So, that was a great night. Unfortunately, she didn't sleep much that night (I did, but she told me the next morning that she woke up over and over.) The next night, Friday, we had a little mood swing action happening.
I spent the day at a school (in cold air conditioning) doing some training. (More on this in next post; long story short, it was great and I came home in a great mood.)
My wife and one twin dropped off S3 at the babysitter's house and went into the bigger town to get checkups and vaccinations. Fun fun fun! The other twin stayed home.
Since it's hotter than Hell's attic here, I called my wife when I left for the gym after work and told her I wanted to take the family out for Thai food and a movie in a dark, air-conditioned theater. She was delighted.
But when I got home, I found her shouting at the twin who stayed home, S14K. S14K was throwing a tantrum because W had taken S14D out for breakfast at Denny's this morning, and they'd also stopped for an ice cream cone after getting their shots. He'd been cooped up in the house, he'd shouted at her, and had nothing to do except watch TV and play the Wii and his PSP! In addition, he HATES Thai food and nobody CARES and it's not FAIR and everybody hates him and he's had it with us and . . . .
So the evening proceeded like that for awhile. I refused to let him keep us home. He could choose, I told him, between being polite with us or impolite out in the car until we were ready to go home. He settled down once we had dinner on the table and everyone enjoyed the movie (Toy Story 3, highly recommended) but the drive to the restaurant nearly killed my wife. She pulled over more than once to argue with him. I was trying to get her to ignore him and let him stew over his choice, but she'd been with him too long already and it was too much.
Anyway, when we got home, we were all feeling good, but I'm sure she was exhausted. I was tired, but it was more of a horny sort of fatigue. The HD men reading will know this feeling, I think.
I said something about getting her upstairs, and she flat-out shut me down. It went something like: "Stop right there. I'm not kidding, the answer is no. I'm going to sleep. No sleep last night, remember? And I ran all day, and I'm tired. I'm going to sleep."
I didn't argue with her, which is good. And I noticed that she was nice, but clear and explicit, which is also good. She obviously didn't expect me to read her mind or "just know." And I was able to self-soothe pretty quickly and feel OK about it, which is good. But I did notice in thinking it over that my disappointment took the form of thinking something like "Crap, last night worked so well. What went wrong here?"
I also said something to her about sex in the morning instead. She replied that she wouldn't go along with that, because I'd wake her up at 2 a.m. and insist that "It's morning now!" This seems really unfair because, although I wasn't planning on it, it does seem like the sort of nonsense I find hilarious. I told her all I meant was that when she did wake up, I wanted to make love. But that was not to be, and this morning I again had those frustrated pursuing thoughts . . . "Oh, come on, that should have worked!"
It's not that I expect these thoughts to cause me major trouble . . . and I've gotten so much better at thinking about how I'm approaching my wife and my marriage that I examined these thoughts and dealt with them. It helps to be able to self-soothe so the nagging feeling or thought of having been slighted or missed out doesn't hang in my head all day. But I don't want to go back to thinking of sex as a game where I try to get all I can from her and she's the goaltender trying to keep me out. I don't want to fall back into doing things like the dinner and a movie out last night (which I genuinely did so we could all relax and have fun, not to get her in the mood for sex) with an eye always on getting my wife into the mood.
Not only that, but the way she reacted this week makes me think she's starting to feel a little pressured again. Whether the pressure is coming from me, from her or both, is hard to tell sometimes. Sometimes she feels pressured because I'm coming on too strong or too often. Sometimes she feels pressured because we've had especially good sex lately, and she feels like she has to live up to it and keep it that good forever. Sometimes she feels pressured because we haven't had it in awhile and she feels like she's got to wait to make it great . . . but the longer she waits, the greater it has to be . . . it's not easy for her.
