Last night laundry (yes, the same laundry we've been working on for days now) was done, and we did a lot of work on areas of the house that had been neglected for awhile (mainly the playroom and kid's bedrooms). I took down S3's crib finally and moved it out. We fixed up his room and reorganized their toys once again (never ending task this is). The kids even helped. It was hard work, but fun.
Well, at the end of the night, other parts of the house were not quite "taken care of". Normal cleaning that we would both do daily was not done and my W was frustrated. She's a neat freak and it kills her to have clutter. Normally, when she voices her frustration like she did at around 11pm last night, I would get irritated and jump to "fix" things rather than have to hear her like that. In short, I always take that kind of thing personally, like she's really saying "why didn't you clean that mess up eariler. Now I'll have to work until 2am to do it." Wrong answer. Last night, I just continued doing whatever it was I was doing, simply saying "I know it sucks to have worked all day and still see mess. We just need another day to finish. It's hard to just let it go, but tomorrow we'll get it done." She said "Yea, I know." and just finished up with packing the kids lunch and we went to bed awhile later. The conversation lasted for about 10 minutes and then moved on. Wow. that NEVER happened in the past. This is one more big moment (or little one but...) because it was a dramatic 180 for me. I would NEVER just sit by and let her complain about some part of the house being a mess without putting on a big show to "try" fix things. Now honestly, most of the time I would just say "Well honey, do you want me to do that for you?" as if whatever it was was something only SHE was responsible for and me doing it was "helping" her and she would respond with an annoyed "No, I'll take care of it." I now see the error in that. I was still making her responsible for my actions and thus not really giving anything of myself to the situation. In this situation, I either do or not do, but don't put it on her to choose. That said, we both worked hard and I didn't think she intended for either of us to "fix" the situation, she just needed to vent so I let her. It worked like a charm. She was onto another subject in minutes...damn that Gray guy. He's onto something here!
