Mirror Images

He is more creative than I. I am more imaginative. He is color blind. I am inexperienced in design. His doodles used to look like actual people. Mine look like stick figures and geometric patterns. I suspect now, looking back, that his insistence on order and pattern according to his own preconceived notions, were more about OCD and control than his artistic inclination. I know I did not care enough about how anything looked to fight much about it. I only drew the line at function. If something met our needs, I liked it. If it interfered with our family's life style or health, I put up a fight. One old days' fight used to go like this: (him) "Our lawn looks like crap. If you don't care about what it looks like, I do! We need to get Chemlawn here at the very least." (me) "We are raising living creatures here, not grass. Children and dogs! not grass! I don't care enough about what it looks like to poison the environment we live in!" The disagreements were not always so clear and I didn't always have such a 'saintly' position on things. Sometimes I just wanted to have a say, an opinion that wasn't treated like absolute insanity. (I didn't understand OCD yet, so took such treatment personally.)
The sad thing now is that he no longer cares much about what anything looks like. He only cares about staying within "stalker space" of me, the living oracle of all knowledge...unless there's a man around, any man, but especially one in a truck, any truck. He repeats, at least three times, anything I say, even small requests like, "brush your teeth". His language competence is so poor now that he really has lost the nouns (and verbs). "Brush your teeth" may as well be, "jump off the bed." Complicating that is his growing loss of confidence in acting solely and without direction. Throw in a goodly amount of the always present anxiety and the increasing panic brought on by the disease process and you can just imagine these small steps in our house turning into major events.
Now I can choose the beds we use and the colors on the wall. I can cancel Chemlawn and buy anything I want (as long as we can afford it.) Isn't it ironic that I should yearn for some kind of disagreement? Some feist, some resistance to my choices? I would give a lot just to hear him say again, "How can you stand that color in this room? Let me show you how it should look."