Okay. I think it’s about time that I try to be brutally honest with myself for a minute. I guarantee it will slip away from me and I’ll go back to being my witty, evading self - but till then, here it goes:
As a couple - My husband and I mesh extraordinarily well. We are best friends and would share pretty much every minute of every day with each other if given the chance. This perhaps is because we are NOT given the chance to spend every minute of every day with each other - but I prefer to believe it is because I Like Him A Lot.
There are thousands of things that he does perfectly well. He offers footrubs of his own accord. He loves to play with my hair. He is constantly solicitous of my needs. He cooks for me. He loves to kiss me. He tells me I’m beautiful. He cleans out the litter boxes. He kills the stray bugs. He lets me choose the movie. He let’s me play car D.J. It does not seem to bother him that my art stuff is littered all over the first floor as though there had been a nuclear craft explosion. In fact, he enables my craft habits by holding my hand as we walk the aisles of the nearest Craft Mecca. He always (%99.9 of the time) lets me know where he is and when he’s coming home.
There are thousands of things that I’ve heard other spouses actively complaining about that don’t bother me or him. We BOTH leave our socks out. We don’t make the bed. Unless we’re particularly motivated at beating them back, our clothes tend to creep out of our closet and take over any available horizontal space (floor, bureau, dresser, loveseat, bed, etc.). Our car is messy. Our house has been in the middle of rennovations for 1.5 years now and going - we’re doing okay. I like to listen to the same song over and over and over again sometimes and he hasn’t eaten me yet. He insists that our car is a GREAT car - even though it has over 240,000 miles and it’s over 12… maybe 13 years old - and I still smile when he says it. I don’t drive stick and our car is a stick shift, and he drives me everywhere I need to go or I take the bus and the bus, as previously noted, makes me crazy and we still get by just fine. We chug along as roommates, best friends, lovers, and companions.
And I could leave it at that and just say - Life is sweet (because it is). But that wouldn’t be the whole picture.
The whole picture includes the fact that I am a hard ass. I am demanding and I can be a Royal Bitch. I am quick and witty! But I am also sharp-tongued and fast to "defend" myself by attacking. If there is a whit of an inkling of a suggestion of negativity in his demeanor and his comment/question/action could perhaps, in an alternate universe, on another planet, in a different timezone, be interpreted as a minor rejection then I am quite suddenly Upset. My brain short circuits and I am left feeling as though there is no longer any ground to stand on or gravity to keep me there. I Freak Out. Sometimes it is a lesser freak out, but to say that it doesn’t happen would be like walking into a HUGE brick wall and then earnestly asking if anyone else noticed that overly strong wind that just knocked me over.
My gut reaction is to push. Perhaps I am an emotional bully. I push him to react to things I say that grow progressively more awful. I push him away from me because if he gave me a hug, because he thinks I’m upset and I accepted that hug - it would be like saying "Everything’s Okay! I need you! I will now proceed to fall apart in your arms!"; when, in fact, everything is Not Okay, and although I desperately need him - God forbid HE know that. And although I am falling apart - there’s a small part of me that keeps running around with a staple gun and stapling the pieces into a bigger, scarier, less stable, less real, ready-to-fall-apart-if-only-seriously-confronted-with-a-true-calling-out-of-all-the-ridiculousness me - therefore he’s too intimidated to really confront me, and his "weakness" (which isn’t weakness at all) just drives me to further insanity:
Him: So… then we can go up and take a shower and you can try that new conditioner I picked out for you that will "Smooth and Condition" dry hair!
Me: Are you saying my hair looks dry?
Him: No… No no no nonono. Your hair looks great! I just thought you would want to go upstairs.
Me: So you paused my show to interupt me to tell me you think my hair looks like shit?
Him: No! I’m sorry *Presses play*
Me: So you don’t want to talk to me at all?
I nit pick, say things that sting, and complain. I interpret his questions/queries/comments as insults and tell him so, even if they are of the most gentle nature and I watch as he is dizzied by my ability to spin things around.
And then my head spins around 360 degrees and I walk down the stairs backwards as in The Exorcist.
Yes. I know i’m ridiculous. The ridiculousness echoes in my head and I hear the bile pour out of my mouth and there are those rare moments when I stop it all by myself. But most of the time… I don’t.
I continue this until I tire myself out and the storm dissipates, and either we fix it, or I’m crying, or he’s crying, or we’re both crying, and I crawl into his arms after his 500th plea to hold me. And then everything’s fine.
You see. I am fragile. I fancy myself wonderwoman, strongest of the strong. Dude, I could totally fight off an attacker on the subway - they could NEVER take me. I am intelligent. I am well-read. I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING DAMMIT. Except when I don’t.
And when I don’t, my world is turned upside down a la David Bowie’s Labyrinth and I no longer know which way is up. The smallest potentially-negatively-interpreted comment from Kyle makes can bring my world crashing down and he hasn’t figured out how not to do that or how to make it all better in a fairly short time-frame. He’s figured out that food sometimes works - chocolate chip pancakes, or donuts, or souffle and now that I weigh a bunch more than I did a year ago I’ve (mostly) stopped accepting that kind of apology.
But the thing is that I know that at LEAST half of the time - he really shouldn’t even have to apologize because he didn’t do anything deserving even half the explosive reaction that it got. It’s also not his job to figure out how to snuff the explosion after it happens - but rather it should be MY job to figure out why I explode in the first place.
But on the explosion goes.
It’s me battling my own demons. Now, he is NOT without fault, and there are times when he is genuinely hurtful or offensive and we work through those times. I would even venture to say that those times are easier to work through because there is something concrete for us to tackle with our combined reasoning powers. But I share the fault for these freak outs. You would think that after a year and a half of marriage to this man who pretty much consistently treats me like the Best Thing That’s Ever Happened to him. You would think that I wouldn’t be so terrified that I’ll lose him - I mean, for goodness sake, WE’RE MARRIED. NEITHER of us believe divorce is an option for us - personally. How am I going to lose him? And even as I type those words, a million dark swimming things start moving in my stomach and my mind imagines a million ways he could abandon me… emotionally, physically… when I reach my hand out for his and he doesnt take it IMMEDIATELY (even if he literally happened to be looking in a different direction at the time of my plea for hand holding…) , does that mean he doesn’t want me anymore? It must, right? That’s what it means?
This is not the prettiest part of my psyche, but it is a significant part. And Kyle continues to struggle in the Gail force winds of my emotions. And I continue to let the gusts fly.
There’s a line in a counting crow’s song… American girls are weather and noise.
That’s me. Weather and noise.
And all I can do is keep praying that each day he’ll see through it a little better.
And maybe one day, he’ll stroll right through the storm as though it were a beautiful day, pick me up, slide his hand up through my hair at the nape of my neck and tell me to quit being ridiculous.
He’ll always love me.
