What We Don’t Talk About

One very cogent and true complaint I see of modern life is how we have this online medium to present a picture perfect life. Fights are glossed over or never mentioned, each child is more picture perfect than the last, and isn’t everything enviable? Everyone is perfectly in love with the love of their life, and everyone is shitting rainbows from joy.

Now, combine that with our general reticence to admit to our quarrels in general. It’s fine — nobody wants to make people worry unduly, and most people would rather generally get along with folks rather than come off as contentious or looking for a fight. Of course, I might just be speaking from my own gender conditioning and age with that statement, but anyways.

You see, today I was mad at Z. Not like, white hot rage, but annoyed and frustrated. I’d told him that I wanted to take Smallhausen on a walk to the Post Office so I could mail off my absentee ballot request form. I’m way ahead of the curve on getting it there in a timely fashion, but it was also a promise of a minor outing to the childling. Yeah, I could have done it before he got home, but this headache crap continues on and I wasn’t up to rangling both the children. He got home as the Post Office was closing, and I gave him a heavy dose of stank eye. I gave him a heavy dose of stank eye knowing that he would take it way to heart, and that it would hurt him. That isn’t to invalidate my feelings — they were valid, and I was entitled to express them.

Having said that, I apologised a couple of times with sincerity because oh hey, I knew it was going to upset him that he ‘failed’ me. He told me just how hard things have been for his brainmeats this week, and I commiserated. He has so much on his plate here in our post-vacation world. But he also accepted the validity of my upset. We talked about things, like my concerns about how he’s at the office increasingly later during the holidays, and feelings in general, and well. Stuff. Like, this is about the extent of our fighting y’all, which totally makes me sound like the turd-polishing faker sort… except like, I really did luck out. I guess my point is that we DO fight sometimes, but we get that shit locked down quickly before it can fester. It doesn’t magically fix the circumstances of current, but at least we know where each other stand so we can be considerate and loving to each other.

I guess I should add that this is always going to be significant to me because my self-preservation response to conflict is to block the ever-loving crap out of people and to lock myself down to keep sane. I used to literally run away from home after moving here and being married to try and cope with conflict, but all of that stuff is getting better and better the longer I’ve been an ACON. It feels so freaking healthy to me to be able to express my anger, to fight, to make up… all these normal, healthy, *human* things.

The last couple of nights, Z has had the brilliant idea for us to take our dinner outside. For one, we have a huge freaking table that we bought earlier this year, and for two, our kitchen is such a hotbox that dinnertime has been a miserable prospect lately. But in the evening, the sun isn’t in the yard, so it’s freaking gorgeous to be out in nature for our meal. The girls appreciate the novelty as well. Really though, us getting our pasty butts outside for any reason can only be a good thing, ha ha.

The only other thing of note is my annoyance at Pokémon Heart Gold. I started playing it on my 3DS XL, and it kept freezing. I have no idea why, and was rather annoyed. I -do- have one of the first generation DSes compliments of my best friend’s husband, so I’m trying it in there. I grumble at the small screen, but it seems to be working pretty well. I might try it again on the 3DS, but yanno… I’ll do what works to get the fix in.

Oh yeah, and I guess I’m scratching a minor Minecraft itch as well. Getting the Mooshroom while on vacation reminded me that I have yet to find a mushroom island biome in my wanderings, and that I should wander further in hopes of finding one. I’ll probably get bored pretty quickly and do something like Sims 3 or 4. Or Maybe I’ll stick my head properly into Fallout 3 like I’ve been meaning to for a year or so. We’ll see.

For now, I’ve evoked the talking cat again, so I’m off. I’ll try to remember to talk about the chore of children and sleep tomorrow, as that’s one of the ongoing household dramas. ¬¬

<3