Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
~Max Ehrmann
When we marry someone, we become family, which means that we agree to take on all of the other person’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. Before I married my husband, Roger, I knew he had difficulty hearing. I was already trained to walk on his left side. I knew that if we were outside, and a lawnmower or a chainsaw was running, he would ask, “Where is that coming from?” while looking in the wrong direction.
But I didn’t realize how bad the problem really was until we got married. When he was facing people, he could read their lips and expressions. But when he went to bed and put his good ear down on the pillow, a bulldozer could crash through the wall right next to his head, and he would snooze away, never having heard a thing! Meanwhile, I have always been a light sleeper, waking up at real — and imagined — bumps in the night.
When I moved into Roger’s house I made a big discovery. Alarms were going off in the house at all hours!
The first time I heard the alarms going off in the middle of the night, I kept thinking there must be a faulty smoke alarm. Every time I jumped out of bed to find the alarm, there was no smoke, and the alarm stopped after a few minutes.
But after testing the smoke alarms and replacing their batteries, I realized that there must be old travel alarm clocks stashed in forgotten corners around the house. Some of them must have been going off dutifully for years. Since Roger couldn’t hear them, he was blissfully unaware of the racket they were making, but they were driving me crazy.
I kept a notepad and a pen on the nightstand, and I made a checklist that went something like this: 12:17, 1:35, 2:15, 3:18, 4:42. Those were the times I knew the alarms went off each and every night.
I made it my mission to track down these alarms, one by one, and shut them off for good. I would jump out of bed and stagger around, disoriented from being jerked from sleep, yet desperate to find the alarm, as I would have only a few minutes to locate it before it turned itself off again.
Before we would go to sleep at night, I would announce, “2:15 a.m. I’m going to get that one tonight,” much to the amusement of my new husband, who couldn’t hear the alarms at all.
It took me several weeks, but hunt them down I did. One alarm was in the bottom drawer of an old desk, underneath stacks of papers, colored pencils, photographs, and other memorabilia.
Another one was stuffed in a duffel bag in the back corner of a hall closet behind shoes, umbrellas, and a deflated basketball.
One by one, I tracked down the alarms and turned them off. Problem solved.
I adapted in other ways, too. I would set an alarm for the time Roger needed to get up, and when the alarm sounded, I would turn it off and wake him up by gently touching his shoulder. When I needed to go out of town for work, I bought him an alarm that strapped to his leg and vibrated to wake him up.
Then the bat moved in. It seemed to be trapped in the wall right above the headboard of our bed. I couldn’t sleep for all the noise it was making.
At first, when Roger said he couldn’t hear it, I thought he was messing with me. “It’s right here!” I wailed, pointing at the exact spot in the wall where the bat was fluttering, scratching, and chittering away.
Finally, I realized that he really couldn’t hear it. The bat noises were high-pitched, and he had lost that range of hearing.
After eighteen years of marriage, Roger recently got hearing aids. I can’t believe the difference it has made. When he first started wearing the hearing aids, he was startled by each new noise.
“What’s that?” he’d ask, and I would tell him: That’s the icemaker in the refrigerator; those are the sparrows in the bush outside the kitchen window; that’s the beep that means the oven has reached 350 degrees.
“The oven does that every time it heats up?” he asked in disbelief.
“Yes,” I assured him.
Once Roger could hear again, I, too, made a surprising discovery. In the intervening years of not being able to get his attention unless he was looking directly at me, and saying things five times in a row in order to be heard, I had developed some bad habits. I had gotten used to saying pretty much anything I wanted to, knowing that he would never hear me! Sarcastic comments and snide remarks were coming out of my mouth left and right — only now, Roger would ask, “What did you say?” I knew I had to knock it off quickly, so I started shutting down the yeahs, rights, and whatever you says, just like I hunted down and switched off those forgotten alarm clocks all those years ago.
~Gwen Hart
