Back to the Fourth
You know you must be getting close to the end of your Fourth Step when you are sitting with your hands on the keys going "Hmm, what else do I resent about my wife?" It's a good feeling. But it doesn't mean I'm done. And I want to be done so I can turn the whole thing upside down and get to the fun part where I start looking at my part in all the things I've been resenting. So here goes:
Finances. Mostly we just pay for everything out of our join account but my wife keeps the money she earns from her job in her own account and sometimes we use that money for taxes or investments or college tuition emergencies. She also uses it to pay for some of the stuff she'd rather not tell me she's spending money on until it's already in the house. The problem is that she doesn't ever balance her checkbook or look at her statements and so at any given time has only the vaguest notion of how much money is actually in her account. This often leads to the account being overdrawn. That's the not the resentment--I'm no genius organizer myself. This is the resentment: every time I suggest that she put Quicken on her computer to keep track of her money--or let me balance her checkbook--or hand it over to the person who comes in to do my bookkeeping a couple of times a month--she doesn't just say no. She goes ballistic. She makes it a big issue of control. Exhausting!
More finances. My wife isn't extravagant. But she just won't accept that the business we're both in has an ebb and flow and sometimes the belt has to be tightened. So she'll do impulsive (and undeniably endearing) things like buy two Panama hats, one for me and one for our son, at $500.00 each. You heard that right: a thousand dollars in straw hats sitting in the closet for going on two years now. She does it out of love. But she has to know that I'm not a hat guy. And then there's the lawn. We don't live in New England. It doesn't rain here very often. And there's a lot of shade. And there are pine needles. All of that makes for an intensely anti-lawn environment. So why, year after year, the hundreds and hundreds of dollars spent on trying to create a perfect carpet of green that will never be?
One more finances: Nobody needs a new car every three years. Nobody. That's the one true extravagance. We're coming up on the third year of the Prius soon. It's gorgeous. It's perfect. I'm bracing myself.
Caged animals: We have tons of pets and that's great but I only want ones that stick around by choice. And my wife loves birds. Loves them so much she wants to lock them up in little avian Auschwitzes and then listen to them shriek in the agony of imprisonment all day long. I keep telling her the unhappiness I feel having caged animals around should outweight the happiness she feels hearing them "sing" because God knows there is no shortage of cute little free-running animals around here to be amused and delighted by. (As I write this, Phoenix the Monkey-Cat is leaping from branch to branch of the tree outside my window making life hell for the pigeons.)
The high horse: My wife and I are both slobs. We've managed to pass for actual have-it-together adults for years--we give dinner parties and the guests don't see dirty clothes strewn randomly around the house--but the truth is we're both still oh-just-throw-it-anywhere grad students at heart. Every now and then, however, my wife will embark on an admirable War Against Chaos. The resentment comes in when she gets on the high horse and suddenly I'm the problem, if it weren't for me our house would look like a room at the Four Seasons right after the maid finished cleaning. All efforts to remind her that her own office (into which I never set foot) looks like something Katrina left behind are met with wild indignation. This sounds like a small thing. It should be a small thing. Maybe when I'm done with this process it will feel to me like a small thing.
The Cabin: friends of ours own a big piece of property in upstate New York that has on it a small cabin that was lying derelict for many years until my wife fixed it up (rather brilliantly, I might add) in exchange for getting to use it whenever we want. We go there a couple of times a year. All good. The problem is: when she refers to the cabin, it's always "My cabin." And when I'm there, when we are all alone together in a ridiculously romantic log cabin by the bend of a rushing stream in a dense forest of pine and birch, I am somehow made to feel like a guest. She won't even really allow that I actually love the place myself. And somehow the more I express my love for the place, and being there, the more uneasy and ridgy she gets. There's a lot of getting on the high horse about who's keeping the place clean and who's messing it up. We actually don't have a very good time when we're there. I've actually tried to talk to her about it. Which leads to the last resentment:
Unwillingness to Process. The cabin is just one example of this. There'll be a problem between us and I'll try to get her to sit down and talk it out and she'll say, very simply, "No." And that's it. It'll either work itself out or not.
And I'm going to make that the last of the resentments that I am carrying against my wife. Stay tuned for the other side of the story on every one of these points.
