Just a Suggestion

I don’t take ‘suggestions’ well.

I know this. My husband even commented on it last night.

I often feel like when someone makes a suggestion to me, what they’re really saying is that I’m an idiot who can’t figure something out for myself and so they have to suggest an alternative because there is no way I’d have come up with it myself.

Last night, for example, I was getting ready to help Olivia write out her Valentines for her class party tomorrow. She had one new kid join her class this year, so this girl’s name isn’t on the list we had from the beginning of the year.

I said, “Okay, we don’t know her last name but we do know her first name…”

At this point, Tom interjected, “Are there any repeating names in her class?”

I glanced at the list and declared, “Nope, all the Addisons and Aidans are in the other class.”

“Well, then, I’d just have her write the first names on the Valentines,” he suggested.

In what I thought was a reasonable tone, I said, “That’s what I was going to have her do.”

Apparently, I was snippy when I said that to him because about ten minutes later, he came back to where we were still working on the Valentines and said faux-casually, “You don’t like it when I make suggestions, do you?”

I had forgotten all about the suggestion about the first names so I looked at him in confusion and asked what he meant.

He told me I’d been really short with him when he suggested writing just the first names.

Huh. Okay. Maybe I had. I wouldn’t put it past me to do just that.

Because…all of fifteen minutes before the Valentine ‘suggestion’ we’d been discussing Alyssa’s next orthodontist appointment and I got the distinct impression that I’d rescheduled her appointment wrong.

How does on reschedule an appointment wrong? Well, in this case, when I’d called to reschedule the appointment, the lady with whom I spoke said that the times we like best (after 3:40 because of school and bus drop off time) were going to be pretty far out, like in another month.

I remembered that the girls don’t have school on Monday, February 20 and so I asked her to check that day, any time being fine because, yeah, no school.

She told me that the staff would be in their other office, which is in another town about a half hour away. I decided I could take a half day vacation and accepted an appointment for 2:00 that day.

Tom didn’t understand why I didn’t just take one for a later time in our usual office later in the month. Why did it matter, he wanted to know, when her next appointment was.

It didn’t, I explained but I was TRYING to keep from inconveniencing him!

It was just weird and it put me on edge and made me feel like he thought I was an idiot and that’s probably why I snapped about the stupid Valentines.

So yeah, a wordy explanation about how much I dislike it when people make ‘suggestions’ to me.