I Thought The Fighting Was Over

I thought the fighting was over. I thought that even if I hadn’t killed those demons; I at least laid them to rest. Last winter I found myself staring at pictures that my son drew in school as my wife sat upstairs contemplating the future of our marriage. I’d said so many times that things would change, that the words became meaningless. They did as much as good as a man spitting on a wildfire. So, I said, “If you’ll stay, I’ll start doing therapy. I’ll work on myself. Just give me a little bit of time.” She reluctantly agreed.

So, a few days later, I locked myself in the spare room, staring at a screen with an old man from southern California, who spoke slowly as though every word meant just as much as the last. He carried a thin smile throughout his introductory speech, letting me know it was alright to laugh, and it was alright to say anything. This was indeed a safe space.

“I can’t stop fighting with my wife.” I said the first day. “I don’t know what it is, but we can’t seem to stand each other anymore.”

“Why do you think that is?” He asked.

“Partly because of my temper, and partly because I feel that she’ll forever play the victim.”

“Now, that’s interesting. Could you elaborate on the playing the victim part?”

I felt bad, almost nauseated, and I wanted to just exit the screen and take off. Just go for a drive somewhere, one of those long therapeutic drives with no destination. But, if I did that, she’d leave, and she’d take the kids with her. Whether that was the best reason for staying, I don’t know. But the house was too big, and full of life. Sitting in it, by myself in the deep quietness of solitary confinement, felt like enough to blow my head clean off. The noise, though it drove me mad sometimes, also kept me breathing.

“Well, uh, look, I love my wife. But every argument we’ve ever gotten into has ended with me saying that I’ll fix myself. That I’ll go to therapy. That I’ll stop getting mad about sex. That I’ll stop getting mad about everything, and just once, I’d love her to say, hey, I’ll work on me too. But she won’t, because in her mind, she has nothing to work on. She just married some kind of sick sadistic asshole, who makes one right move for every 50 wrong ones. And it’s hard. Call it narcissism, call it whatever you want, but I don’t feel like she’s a sweet angel with a halo hovering above her head, and I just come home from work looking to wreak havoc on her and my family. And I feel like the only way our marriage will ever stand the test of time is if I just become an obedient dog. Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, sure, ma’am. And I think if I tried that, I’d eventually go off like a fucking atomic bomb. So, I guess I’m here wondering, what on earth should I do?”

And from there, we went back and forth for months. Me and a 75-year-old man from California, with a lifetime’s worth of stories and regrets, but a lifetime’s worth of perseverance and seeking answers to all those questions that seemed devoid of them. He was an inspiration to me, because he put things into perspective.

“Do you think that you’re relying on her too much for your own happiness?” He asked me.

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“Well, you say that you get angry if she doesn’t want to have sex, or if she doesn’t want to spend time with you when the kids go to bed. Does it make you angry because you don’t have a Plan B that just involves yourself?”

I thought about that for a moment.

And it was like a revelation.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

That same smile appeared on his weathered face.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not here to say that she doesn’t have things to work on, right? But we’re here for you. We’re here because you took that giant leap to speak with a stranger about things that you don’t speak to anyone about. That takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of courage to seek help, and to stop fooling yourself into believing that all of life’s hardships can be solved alone inside our own heads. Fools think that way, and fools drown themselves. But, I do think that there are dependency issues at work here. Issues that stem possibility from a time early on when you were attached at the hip. But the years go on and a natural drift starts to appear. Some deal with that better than others. But tell me, what do you like to do? Something that doesn’t involve another soul. Something that you could do, if like an episode of the Twilight Zone, everyone disappeared off the face of the earth. What would you do?”

“I like to write. I want to write a book. I like to play guitar and listen to my records too.”

“Do you do those things?”

“Not as much as I should.”

“Well, the next time plans with your wife don’t go as planned, take yourself out of the situation and go do those things. Unburden yourself, become more independent and seek happiness and validation from yourself, and yourself alone.”

