I didn’t answer.
By the fourth day, he couldn’t find a clean shirt.
“Margaret, where do you keep the laundry detergent?”
I replied, “In the cabinet where it’s been for fifteen years.”
A week later, our daughter Emily called me.
“Mom, Dad just asked me how to clean the bathroom. He says the house is a disaster.”
I laughed for the first time in months.
But something else was happening.
Without me there, Robert began noticing things he’d never paid attention to.
The kitchen floor didn’t clean itself.
The refrigerator didn’t fill itself.
The bills weren’t automatically paid.
His clean towels didn’t magically appear in the bathroom.
And meals didn’t arrive on the table simply because he was hungry.
On the twelfth day, he hired a cleaning woman.
She charged him $150 for a thorough cleaning.When he complained about the price, she calmly explained that it was several hours of physical work.