We’re standing in the kitchen on a Tuesday, it’s a small kitchen, not much room to move around, and we are putting away our dishes. He’s grabbing mugs and spatulas as I’m grabbing bowls and forks and we move around each other as we find a place for everything and everything in its place.
Stepping on toes
This is a new thing for us – being in the same space again after deployment – and it feels like we don’t quite know the steps yet to a dance that everyone else intuitively knows. I feel myself getting irritated as he puts the measuring cups in the wrong cabinet, feel myself resenting him for having been gone so long, feel myself just wanting space and I feel guilty. We’ve been married for awhile now after all, we should move together with fluidity and understanding and he should know where the frying pan goes, for the love.
I’m surprised by these thoughts, these resentments, and I don’t quite know what to do with them. Do I talk about them with Lane, do I lay them down, do I nurse them for a little bit because I have a right to be wounded after that terrible deployment we just endured, me as much as him?
Letting it slide
I let it slide- I’m a good wife, after all, I have grace and don’t nag and know how to move on after something so trite- but I don’t actually let it slide at all, not really. He’s down 0-1 in my book and spends his next week trying to make a comeback in a game he doesn’t even know he’s playing. He comes in the door from work and leaves his pile of things on the counter. His unpacked suitcase sits sprawled open in our bedroom, he grates his teeth on his fork.
We settle into our routines- he exists in his world, I exist in mine and we share chicken at the dinner table but that’s the extent of our togetherness. We have become roommates.
I can no longer let it slide. If we’re going to actually do this thing- be married, live together till death do us part- he has got to pull his weight, I tell him. He has to put away his laundry and he just cannot, cannot eat his food with his teeth. I then break down crying because of the guilt and the fear and the hurt, and I begin to realize that the thing was not really The Thing after all.
New dance steps
I realize I wasn’t really angry about the frying pan or the keys on the counter. No, those weren’t the thing. I realize we need to talk about the fear and the loneliness. We need to talk about how to better love the other and be married again. We need to talk.
So we talk- brutally honest, for hours, into the night. He shares his hurts and I share mine and it felt like we could breathe again.