And I did that. And it worked for a while. There were no major changes in our marriage, but I felt myself becoming less bothered by things that would have normally upset me. I played my guitar more, and that winter, I even wrote a full draft for a short story collection that eventually got published.

There was a power in independence. One that I suppose I’d forgotten about.

But the other day there was a misstep and again the verbal bullets flew. This time it started over a head cold. Yeah, you read that right. A fucking head cold. We were doing dishes together after supper, and she sniffled and said, “I’m tired of being sick.”

And I responded, “You’re always sick.” And as an added joke, I said, “I don’t really even believe that you’re sick. I believe you believe you’re sick.” A stupid joke, but a joke nonetheless.

We finished the dishes, and she went upstairs to use the bathroom. She’d been talking about taking a bath before the kids went to bed, and I said, “Oh, by the way, if you want to take a bath, go right ahead.”

Then I noticed she was crying a little, and I said, “What’s going on?”

She turned with sadness and annoyance in her eyes and said, “You really hurt my feelings.”

“About what?”

“About not believing that I was sick. I am sick. And it hurts my feelings when you don’t believe me. You think I’m just making it up?”

“It was a joke.” I said, and she stormed off into the kitchen.

I could feel that temper flushing in my cheeks. And I hated that feeling. My hands became clammy, and my heart pounded, almost as though my appendages and organs knew a fight was going to happen before it happened. And it was Friday, not even two hours into the weekend, and I was already having a premonition about a full two days of ignoring each other. A full weekend of trying to not let the kids see what was happening. But they’re getting older now, and I suppose that cat’s been out of the bag for a while.

I followed her into the kitchen where she cried some more, and I could have been sympathetic, should have been sympathetic, but anger was winning the battle of emotions.

“Why do you get to do this?” I asked. “Both kids in the living room and you’re going to have a full meltdown. Do you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to get upset and cry and hole yourself up somewhere and I’m going to have to go out and act like everything is normal with the kids. Is that it? You’re 31 years old. I think it’s time to get over having your feelings hurt over a stupid joke.”

“Jesus, you’re not sympathetic. You don’t care about me.”

“Do you think you’re sympathetic to me? When I threw my back out a couple months ago, what did you do? I couldn’t fucking breathe and you laughed your head off. What happened when my balls were so swollen, I couldn’t walk and I thought I had goddamn cancer? What did you do? You laughed. You stood over the bed and laughed at me. And yeah, fine whatever, it’s okay to make light of situations like that, but man, you have some nerve to tell me I don’t care about you because I made a joke. It was a goddamn joke.”

Then she went from the kitchen to the bathroom, getting ready to slam the door in my face. I stopped it, and she screamed.

“GET OUT OF MY FACE AND LEAVE ME ALONE!”

“You don’t get to do this.” I said. “Over a head cold.”

Then she slapped the bathroom wall, screaming as loud as she could now. How did we get here? Jesus Fuck, how did we get here?

“THAT’S NOT WHAT THIS IS FUCKING ABOUT!”

Then she approached me, moving faster than I’ve seen her move in the twelve years that we’d been together. Her nose flush against my nose, like she was getting ready to knock my head off.

“Are you trying to fight me? Are you going to hit me?” I asked.

The world was going red. The screaming and the fact that the kids were hearing it all. No longer than ten minutes ago, had you asked me how my marriage was going? I would have said, right as rain, man. Everything’s fine. Groovy.

How does it get here? Why is my wife staring at me like she hates me more than anyone else on God’s green earth? And why couldn’t I have just been more sympathetic? Sorry, you’re feeling sick. Boom. Crisis averted. Do you want me to go get you some cold medicine? Boom. I’m in her good graces now. I’m beginning to look a little like a hero.

She slammed the door of the bathroom. The noise reverberated throughout the house. And I was depleted. The anger quickly liquidizing into sadness. The walk of shame to the living room where my kids sat playing Minecraft.

