-- Me, Saturday afternoon.Part of being married is that you are expected to jump in, when your husband or wife says something negative about themselves, and reassure them that whatever negative thing they just said is absolutely not true. I know this, and it's a rule I follow almost unfailingly.
But Sweetie tests the edges of that rule; Sweetie will not always come right out and say "My hair looks terrible today" when I'm sitting and just listening to her; if she did that, Sweetie would immediately get my response: "No, it doesn't. Your hair looks beautiful, like always." (It always does.)
Instead of doing that, just coming out and saying things directly, Sweetie tends to take one of two different tactics. She'll throw it in in the running, apparently to see if I'm listening. Like this:
Sweetie: So then I told him that he absolutely could not stay out until 1 o'clock and he had to clean his room this shirt makes me look terrible plus Mr Bunches wouldn't put on his pants.
Me: Um... No?
Or, if Sweetie doesn't do that, she'll hit me when I'm clearly distracted, as I was on Saturday, when I'd returned home from This Saturday's Adventure, and had just finished getting the Babies! up into their room and ready for their nap, leading me to now start my own lunch at about 1:15 p.m. I was starving and looking in the refrigerator as Sweetie wandered through the room doing something about the cat food and talking to me all at the same time, and then she paused and looked at me expectantly.
I realized that she'd just said something about her appearance, or personality, or something, that required refuting, but I wasn't sure what she'd said or what I was supposed to say.
Rather than going with a generic "That's crazy," I said ""I'm eating lunch, so you should list all the things I'm supposed to refute and I'll get to them later," and then moved on to eating my Ramen noodles.
No comments:
Post a Comment