Maria and I have plenty of arguments, but they are not the normal arguments that people have with their partners. They are unique to us. My wife has very particular feelings and sensibilities, most recently we began a three day argument about sloths.

You can follow her version of events here.

What, you might wonder, do sloths have to do with us and our marriage? Well, a lot, as it turns out. A brief synopsis:

Maria often wakes up in the night and wants – demands – to hear a story. I often tell her a story unless I’m too sleepy. They did put her to sleep, although I didn’t always take that as a compliment.

I learned early on that any animal story puts her to sleep instantly, in seconds, almost as if a fairy waved some dust over her, or somebody flipped the sleep switch.

I have this calming and sleep app which I got to help her get to sleep. This app has great stories, many of them about animals, and when I saw the story of “Sienna, The Sleeping Sloth,” I knew I had struck gold.

Nothing makes Maria sleep quicker or more  deeply than a story about an animal that she loves – like any kind of puppy or octopus or sloth. I always started my stories to her with a baby something.

The app worked like a charm.

I would just open the app, start the story about Sienna and wait for her to conk out. It usually took about 15 seconds.

The other night, she didn’t go to sleep. She listened to the story. And in the story, the sloth walks some distance in Costa Rica to help another sloth get up a tree. I fell asleep, but in the morning Maria woke up ticked off, even outraged. The story was upsetting to her.

Everybody knows or should know, she said, that sloths can’t walk normally, their muscles are attuned to hanging on to trees, it is painful and difficult for them when they try to walk. Just check out this video about a man rescuing a sloth in Costa Rica and her gratitude, it has about 8 million views.

Maria was angry about the story, they should have known, she said, it reminded her of some of her nightmares about walking in wet concrete. Not the point of the app, really.

I took the writer’s side. It was fiction, I said.

Made-up stories don’t have to be literal. They aren’t supposed to be literal.  If every story had to be literally true, there would be no novels or fictional movies or drama series on Netflix.

It would have been a much duller story if the sloth couldn’t walk to help out his friend, or if we had to wait an hour for him to get there. They move slowly.

I said she was taking it too seriously. Well, she disagreed of course, and the discussion rages, we have asked a whole bunch of people about it and most just raise their eyebrows.

But I keep telling Maria that writers usually get the last word.

Yesterday I spent an hour trawling the Internet for a stuffed sloth, and I found a good one after awhile. It arrived today and I hung it on the flower pot outside of her studio. She still disagrees with me but she is very happy to have the sloth, she just started beaming.

You can’t win a fight with an artist,  you just have to find a way around it. I lost the battle, but perhaps I won the war.