“What time are you coming home for the concert?” I asked my husband this morning in the bathroom.
“What concert?” he asked.
What concert.
Sigh.
“Springsteen,” I reminded him.
“Oh, I didn’t know that was this week,” he answered.
How can you have tickets for Bruce Springsteen and not know when the concert is? How can you live in New Jersey, a veritable shrine to The Boss, and not realize that he’s coming here to perform this week? All you have to do is turn on a radio to find out. Or, perhaps to look at the tickets that have been sitting in our family desk for a month or so. Or maybe, just maybe, to put it on your calendar.
I asked my husband how come he can’t remember when the concert is, or what the last four digits of my social security number are (thereby rendering him incapable of logging onto my Verizon Wireless account last night. And he couldn’t call me while I was out, as he had my phone.) I rattled off his social and the numbers for our kids. He shrugged.
“Why do I have to keep all this information in my head? Why can’t you?” I implored. “It’s exhausting!”
“‘Cause you’re good at it, and I’m not,” he replied, and shut the bathroom door ever so slowly behind him and left for work.
I stood in the bathroom, remembering how I was the one who had secured the tickets and the sitter, and how I had made plans to meet my brother and his fiancé before the concert so we could all go in one car. I was the one who questioned the price of the tickets with Ticketmaster. I was the one who coordinated with the neighbors to get our son to his baseball game and back. I was the one who put all that mental energy into one night, not to mention the memorization of four social security numbers, among many, many other things he’d apparently never even pondered.
I thought about my husband driving to work, oblivious to why there’s so much Springsteen on the radio this week and finally dedicating a little space in his brain for the concert. And then I realized: I am a sucker. I am a sucker because I have taken over the coordination of most of our social calendar, as well as the reservation of mental space for various bits of crucial information. I am a sucker for keeping all of this information because I am “good at it.”
But at least I am a sucker with Springsteen tickets.
Originally published on MommaSaid
