Just finished my swim. I’m a mite cold, wrapped in a fleece robe and an alpaca blanket and woolly socks,bt I’m moving better after the swim and exercises.

Generic, cont’d:

It took a while for Matt and me to get used to living together. I thought I knew everything about him because I saw him a lot each week: 3 or 4 dinners, plus shopping, movies, appointments, etc.. and more last year when he broke his ankle and was in rehab for 60 days. But I made new discoveries not only about him but about me and my bad character. I wrote some of my discoveries (“what was I thinking?”) in a blog about the capricious nature of learning disability, and of the things you take for granted in normal development and the gaps it skips in impaired people.

As for my bad character and short temper, that got shorter with the constant minutes of increasing pain, allI can say is that Matt was/is a saint for putting up with me. He made feel worse as i was recovering from a bout because he never retaliated and he always forgave me. After a while I eased up, not with the pain but with him, and he LEARNED: my methods, my ways, my needs—no, not my needs. But once in a while now he does me an unsolicited favour for which I am helplessly grateful.

I am still short but not short-tempered, just normally (?) impatient with a lapse on his part that causes extra work or reparation or not noticing what another person might see. Patterns, similarities, discrepancies all have to be brought to his attention. I am beginning to understand more about his challenges and to sympathize with them and respect him for his efforts to cope with life with sometimes inadequate tools. What must it be like to go through a day, let alone his life like that?

What was I thinking? Not enough, obviously.

See what I’ve been learning because of Covid-19?