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I’d intended to write a real entry today, but as I sat staring into space for fifteen increasingly uncomfortable minutes completely incapable of coming up with the word for that thing, that thing that slides down mountains? That is made of ice? And it moves really slowly? And carries lots of debris? What is that thing called?
I could even remember that it forms something called a terminal moraine, and that it leaves behind a cirque, and that it produces debris called till…but what is the thing called?
I could have googled it. Pride prevented me from doing so.
Weekends leave me dried out and exhausted in a way that no weekday, no matter how stressful, can ever do. It’s the comparison, you see, the comparison between how much I do–by absolute necessity–and how much he doesn’t do. I can manage the hard work of running a house and raising several children when he’s not here, but when he is here and doing nothing, or worse, complaining about what I’m doing, then I wear out.
The mental stress sucks the life out of me.
It’s like this: I’m leaving the house to take a child to an athletic practice. He’s staying home with the smaller ones. It’s about to thunderstorm. I’ve offered to reverse tasks, if he’d prefer. He prefers to stay home. As I’m hurrying the eldest child out the door, I ask him to please shut the windows if it starts raining in, because I know he’ll never ever think of such a thing on his own, even if he’s sitting next to an open window and getting wet.
He sighs deeply, with enormous distress, as if I’ve asked him to donate a kidney to my best friend and he really must carefully weigh his options before deciding. “Which ones?” he asks.
Which ones? What is he asking me? “Whichever of them it’s raining into. All of them. The ones that need to be shut!” I’m babbling because I cannot comprehend the question.
Now he’s angry. “No! Which ones did YOU open? How can I know which windows to shut if I don’t know which ones YOU opened!” His words come out as an accusation against me, as clearly I have been plotting to ruin his day by opening up the windows earlier. He’s glaring at me.
Would this be a good moment to point out that my house contains precisely seven windows which could possibly have been open at that moment? Seven. That’s all.
See, it’s not the question, although “Which ones” has to rank right up there among the top weird responses to a request to please shut the windows. It’s not the question…it’s the fact that when I ask the man to do something for me, he gets angry. His first responses, every single time, is anger.
It should not, but it wrings me out. It exhausts me. It leaves me completely empty and alone.
One day, perhaps I’ll learn to lower my expectations enough with this man that I don’t get my tiny little feelings hurt when he snaps at me. Perhaps I’ll find a way to snap back without escalating things. Perhaps I’ll simply stop caring.
In any case, I need to deal with his little outbursts better, because going around forgetting a word like “glacier” just can’t be allowed to happen again any time soon.
