The good wife

I spend a lot of time thinking about parenting... The kind of parent I want to be, the best ways to enrich my child's life... Being a wife? Not so much. I never really plan that. I guess I assume that it's just instinctive. And in some ways it is. And in others... well, I'll just say that I need to bring more 'consciousness' to that relationship too.

Last night my husband came home late. One of his team had been let go, and he had to do damage control. (He's very protective of the group he works with, and it's been hard recently, with all the layoffs in publishing.) Fine, it had to be done. But he was late.

He wasn't that late - but it was later than he said he would be home. And I was furious. (In my defense, he had come home late the previous two nights as well - one night late enough to miss saying 'goodnight' to Jemma, and the other late enough that it was past my own bedtime.) It's not that I don't understand that there's a lot of crucial stuff going on at work right now. I do. I just don't think that stuff is as important as being here with us...

So when he got home I let him know that, "you show people your priorities through your choices, and that by being late (okay, so it was only 15 minutes this time) you're giving a message.... blah blah blah." (And there were a lot of blah blah blahs.) But the truth was simply that I missed him, and had been expecting him earlier. And when that expectation was thwarted my knee-jerk reaction was to get mad. Instead of getting mad back, he told me that he'd had a really tough day. He had had a terrible headache (that didn't respond to medication) since lunch and he'd had to deal with all of his meetings (including the one with the fired employee) in spite of it. He had just been trying to muscle through it and get home as soon as he could. I felt like a jerk.

"I'm sorry you had a hard day." I said. "And I'm sorry I got so mad." He sighed. "I know it's just because you want to see me."

It's funny how when you're mad at someone you automatically assume they're mad at you... or at least mad at you for being mad... "Then why didn't you kiss me 'hello?'" I said. "(...After I finished yelling at you?)" He came up and kissed me. "You can't just go up and kiss a rattlesnake." Hmmmm... note to self.

Sometimes we're so stuck in our own perspective that we fail acknowledge that another perspective even exists. It's always healthy to put yourself in someone else's shoes for awhile. I think that this is true for all our relationships - with kids/spouses/friends- anyone. Because ultimately it helps you to understand others (and yourself) better, and improves the quality of your relationships as well as your day to day experience. Plus, if you never take off your shoes they just get stinky.