Do It My Way
November 16, 2008
Will came in to talk about what he wants to do with the car insurance when Marc starts to drive. He gave me his opinion. I gave him mine (it slightly differed). He told me his opinion again.
From the past, I know that if I don't tell him I disagree explicitly, he considers the matter settled. We're going to do what he said. I'm tired of getting yelled at a later date because I say, "That is not how I want to handle it." He yells and says it's too late - I should have spoke up the first time. SO, I got frustrated and sighed. I didn't have a plan in mind for how to handle this situation, and I didn't know what to do.
I was forecasting what may happen in the future, and of course I don't KNOW what would happen for sure. But, in my past experience with my husband, it's happened often enough to predict.
When I sighed, he jumped all over it.
"What is the deal now? What are you sighing for this time [eye roll]? So, I told him that in conversations where he states his opinion, I state mine, then he restates his, he typically assumes I'll do what he wants to do his way.
[My eyes welled up with tears - a BIG no-no.] I said that I didn't agree with his opinion, so I would call the insurance company tomorrow so we wouldn't have to assume hypothetically and could make a decision based on fact.
"Why can't we have an adult conversation without involving other people?" he asked.
"What?!" I thought.
He said, "All I wanted to do was discuss what we were going to do about the car insurance, and it's turned into sighing and tears already." Unfortunately, I engaged him. I asked him if he was wondering why I sighed and teared-up.
After that, the conversation is mostly a blur. Not so much because I can't remember it but because it jumped from one place to another. I didn't yell although he did. I didn't get emotional (no further sighs or tears) but he said I did. He said it was always about the drama. Specifically that I was a drama queen.
During one part,...
...he said that we should complete one conversation before I tell him that I had been insulted by something he said. I said, "So are you saying that I should allow you to insult me throughout an entire conversation, then when it's over tell you that I felt insulted? Because I don't agree with that."
"No," he said. Then, while talking he laid out an imaginary timeline. It went like this: we have a conversation in which I'm insulted, reach a resolution in that conversation, then I can tell him that I had been insulted. Hmmm. Isn't that what I thought he'd said?
Somehow, he managed to bring up the idea that we agreed to a certain way to raise the boys, and I wasn't honoring that agreement. I asked him, "Do you want our boys to grow up to be responsible?"
He said yes. I asked him two more questions like that to which he answered yes.
Then he said, "Are you ever going to ask me a question that we DON'T agree on?" I said, "Probably not because we both still want the same things for our boys. We're still in agreement. We just go about developing those traits in different ways."
He said, "The difference is that I support you, but you don't do it the way I do!" And I said, "Of course I don't do it the way you do. We're different people." And he said, "So you're admitting to breaking the agreement."
At this point I knew I was in way over my head.
I was tired. It was going no where.
When I withdrew from the conversation, he started yelling again. He tried to tell me what I should be doing as a wife and mother. He said he was upset because I didn't know how to be a wife or mother and I had known him for 17 years. Was I supposed to be "learning" how to be a wife and mother from him? Should a man know how it is to be a wife or mother, or should he know how it is to be a husband and father?
At that point, I said, "Now I'm done." Fortunately he honored our previous agreement that if either of us said that, then the conversation was over for the time being. He shut the sliding glass door hard on his way out.
copyright 2009 verbal abuse journals; all rights reserved.