Thanks for all the witty banter! We ended up going out to dinner to an Indian restaurant. W said she was "so tired" and made a big show of barely keeping her eyes open at the table. On the way home, I said I needed to pick up DS15, and she said she was SO TIRED and wanted to be dropped off at home first. I kind of screwed up, didn't talk to her at all about this, but ended up taking the exit to pick up DS. She said, "Where are you going? I told you to drop me off." I ended up taking her home, but she said I was being passive aggressive in ignoring her request to go home, (I don't know...maybe I was...there was no intent to piss her off...but I did just kind of decide that it wouldn't be such a big deal to swing by and pick him up...is that PA?), wouldn't let it drop, and actually said that she needed to get away from me and be by herself for a while to think things through.
This morning she said she felt like she was walking on eggshells around me (I told her I felt the same way about her) and that the only way to get me to listen to her and take her seriously was to threaten to leave.
I told her that I wasn't sure about whether what I had done was PA, but that I was getting to the point where I didn't really care what she thought about anything, as I felt she was more of a roommate than a wife. She said she felt like I had been treating her like a roommate, except that I expected her to have sex with her. "And we just had sex two weeks ago." Yeah, for the first time in 2004.
Anyway, we got to the usual "hairdog doesn't listen and discuss and consider and appreciate Ms. Hairdog" stuff, and I said I'd work on it, and she said she'd work on her stuff, too.
Does anyone hear a record skipping? So, assuming that everything she says is true, how does one "listen and discuss and consider and appreciate"? According to her, that is her love language. What do you classify that under? Quality time?
vent vent vent.... and let's talk about the birthday again for a second. Let's talk about effort. I got a dinner out with her and the kids (during which she was barely awake). I got a card from her in which she had put a picture of a nice globe on a stand, which is what she has ordered for me, and which will be coming in a few days. I could care less about the present (I certainly didn't ask for a globe, although it's always nice to have one at a house.). I didn't expect sex, especially after her announcement of how tired she was. But a little effort to avoid fighting would have been nice. A little effort to not threaten to leave would have been nice.
My DS15, who was not in the car during the argument, asked me how my birthday had been. I told him this: "You know how you can have a day that is just 'kinda bad' and it just becomes another day, and you shrug it off? Well, when it's your birthday, and it turns out 'kinda bad,' the fact that it's your birthday really magnifies the badness. It's because even when you get older and you don't care so much about presents, you still want to feel special on your birthday. It's the one day a year when people are supposed to put a little effort into making it a nice day for you. So, my birthday has been 'kinda bad.'" I assured him that he and his siblings had nothing to do with the quality of my day, and that they had in fact help make it bearable.
And to top all this off, during the night, W put her hand on my side, which she rarely does. I don't know if it was a guilty conscience or what, but I just ignored it.
