather small, so I never put a great deal of pressure on myself to advance. I was perfectly happy being a lab rat. My customer base consisted of audio technology companies, and while it wasn’t exactly the best use of my creativity, I enjoyed playing with home theater systems and consumer audio gadgets years before they were introduced to the public. I was sometimes distracted by how cool it was to have my very own desk and my very own phone and my very own name placard outside my cubicle, and I was almost oblivious to the fact that I was working on the most cutting-edge audio technologies on the planet, but I could manage that job—it suited me. At that point I had it all—I was earning good money, I had no real responsibilities, I could order any office supply I wanted no questions asked, and my girlfriend, Kristen, was crazy about me. Life was good back then.