Kiko Okada

True love caught me by surprise about 40 years ago.

My husband was one of the sweetest men you could ever hope to meet. We loved each other deeply. He seemed to love everything about me, I appreciated him so much – and I was also exasperated with him.

I didn’t really understand ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, in those days. All I knew was that I was constantly picking up after this man. I didn’t want to fall into nagging, but no amount of gentle or logical requests, reminders or pleas seemed to make any difference. I even brought a 30-gallon trash can into the house and put it right under the lip of the kitchen counter. After he took his pizza out, surely he could just sweep the box in? Instead, I was the one that threw the rubbish into the can and continued to pick up after him.

He liked a tidy home, but not enough to maintain it. Even back then, I felt that sharing a space with anyone meant finding compromises to work out differences in lifestyles. Expecting him to meet my standards of neatness just because I liked to squeeze toothpaste tubes and roll them up from the bottom was stepping further into all those shades of gray leading to “my way or the highway.”