Take this job & shove it

Did you make honey-do lists for your significant other? I tried but wasn’t very successful at getting my husband to actually want to work off a list. Life threw us many curveballs over the years, cancer being the biggest one. Once the dust settled and Joe was done with all of his treatments, he was unable to work full-time anymore. That was the first thing cancer took away from him.

He lost all of his short-term memory thanks to chemo-brain (yes, it is a real thing). He was forced to work off lists or he would have never gotten anything done. One more thing cancer took away from him: his ability to remember. That really pissed him off. Cancer also took his desire to work on anything that wasn’t really important to him. Me, music, our dogs, outdoors and beer. Those were his loves. So, he built a place just for us. An entire backyard indoor/outdoor bar from scratch. He never once complained about it, enjoyed every second of it, and was so proud of it when it was complete. I was so proud of him too. It took him well over a year to finish thanks to the long-lasting physical effects of chemo, but it was a masterpiece.

Our very own backyard paradise.

Rewind to our master bathroom shower that sprung a leak in the shower pan over 10 years ago. What did Joe do? He stopped using that shower and started using the guest bath that I had already claimed as mine. If the project didn’t interest him, it probably wasn’t getting done anytime soon. If the project wasn’t outdoors in the sunshine, it most likely kept getting shoved to the bottom of the list. And sometimes, even if it was outdoors in the sunshine, a quick fix almost always sufficed rather than to actually address the underlying issue.

Don’t get me wrong. I am in no way complaining about my guy. I loved his creativity and also understood his need to not worry about things that just didn’t seem important anymore. Cancer will do that to a person. It did it to me as well.

But now, with a drainage issue at the end of the drive because he filled up the ditches years ago, and not one but two showers in the house that need repair, I am growing weary of the projects that never got done.

Contractors have been called and things will get fixed. But in all honesty, I really don’t want to be in charge of these things. I just want my Joe here so he can keep bumping them to the bottom of his list and putting them off for as long as humanly possible.