I may have accidentally swallowed a rock this morning, the husband calls from work one day to tell me. The back-story to this event is that he puts all of his daily pills (vitamins, ADHD meds, etc.) loose in his pants pocket each morning. … I know! I hear your many exclamations loud and clear, my fellow anxious (and therefore thinking-ahead) humans. Don’t think I haven’t offered everything from cautious concern to an outright declaration of the danger and absurdity of this habit, among others! While I’m sharing, you may as well know that he also puts multiple types of pills into unlabeled or mislabeled bottles together. Nowadays I mostly swallow my thoughts on this, before they can even make it to the tip of my tongue. And don’t worry; there are no children in our home who might suffer the obvious consequences of such outrageous behavior. His three daughters managed to grow up generally unscathed somehow.

The story goes that he also keeps a handful of tiny chakra rocks in his pocket. Chakra rocks? What?! This was also news to me that day. Well, not the chakra rocks, but their location.

I guess I’d better back up a bit more.

My husband has taken to practicing meditation as part of his mostly admirable attempts to be more self-aware. He typically uses one of those guided meditation apps one finds for free on the app store. He has surprised me by randomly trying to pronounce names of various chakras in some other language several times after these meditations. I have, of course, heard of chakras, but I don’t really know anything about them. Yet he was unaccountably interested, so I took notice, because Noticing is one of my anxiety-related superpowers. (And NOT-Noticing is one of his ADD-related superpowers which alternately benefits or frustrates me.) So. One day while shopping for my niece’s birthday, I wandered into a local shop, one of those that deals in crystals, incense, Buddhas, and the like. I am a person whose sense of smell is uncomfortably, crazy-sensitive, so the throat-clogging scents of sandalwood and patchouli were just bearable through my covid-mask lined with a coarse, brown, coffee filter. Trying to breathe as little as possible, I wandered through the books, rocks and crystals, noting a bowl of tiny satiny bags filled with colorful, polished, rocks, complete with a minutely printed description of how each rock represents a different chakra. Though I knew he wouldn't put on his reading glasses to actually read the fine print, I impulsively bought the set of chakra rocks for him anyway. He received them later in a somewhat bemused and underwhelmed manner, and I expected the little rocks to spend the rest of their days in his dresser drawer. However, that was not at all what happened.

Instead, weeks later, I learned that these little rocks had been traveling (not in their little satiny bag) to and fro in his pocket, along with… you know it… his daily pills. Anyone with a light on in their brains could have predicted what came next. Am I doubting his intelligence? Not at all. My husband is smart, creative, and talented. He has many stellar qualities. He also has ADHD and despite his medication, he still manages to blow my anxious mind on a semi-regular basis. This latest feat affected me not in the least, and so I could freely laugh with him, (okay, a teensy bit AT him,) rather than panic and worry. Plenty of panic and worry scenarios are sprinkled throughout our lives together. He says he is not entirely sure, but one of his chakra rocks is missing (what a “shock!”) and he thinks he may have swallowed it with his pills.

Maybe the rock will seek out whichever chakra in his body that it matches and stay there. Maybe it will make an uncomfortably bejeweled exit at some point. Maybe we will never know what became of it. But I can predict with a fair amount of confidence that it won’t be the last time he swallows a chakra rock. One of my many (concerned but loving) observations of this man is that it often takes multiple consequences before a lesson is learned. But who knows? Maybe by now he’s “chock” full of “chakra” rocks, and with his chakras now properly aligned, he can move on to the next phase of his enlightenment.

Tahlia Miller lives in west Michigan with her husband who has ADHD. Like many other couples, their marriage has been impacted both positively and negatively by his ADHD, but also by Tahlia's anxiety disorder. Both Tahlia and her husband are educators.