They were deep into their games and, for a shadow of a moment, I thought they heard nothing. They didn’t pay attention. But that proved to be wrong. Of course, the goddamn house shook. No way they didn’t hear that.

And it was one of those moments that I’d felt several times throughout the course of my marriage. A deep discomfort in my own skin, in the world around me, wanting to run somewhere but not wanting to leave the kids behind.

Something people don’t talk about, or at least not that I’ve heard, is the difficulties in the aftermath of a blowout when you have kids. You see, when we first met, if we fought, I’d leave. Easy peasy. We’d both get our space. I’d go for a walk downtown to a coffee shop, grab a seat near the back and sit in silence until the screams of anger inside my head tired themselves out, and then I’d return. At the same time, she’d get to be alone, and we’d have crucial hours to think about what had just transpired.

But when you have kids, you can’t run away and leave your partner to take care of both of them because you’re having a tantrum. You need to parent. You always need to parent.

As soon as I sat down, my daughter asked. “Why were you and mommy screaming at each other?”

Ouff, a deep pain in my heart. An arrow right through it.

“We just got a little mad at each other. I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

“Were you being mean to her?”

Another dagger.

“I guess so.” Unsure of what to say, I added. “Do you guys want to go for a walk?”

They both leaped up off the couch and screamed in unison. “YEAHH!” And it made me both happy and sad because I realized I should do this more often, not just when I need to run away from life for a while, and happy that they wanted to be with me.

“Can I say bye to mom?” my daughter asked.

“Sure.” I said, and she went over to the bathroom and knocked on the door. She said bye and came back out to say that mommy was sad and she was sitting in the dark. I prayed these memories wouldn’t stick, but I had similar ones from a similar age, and I figured they would too. These memories weren’t going anywhere.

It was a chilly October evening, and the sun was going down in the next hour or so. Not that I thought we lived in a particularly shady part of town, but it was close to downtown and there were some characters that roamed those streets at night. So, I told them just a quick loop around the block and we’d have to go back home. Though at that moment, I could have walked to the edge of the earth.

We went up the street to the mailbox first and it was nothing but election junk mail. We walked back down to the house, and I threw it all in the recycling bin, then we kept going down towards the park along the edge of the river.

I apologized to the kids multiple times, making myself sound like a broken record.

"I don’t want you guys to hear mommy and daddy yelling at each other. I hate that you

hear it, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

"It's okay, daddy," they both said.

I could feel a lump forming in my throat. They deserved better, and I was always sure that they were lucky to have me, that no other father could hold a candle to me. Again, it was narcissism at its finest, but it lived protected behind a thick and what I thought was an indestructible barrier inside my head. But now, the great walls had fallen, and I thought at that moment that every father that ever roamed this shitty rock was better than me. Everyone was better than me.

We made our way to the parking lot of the high school and walked along a low stone wall. The kids making a game out of it. They talked about Minecraft. And told me about all the crazy things you could do in the game, and I told them I wanted to watch them play a little before bed because I was feeling like an old head. They lit up at this, and that made me feel better.

Sure, it was a nasty fight (are there any good ones?), but it was just a fight. And we’d persevere or we wouldn’t. But one thing that was as certain as a sunrise was that I’d always be a father. If I lost their mother, then it had to be, but I’d never lose them. I couldn’t.

I thought about the therapist from sunny California, and I thought about independence. And I told myself to be happy with myself. It was hard at that moment, as hard as it had ever been, but I said that once the kids went to bed, I’d watch a movie, maybe have a beer, and in the morning, maybe my wife and I could make things right, or maybe not. But I was going to enjoy my own company, and I would not let one bad evening unravel everything I’d worked so hard for.

I wasn’t going to just be an asshole who was mean. I was going to be better. I just needed to enjoy myself.

We continued our walk and when the sun set; we came back to the house. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

And for extra measure, I said one more time.

“I’m sorry, kids.”