Finances. Mostly we just pay for everything out of our join account but my wife keeps the money she earns from her job in her own account and sometimes we use that money for taxes or investments or college tuition emergencies. She also uses it to pay for some of the stuff she'd rather not tell me she's spending money on until it's already in the house. The problem is that she doesn't ever balance her checkbook or look at her statements and so at any given time has only the vaguest notion of how much money is actually in her account. This often leads to the account being overdrawn. That's the not the resentment--I'm no genius organizer myself. This is the resentment: every time I suggest that she put Quicken on her computer to keep track of her money--or let me balance her checkbook--or hand it over to the person who comes in to do my bookkeeping a couple of times a month--she doesn't just say no. She goes ballistic. She makes it a big issue of control. Exhausting!
More finances. My wife isn't extravagant. But she just won't accept that the business we're both in has an ebb and flow and sometimes the belt has to be tightened. So she'll do impulsive (and undeniably endearing) things like buy two Panama hats, one for me and one for our son, at $500.00 each. You heard that right: a thousand dollars in straw hats sitting in the closet for going on two years now. She does it out of love. But she has to know that I'm not a hat guy. And then there's the lawn. We don't live in New England. It doesn't rain here very often. And there's a lot of shade. And there are pine needles. All of that makes for an intensely anti-lawn environment. So why, year after year, the hundreds and hundreds of dollars spent on trying to create a perfect carpet of green that will never be?
One more finances: Nobody needs a new car every three years. Nobody. That's the one true extravagance. We're coming up on the third year of the Prius soon. It's gorgeous. It's perfect. I'm bracing myself.
Caged animals: We have tons of pets and that's great but I only want ones that stick around by choice. And my wife loves birds. Loves them so much she wants to lock them up in little avian Auschwitzes and then listen to them shriek in the agony of imprisonment all day long. I keep telling her the unhappiness I feel having caged animals around should outweight the happiness she feels hearing them "sing" because God knows there is no shortage of cute little free-running animals around here to be amused and delighted by. (As I write this, Phoenix the Monkey-Cat is leaping from branch to branch of the tree outside my window making life hell for the pigeons.)
The high horse: My wife and I are both slobs. We've managed to pass for actual have-it-together adults for years--we give dinner parties and the guests don't see dirty clothes strewn randomly around the house--but the truth is we're both still oh-just-throw-it-anywhere grad students at heart. Every now and then, however, my wife will embark on an admirable War Against Chaos. The resentment comes in when she gets on the high horse and suddenly I'm the problem, if it weren't for me our house would look like a room at the Four Seasons right after the maid finished cleaning. All efforts to remind her that her own office (into which I never set foot) looks like something Katrina left behind are met with wild indignation. This sounds like a small thing. It should be a small thing. Maybe when I'm done with this process it will feel to me like a small thing.
The Cabin: friends of ours own a big piece of property in upstate New York that has on it a small cabin that was lying derelict for many years until my wife fixed it up (rather brilliantly, I might add) in exchange for getting to use it whenever we want. We go there a couple of times a year. All good. The problem is: when she refers to the cabin, it's always "My cabin." And when I'm there, when we are all alone together in a ridiculously romantic log cabin by the bend of a rushing stream in a dense forest of pine and birch, I am somehow made to feel like a guest. She won't even really allow that I actually love the place myself. And somehow the more I express my love for the place, and being there, the more uneasy and ridgy she gets. There's a lot of getting on the high horse about who's keeping the place clean and who's messing it up. We actually don't have a very good time when we're there. I've actually tried to talk to her about it. Which leads to the last resentment:
Unwillingness to Process. The cabin is just one example of this. There'll be a problem between us and I'll try to get her to sit down and talk it out and she'll say, very simply, "No." And that's it. It'll either work itself out or not.
And I'm going to make that the last of the resentments that I am carrying against my wife. Stay tuned for the other side of the story on every one of these points.
posted by Tom at 6:47 AM
4 Comments:
That last one is very interesting. I am very curious to find out what you think is your part in that.
Keep up the good work.
"Pidgeons"??
I thought you said you were a writer...
And there's always Spellcheck you know lol
Dear Pigeon Awareness:
Many thanks for the correction, which I have made, though in fact now and then Walter Pidgeon and the Pidgeon sisters from The Odd Couple do come and play in the tree outside my office, and the cat particularly loves those days.
I am trying to get myself organized and have been looking through the web for some ideas. I just started searching blogs and found you post. Thanks for the read.
--Closet Maid
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