As my husband’s symptoms progress, I am being asked to take care of more around our house. Often these are things I have never done before and really have no idea how to do them. A case in point, I recently had to troubleshoot a problem with our dishwasher.

When I face a new challenge, I have a tendency to jump right in and have bungled things up in the past so decided on this occasion to try a smarter approach. Instead of simply starting to take things apart, I talked it over with my husband. He suggested checking the appliance manual, which we found on-line. Armed with this information, he stood by while I went to work. He has become the supervisor, helper, clean-up crew and I got to be the technician. We removed and cleaned filters and found a twist tie that had gotten into the lower drain. I removed the item and, with my husband’s help, I was able to put it all back together with no leftover pieces. We were back in business!

Life is so much easier when the challenges are shared. I sometimes hesitate to talk with my husband because I don’t want him to feel displaced when I pick up one of his chores, however, I may need his advice since he has experience and ideas on how it should be done. We may disagree on the approach to a task, but at least we have both given our input and neither of us is carrying the load alone.