Conflict

Last night I got pissed off at my wife for not making dinner. Which, when you say it out loud (or write it down), seems downright ridiculous. The back-story: When I got home from work last night at 5:30, my son Jack was complaining about pain in his ear, so I bundled him into the mini-van and set out for the after-hours pediatric care center on the other side of town. A diagnosis of an ear infection, a prescription for antibiotics, and we were out the door. I stopped at the drug store to have the prescription filled, then headed home. We walked in the house at seven. My expectation was that my wife would be bustling around in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a meal of some sort which I could then sit down and eat. I was pretty hungry, having last eaten at 3:00, and when I get hungry, I get crabby. I made some sort of offhand comment about there being no dinner, to which my wife responded in kind, so I called her a not-so-nice name, and then we fought for the rest of the night. Notably, neither one of us really ate anything after that, except for a desiccated pop tart (her) and a dry, stale slice of pizza (me).

Even as I was fuming around the kitchen in the immediate aftermath of our verbal exchange, I knew that fighting over something as trivial as who should have put the pizza in the toaster oven was a pretty stupid thing to do. Nevertheless, it is amazing how quickly the ego can make up the most illogical justifications for feeling wounded and how easily you can heap blame on other people when your expectations don’t meet up with reality.  (And this was happening less than four hours after I wrote the last posting on how absurd it is to think we can read other people’s minds. The assertive ego is nothing if not persistent).

What kept running through my head something along the lines of, well, shit, I know if our roles were reversed I would have made dinner. Which is a load of crap, obviously. The truth is, I have no idea what I would have done if our roles were reversed. I was conjuring up a fantasy future where I was the hero, which had absolutely no grounding in reality, and then using it as a yard-stick to measure someone else’s past behavior ,which itself existed nowhere other than in my unspoken expectations. That’s the ridiculous part.

What I could have done, what I should have done, was to walk over to the freezer, grab a frozen mushroom and truffle flatbread (from Trader Joe’s-yummy) and stick it in the toaster oven. Then everyone would have gotten something to eat and no one would have felt bad. Instead, I wrote a script about what was going to happen and when it didn’t happen the way I expected, I freaked out. Yes, blood sugar was low. Yes, it was late. Yes, my wife’s initial reaction was less than ideal, but none of that matters.

I guess the thing to keep in mind is that the ultimate responsibility for my actions lies with me. I am fully aware that I have control-freak tendencies which sometimes don’t mesh too well with my wife’s approach to organization. So, was I upset about dinner, or upset that she didn’t adhere to what I thought was the way the evening needed to unfold?  I think I need to work with this a little, but I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

Conflict does not necessarily have to be destructive. Sometimes it’s the fertilizer from which beautiful things grow, but sometimes it’s just cold pop-tarts and hurt feelings.