Uh oh, you look like hell. Been a long week. Do tell. The more I feel like I am ascending from this hole I've been in, the more my feet and fingers slip from the cracks in the side of the walls, and the higher I climb the less likely there are enough cracks to proceed. Picking yourself up from the ground is not easy to do. Everyday a new challenge awaits. If things are as bad as they seem, surely you did not expect them to improve overnight. I guess that is one of the challenges I did not expect to have. I have said for years now that there is nothing wrong with us, that our core is and has always been intact...but the more aware I become, the more hesitant and aware to our core being broken I become too. Explain. My wife is real high on pointing out the things I do that I never seem to "get". For example, I will come home from work, my mind riff with the day's bullshit and tomorrow's woes that I am in charge of fixing, without losing my mind or what little control I have over the people who report to me. I come home and search out the first thing that will alleviate this stress, my daughter, and then try to get out of my work clothes into something more comfortable, because the second I shut off the engine to my car, I instantly become Daddy and Plaything, while Mommy makes dinner. She talks to me but I do not hear her. I do not hear her because I am too involved with my own voices in my head, making pretend voices with Fairies and Mickey Mouse toys on the playroom floor, to care about anything else being said, which leads to her being upset with me over the important thing I apparently missed out her job. She refuses to repeat herself, because I should have been listening the first time, and then proceeds to be a dick to me for the remainder of the evening. Well, this morning, she comes in from being gone all morning long, sees that the little milk containers she bought for our daughter's school days has been cut open and assumes I used it for my coffee. She assumes this because she has already made up her mind long ago that I am simply disrespectful and inconsiderate to everyone not me, and then proceeds to lash me with "Can you please not use these for your coffee in the morning? I buy them for her school and we have milk in the fridge for coffee." I ignore her, knowing that she has inserted foot deep into her mouth, for the true of to the matter was that there was no straw on this one, so I cut it open for my daughter to drink. She was so focused on getting her point across to me that she did not give a shit about the tiny little facts completely shitting on her heated little rant. IN FACT, she got even more pissed about me correcting her. She then stated that I must have misunderstood her, because her intentions were not to blame me...I simply repeated her words, "Please do not use the milk for your coffee." and asked how exactly I could not have done anything other than assume she blamed me for using the milk for my coffee with those words. I see. So, even when you have clear cut proof that her anger is driven by false assumptions, your wife continues down this same path, altering her own interpretations in order to not apologize for her actions, while continuing to assert herself onto you for something you did not do. Man, you're getting good at this. So what did you do after this? Tried to remain in control of my emotions. I get enough shit from her that is legitimate, I be damned if I will eat the make-believe too.
So not much improvement then between you two? Actually, no. We have slowly gotten better, but it's been mostly my own, which I know sounds a bit cocky and unfair to say, but I cannot state something that doesn't apply. She has grown in her own turtle-like ways, but I have been making strides with my own pursuit of happiness. How so? Take the lottery this past week as an example. It hit world records highs and I decided to plug 50 into the company pool at work, which is something I don't normally do, and getting word that we had 2,100 tickets that equates to about 16 million a piece I started to think big, like everyone else was I suppose. Then, the day of the drawing, I had a thought cross my mind during lunch at work. I reached for my phone to call the wife, because I wanted to share this with her, and she was too busy with her mommy friends to listen. Two things happened with this.
1) I realized that we both might be working towards something, but only one of us made it top priority.
2) The chance of me winning the lottery, even with the biggest number of tickets ever purchased by me, palled in comparison to the jackpot I had already won a decade ago, when I met my wife. It's this last one that really settled deep inside my heart and soul, and I wanted to desperately share it with the woman who put it there. And she did not feel it important enough to step aside from her social gathering to listen. Exactly. Maybe I am just expecting too much from her. But do you truly believe this yourself? Is she your jackpot or just a series of random chances of hitting the internal jackpot your own insecurities will not allow you to admit to? Are you trying to knock me down? No. I am simply asking those things you do not want to ask, and hope someone else will ask for you. It's a fair question to ask, is it not? You say that she is your jackpot, but you have squandered it all these years, for whatever reason, throwing it away as though these kinds of things grew on trees, flaunting in some cases to others of what you have and never really knowing for sure yourself. Admittedly, she is a wonderful woman, when all the correct cylinders are turning and firing in perfect timing. The very fact she never accepted your perspective on her coming home and blaming you shows that either she feels nothing ill happened between you, or that you are simply making up a defense to cover for that ultimate asshole your wife thinks you are. So, did you win this jackpot or did she? What do you mean?
Your wife has not once admitted fault to you. She has only restated the facts as she sees them, implying that, even if something wrong had occurred, the misconception was brought on by a previous notion that you put there for her. She has, in a sense, hit the lottery of excuses she was running thin on before. Sure, she might have done wrong, but had you not done it before multiple times, she would never have assumed it was you the moment she walked in the door. If *you* had done your due diligence as a man and a proper husband, she would not have to work so hard on being this supreme asshole you can't seem to live without. Maybe, with this explanation, you both are winners, while being total losers at the same time. So, you are telling me that my emotions are not only wrong, but misleading in such a way that I have managed to see through the walls, lost in my own fantasy, in order to thrive within a corroded marriage? I am a subconscious mirror of yourself, I am not telling you anything you don't already know or think outside this open fantasy of yours. So, to close this metaphor, Mirror, mirror on the Blog...Who is the most unlucky person of them all?
The little girl who is oblivious to this. She has a mother and a father who loves her more than anything this world has to offer, including half a billion dollars. So in that, you both are the luckiest persons in her world, because her world is one that flourishes on something other than money, and the one thing no amount of money could ever buy...her love.
