You are right Blistory, I should not have laughed, I should not have even continued to engage with her as she said the things she said. I should have walked away and turned my back on her and her extreme reaction to my resistance to bringing an extra responsibility in the form of a dog into our family. I take full responsibility for everything I did and said in all of our discussions and arguments, but I did not call her names, I did not judge her, I did not tell her what she was thinking, or react to what I thought she was thinking, and inflicting violence on her never entered my head.
Just before that argument and assault I made a choice to do anything I could to not despair. Right or wrong, laughing was the best I could do, but inside I was crushed and desperate for a way to show her how crushed and hurt I had been feeling all through the years. Through the years I would despair, despair that the woman I believed to be rational and understanding could be saying the things she would say. Telling me that she hated our street, referring to the people of the area as "scroats", saying to me that it was not fair that "everyone else" was leaving their young children with their parents and taking holidays abroad and that she couldn't because I would not leave our DD and go away for probably the only holiday we could only afford if we put it on a credit card. She used to complain at me that we didn’t go out enough and that we didn’t have many friends and that I should be cooking her romantic meals and renting a film because that was what “normal people did for their wives”.
I believed anything was possible with communication. All I wanted to do was talk and plan. She seemed to want things immediately, and my need to plan was because I had OCD in her opinion. When I used to tell her my thoughts about our responsibility to save for the children’s education she told me that I worried too much and that they could get student loans, that I was an automaton, where as she was a human being. That I was controlling, and that “everyone else at work was talking about their holidays” and she told me that “every one else was happy to pay for their holiday on a credit card” telling me that she knew the debt situation of “everyone else” who she worked with and who had been abroad.
The worst thing Blistory was being told what I thought and what I wanted, as though she had a window on my mind. She would tell me what I ws thinking and then I would find myself explaining that I didn’t think those things. What she thought I was thinking would get her so angry and take th discussion off in a direction that was far from the issue that I had raised in the first place, which would lead to shouts, her calling me names, throwing things at me, then days of silence. After the silence she would be all loving again as though nothing had happened, but the unfairness of it all weighed on my mind so that over time I became quiet, withdrawn and sad. I spent years trying to convince her that I wasn't thinking what she said I was thinking
If I were to want to discuss anything it was never the right time and I should have known that it was the wrong time to bring up things. Things as trivial as taking down a tree in the garden, whether we can really afford the cost of drama classes for two of the DC, never mind two hour round trip on a Monday night to take them, or how much we might afford to spend at Christmas, whether we could make a shopping list together so that I was not having to drive the mile up to the shop at times when I had the kids to bathe, to play games with, to read to.
Her anger quickly flared up when I suggested that maybe the open plan room we had could be partitioned. My reason was because there were 3 growing children and 2 adults sharing one space that we were likely to clash in the future, plus I wanted some privacy to be able to discuss grown up stuff, without the kids earwigging from the other end of the room. She got angry with me and criticised me for changing my mind about the room in the years since we bought the place. A small thing, but we could not discuss it because anger got in the way.
Her explanation for getting angry was - because I had brought up a subject at the wrong time, that she was tired as she worked three nights a week on shifts with a sporadic pattern, that I had the wrong look on my face, that the tone of my voice was wrong, and that I should have known that the subject would be emotive, and that I should not bring up potentially emotive subjects until at least two clear days from her last night shift. When I told her that many of her reactions were disproportionate and unfair, and when I referred to the last time she had reacted that way she would accuse me of living in the past and tell me that I was not normal, that she didn't live in the past at all and could put things behind her because she was laid back and easy going and that I was a stressed, uptight, miserable person. She once ran around the kitchen area waving her arms in the air like a crazed baboon and said that that was how she saw me to be. Sometime after that incident, when I told her I was leaving and reminded her of that insulting impersonation she did of how she perceived me to be and she said "I am sorry I did that, but that is what you are like".
I was not like that, I was just an ordinary person dealing with the challenges of children, life and business. I would never speak to anyone in the way that she would thoughtlessly speak to me. And not only to me, she once told our youngest DS when he was four to “get out of my face” when he was wanting to get close to her at the dinner table. She shouted at all three of our DCs that “everyone was treating her like shit” when I happily let them put fluffy tinsel on what she referred to as HER real Christmas Tree! She later text me from work to tell me that she thought that everyone was laughing at her. By everyone she meant me and the three children, who I saw to be happily decorating our tree.
When she was off nights at the weekends and sleeping I would sort the kids, entertain the kids, keep them quiet, clean, do washing, shop (with the three kids), cook AND attend to the business stuff that as a director of a business that was contributing to the household was my responsibility alone. I did all of that without complaint, and yet on a couple of occasions, when I was home in the week and she was going to the shop she wanted to leave our youngest with me because he “did her head in at the shops”, never mind that I was working, and that I never objected to taking him or any of the DCs to the shop when she was sleeping off nights. But then she would point out that I was “Mr perfect”. When I pointed out how leaving our 4 year old with me was distracting she became angry and an argument ensued.
I didn’t mind night shifts, they were necessary and I was grateful to her for what she did, but she often remarked that she was tired and that it made her grumpy, and that she didn’t like that it meant that she missed out on evenings with the children and social events. When I suggested that she might be able to find a day job in the local area her response was “how dare you tell me what to do. I love working nights and I would work nights for the rest of my life if I could” And this is a woman who wanted us to have a dog. The practicalities would have been too much for me, never mind the fact that I am allergic to them. This was not a problem before we had children and when our DC(1) was only a toddler, but 14 years later, as a person who runs a business on my own working with people who are highly vulnerable to infection, I couldn’t risk bringing a dog into our open plan room and trust that I would not have to live with the symptoms of mild asthma, which to any casual observer might appear that I have a cold. I argued that if a person visiting my very disabled and ill child was showing up sneezing and coughing every visit, I would politely ask him to cease coming. Her answer was that I could take antihistamine every day and that it was not fair that she could not have a dog and that she didn’t think that she could cope with not having a dog, and that she had no hope, nothing. And when I told her that she had me and the children but it seemed that we were not enough she responded “you’re not enough”.
I had a choice in my reaction to her that night and I chose to laugh at her statements and to stand up for my beliefs. My DW had a choice and she chose to come across the room and hit me. I am so glad that by the time she resorted to hitting me, that I was past my despair, long past the time when I would find myself unable to get out of my seat because my arms and legs felt as though they were filled with lead, long past the time when I would consider whether the world would be better off without me, long after the time when I would find myself standing by the local canal lock on a winters morning, staring into the hole in the ice, considering how long it might take for it all to be over if I were just to tumble in head first. It was MY reaction to my DWs choices of words that put me in a dark place where men and women exist today and it was my choice to leave her.