In the spirit of “keeping current” without “dumping,” I offer the following:
Last week I got pissed off at my wife, so much so that I couldn’t hardly look at her as we ate lunch together.
The feeling between us was so bad that she eventually had to leave the house for a while, just to get some air.
See what happened was that she insulted my beef soup. She called it “stinky,” and as a self-respecting man, I just couldn’t allow that to pass unanswered.
If I had just let it go, she might get the idea that she could treat my food poorly without consequences. She’d walk all over my every meal. A man’s got to eat his lunch in peace. Right?
Well, if it sounds crazy now, it must have looked even crazier then, a grown man getting all steamed over something petty like that.
Of course, at the time I was convinced that my resentment was perfectly rational, the only sane response to her comment. I really believed that I was the innocent victim of an insensitive, uncaring wife.
And I held it against her.
She took off, and I spent a few hours alone. I did have enough sense to pray during that time. But I can’t say that I gained any willingness. Or insight. I stayed angry, just cooled down a little, and resolved to prove my point.
When we finally talked about the soup incident later in the day (and I insisted that we talk about it), I pressed her with questions suggesting that she was at fault. Didn’t she have anything to tell me? Wasn’t she sorry? Didn’t she think that I had behaved rationally? Wasn’t she really to blame?
Needless to say, that didn’t go over very well, and I left for my meeting with a big storm cloud brewin’ over my head.
That night something happened that always happens at a good meeting: someone told the truth about one of their resentments, and it shot my own resentment to shit. It feels like getting knocked off your feet, even though your still sitting in your chair.
The guy talked about how he had made himself out to be a victim and caused all this trouble, blaming everyone else, when the only real trouble was his own selfishness. He totally nailed me.
What the hell was I thinking?
My wife is five months pregnant. And she gets hungry at lunch time, desperately hungry. That day she had come into the kitchen with a biological imperative to get food to our unborn daughter.
But there I was, right in her way, cooking up some old, sloppy, left-over beef that smelled, to her heightened senses, like I’d scraped it off the bottom of the river.
Had I consulted with her before I started cooking? Did I stop and ask her what she wanted to eat? Did I make sure the baby got what it needed before taking care of myself?
No. I’d gone after my own needs, leaving my pregnant wife and daughter-to-be to fend for themselves.
I’d been selfish. And being selfish led me to be inconsiderate. Being inconsiderate led me to be insensitive. Being insensitive led me to be argumentative. Being argumentative led me to say things that were uncaring and unkind. Saying such things led to a conflict in which I behaved like an idiot. Persisting in my selfishness, I blamed the conflict and my behavior on their victim, my pregnant wife.
Once my head finally popped out of my ass, it was hard to understand why I wanted to stay buried up there for so long.
I thanked God for freeing me from my resentment, and when I got home, I made a much needed, rather belated amends.
With a bit of Grace and a little elbow grease, I can stay sane, sober and married. Short of that—on my own—I will resent myself back out into the cold. Happens every time.
