A Big Misunderstanding
January 22, 2009 1 Comment
Exciting news – we are going to Sydney for a long weekend! And this is all due to a monumental misunderstanding arising from the fact that I don’t speak as clearly as I used to, and Andrew apparantly can’t understand half of what I say.
To go back a little, as you know I had the roof of my mouth – all of my soft palate and some of the hard palate – removed in 2007 to take out a tumour, and a new palate was was constructed using tissue from my left forearm and some from my left leg. This new palate has no nerves, and more importantly, no muscle. It doesn’t move at all, and I can’t feel it.
My new palate is squishy like a marshmallow, and the new shape and lack of movement mean that, among other things, I can no longer blow up balloons, I can’t whistle, and my speech is hypernasal. This means that the palate doesn’t move up to close the nasal passage when I speak to stop air escaping from my nose, so my voice sounds nasal. Its quite hard to form some sounds – b’s and d’s are the worst – and my voice gets tired easily. Shouting at my daughters is particularly tiring, which is a good result for them.
It also means, and this is the crucial bit, that my voice is just generally less clear than it used to be, and although I’m usually conscious of this, its becoming more and more clear that the one person who has the most difficulty understanding me is my poor beleagured husband Andrew. Of course, if you ask me (and most women would say the same of their husbands/partners), he just doesn’t really listen to me quite a bit of the time, and tends to filter most of what I say according to whether he thinks it actually impacts him. Anything involving childcare arrangements, cooking, cleaning, shopping, clothes, what I did that day, plans for the weekend, and whats happening on Coronation Street, is cleverly filtered out of the atmosphere before it reaches his ears.
Anything related to money I have spent, programmes on TV I want to watch that clash with Survivor, Time Team, or Dog the Bounty Hunter, are obviously of immediate concern and make it through the filter, into his ear, and all the way to his brain.
It unfolded like this…There we were, of an evening, pondering the fact that Andrew will shortly turn 37, and also thinking how hard he’s been working lately – regular 15 hour days. So he said (as he worked away on his laptop and watched Dog the Bounty Hunter at the same time), “why don’t you see if there are any cheap weekends away to Sydney?”. I was surprised, thinking that the coffers were not THAT full, but hey, he manages the finances so if he says we can, we CAN!
Speedily, I went to the Air NZ website, plugged in a few details, and found that we could take a three day weekend in Sydney, for the whole family, for $2,600. I thought no, thats a lot of money, Andrew won’t go for that. But to my amazement, he was highly excited, and incredulous, even, that it could be so cheap! Book away, he said, get that credit card out! Rather excited by this sudden spending approval, I did so, and before we knew it, we were writing the thrilling words – “Weekend in Sydney” – on the wall calendar, and pondering all the wonderful things we would do with the girls. Bondi! Darling Harbour! The Opera House!
Andrew settled down to do some more work, I started the ironing. “Wow” he said, “I can’t believe we’re going to Sydney for $260″.
Silence. I ironed a tea towel. “You are kidding, right? You don’t think its costing $260 do you?”
“Yeah, you said $260.”
“No, $2,600″ More silence.
“$2,600??? JESUS!!!!”
So, the weekend away to Sydney is a surprise, but not half as much as the surprise Andrew got when he found out the actual cost, or my surprise that Andrew had ever thought it was going to cost $260.
This has just appeared on my computer. Lucky you. How can I try the same trick!