A Senior’s Moment?

Friday morning I got up at six.

That’s the time my husband gets up, and about two hours earlier than I’ve been getting up most of this past summer. I had volunteered to be at the 24-7 prayer truck down by the Rock by seven on Friday.

At 6:30 after a refreshing shower and an almost leisurely breakfast, my husband began urging me to make haste. He didn’t want me to glance at the newspaper, or check my e-mail or facebook or even turn on the computer.

I found this rather annoying and told him so. “It only takes 20 minutes at the most to get down to the Rock. I have plenty of time.”

“Marian, we first have to drop the van at the mechanic for service.”

I should have known that. Marty had mentioned it briefly the previous evening.

So, this was why my husband was trying to streamline my morning routine. Dropping the van off at the mechanics would take at least 20 minutes and I needed to hurry if I didn’t want be late for my commitment at the prayer truck.

Now I could claim my forgetting about his van-servicing arrangement to be a classic case of “senior’s moment,” but I think it actually results from another phenomenon. I don’t know if this phenomenon has a name. I’ll call it “melding syndrome.”

I’m thinking the melding syndrome sets in on happily married couples at about the 35th anniversary. I say this because Marty and I have been married for 35 years since June 12th of this year and I have been noticing melding syndrome frequently of late. Basically we are becoming more and more alike in our thinking, our attitudes, our expectations etc., so much so that each assumes the other knows what we know and has exactly the same priorities and objectives. Of course this is a mistaken assumption.

Just because we both wear green spring jackets and blue winter coats and often show up at church in matching clothes doesn’t mean that if Marty arranges to bring the van in for servicing  on the day I arrange to get up two hours early to pray that I will remember about the van.

What appears to be a senior’s moment on my part is actually an assumption on my husband’s part that I am totally in sync with his thoughts and plans. He assumes this because after 35 years of blissful marriage our thoughts and plans line up at least 35 percent of the time.

Of course we’ll never be completely melded and that causes the friction. We find ourselves assuming the other knows and thinks exactly what we do, merely because it happens so often. This leads to misunderstandings about what we are doing or not. (As well as strange half-spoken discussions impossible for an outsider to follow, but that’s another story.)

The only antidote: a good measure of the fruit of the Spirit—particularly long-suffering.