I have conflicted feelings about Sparkly and language.
Sparkly talks about herself as very extroverted, very social, very verbal, very able to multitask. She thinks before she talks, sometimes. She always has a snarky answer. She almost never has the experience (that I have all the time) of being sort of caught flat-footed and unable to speak. (What I mean is, she’s told me about one time when she felt the way I feel probably about once a day.) She is apparently capable of really paying full attention to more than one thing at once.
But a lot of the time she’ll, for instance, ask me to get her “that thing” and it takes a while for her to get to any actual description of what she wants. A minute ago she turned to me and said “Dear…” and gestured towards me, and I had to work out that she was reaching towards her can of soda that she left next to me when she changed seats, and that she wanted me to hand it to her. Very often she’ll get a few words into a sentence and then just stop talking, and I have to wait for her to get done with whatever distracted her, and then remind her that she was about to say something.
All this is frustrating to me.
Maybe I’m not cutting her enough slack. I feel like these things are easier for her so she shouldn’t make me guess so often, but maybe that’s not true.
But I really wish we could find a better way to deal with her not answering when I talk to her. Having to wait and hold half a sentence in my mind is frustrating for me, because I can’t just go back to what I was doing and still remember the half-a-sentence. I have to wait doing nothing until she gets back to me, or I’ll lose the thread. And I don’t want to pester her when she is going to answer, but I can’t necessarily tell when she has me “on hold” and when she’s forgotten about me. I really wish I could get her to say “In a minute” or something instead of just leaving me hanging.
She also does a thing where she’ll say “Yeah, let’s go do X,” and then not move. And she interprets me asking her repeatedly as wanting her to hurry up, much as I try not to make it sound like that. I just wish she would give an indication when she actually means now, and when she means “in ten minutes,” or “after I finish this chapter” or whatever. Because what often happens currently is she says “Okay, I’ll help you with dinner,” and rather than pester her I go get started, and half an hour passes and she remembers that she was going to help when I come out and tell her it’s ready. And I would be okay with delaying dinner, but I can’t if she doesn’t say that’s what she wants.
Some Open Space 