Messing Up

Today I was talking with my sister about her potential career path as a speech-language pathologist. The conversation was light at first—just the different settings where SLPs can work. When you’re limited in how much you can ask a loved one, conversations move slowly. The risk of saying the wrong thing and losing her again feels high, especially now that I’m not in Texas anymore. I messed it up and I still don't know how. We hadn’t even gotten to the training, the kinds of people she might help, or the satisfaction of watching someone regain skills. While I waited for the next day, the talk pulled me straight back into old notes from my own visit with an SLP.

That evaluation still sits in my head like a bruise I keep pressing. I tested last fall in the 0.2 percentile for delayed memory. The number is clinical and clean on paper. In the room it felt different. She wouldn’t let me use notes or any of the coping strategies I rely on in ordinary life. No scrap of paper, no phone, no quiet mental checklist. Just raw recall under fluorescent lights. I walked out knowing the percentile, but also knowing the test never measured how I actually function when I’m allowed to work around the gap.

Yesterday I made a family hot dish. I moved through the kitchen the way I always do now—checking, rechecking, trying to hold the sequence, setting reminders, crossing things off my list. When my wife came home she looked at the pan, smiled, and said, “Look at that improvement. You’re getting better.” The words landed softly. For a few hours I let myself believe them.

This morning I went to heat up the leftovers. What sat in the fridge looked right at first glance. Same dish, same container. Then I started tasting and looking closer. At least three ingredients were missing. The main one—tomatoes—was simply gone. I stood there with the spoon in my hand feeling the familiar drop in my stomach.

I had tried. I had measured, stirred, timed, and still the thing that reached the table was incomplete. I used my compensation strategies, but I still fell short even with them. The congratulations from last night and the empty spaces this morning sat side by side and refused to reconcile.

I think I am a lot like that hot dish now. At first glance I look fine. You don’t notice the missing ingredients until you look closely or get a taste. But when you know what should be there, it’s obvious what’s gone. It still tastes okay, but it’s not what it should be. That’s the tragedy my wife and kids live with every day—I’m just not what I should be anymore.

I keep coming back to that 0.2 percentile and the quiet refusal of the SLP to let me use the tools that keep me upright. Some days the compensation works well enough that people notice progress. Other days it fails in small, ordinary ways—missing tomatoes in a hot dish—and the whole effort collapses into the same thought:

I guess I’m just never going to be doing anything right, even when I am trying.

The sister conversation, the old evaluation notes, the proud moment over dinner, and the incomplete leftovers this morning are all the same story told in different rooms. Memory that won’t hold. Effort that still falls short. A quiet, persistent sense that the gap is permanent despite the noticeable improvement.

I’m writing it down anyway. Not because it fixes anything, but because leaving it unspoken feels worse. Maybe next time I’ll get the tomatoes in. Maybe someday I’ll have a conversation about something real again with a sister because she’s excited to talk again. Maybe today my kids will get to have their dad serve them a meal that isn’t missing something.

And maybe that’s why my sisters and everyone else has left us—because who wants to be around someone whose only consistent talent seems to be messing up and taking notes. The same notes the SLP wouldn’t let me use. She stripped them away in that fluorescent room so the deficit would stand there naked and measurable. Out here in ordinary life, the notes are still visible. People see the lists, the reminders, the quiet scrambling to keep up, and eventually they decide the gap is too present, too constant. It’s no wonder they leave when the love isn’t there anymore. It’s the same reason the SLP wouldn’t let me take notes in the first place. But what they don’t see is that I don’t need the notes to love any of them. Even stripped of every coping tool, even sitting in the bottom 0.2 percentile for delayed memory, I have never forgotten how much I love them. My family is the first thought of every day. And if that’s the only ingredient I get right in my hot dish each day, I’m proud of it—even if they’ll never eat me again because I am missing some ingredients still.