Recently my husband has been annoying me with a habit of his.
As a rule, the man cannot hear me when I try to talk to him. Even when we are in the same room I often have to yell to get his attention. Either that or go right up to him and tap him on the shoulder. We already know he’s deaf.
No. His annoying habit is repeatedly asking me what I said.
Repeating myself is one thing. Being asked to repeat myself when I hadn’t said anything is another altogether.
I’ll be sitting here quietly minding my own business. Then out of nowhere he’ll get up from his desk and ask me what I needed, or why I called to him, or just what I said.
I seriously hadn’t uttered a peep.
I suppose I find this so annoying simply because he generally can’t hear me the rest of the time. Either he doesn’t answer or his response makes it obvious he didn’t actually hear what I said.
His favorite stunt is I’ll call the name of one of our children and he’ll respond claiming I called his name. Which actually irritates me because when I do call his name I have to yell it at the top of my lungs at least three times for him to hear me, yet I can call my kids in a normal voice, and he not only hears me but hears his name.
Then there is situations like at the dinner table last night. The kids and I were talking, and he commented that he was completely lost. He couldn’t follow the conversation going on around him at the dinner table.
Of course, we weren’t yelling.
My daughter especially is very sensitive to noise and gets headaches if we raise our voices.
Seriously.
I can be in my room at the back of the house and talk in a perfectly normal voice, no yelling, and she’ll hear every word from the front of the house. Then she has to either yell her answer or come to my room because I can’t pick out what she is saying otherwise.
Sometimes I don’t hear her when we were in the same room but only when there is background noise, like a fan going nearby.
I know my hearing is perfectly normal. It’s been tested.
So, the volume we use in this house to communicate is always fluctuating between yelling and whispering. But it also means it’s extra irritating when my husband hears me talking when I absolutely wasn’t talking.
Though actually talking to him can be just as frustrating because his not comprehending what is being said is far more common then him not hear us in the first place.
A recent example is a couple of weeks ago we were at church, and they announced a Christmas party for last Saturday night. Now, two Saturdays a month we go serve in the temple.
At the time he said something about us not being able to go because it was on Saturday. I pointed out to him that we had nothing scheduled.
He did not hear me. Not then or when I repeated it apparently.
I learned he hadn’t heard me last Saturday.
He’d ask me earlier in the day if I was going that day and I told him no because I had a cold. I thought he was talking about the party. He was assuming we were going to the temple.
I found this out when our son asked him when he was leaving.
It was too early in the day to go to the party, so I asked where he was going.
Apparently he was completely prepared to go to the temple. Even the kids thought he was going so I had to explain our schedule yet again.
We go the second and fourth Saturday of the month. So basically, every other week. However, sometimes there is a fifth Saturday. Rather than go every other week all the time and throw people off that way, we go the second and fourth Saturday of every month, and every other fifth Saturday. The other group does first and third, plus the fifth Saturdays we don’t. It evens out to we’re going about the same number of times each year.
Because the last Saturday of November was the fifth Saturday that we didn’t cover he was thinking we did cover last Saturday even though it was the first Saturday.
As for our kids, they just never paid attention to our schedule. They saw his stuff hanging by the door ready for him to go to the temple and thought it was perfectly normal.
So, I’ve been irritated.
On another tack. Happy birthday to my older son, just a bit early. It’s on Sunday.
Smile. Make the day a brighter day.
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