Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Child tantrum

I've shown how my wife starts fights with me on many, many occasions, and in every instance, she is almost completely wrong in how she acts. These fights generally fall under one of three categories:

- She blows little things out out of proportion, then flips out.
- Her family does something stupid, then she takes it out on me.
- She's just mad for no reason.

On a few rare occasions, she actually has a point, and I'm the one who caused trouble. It never keeps her from pressing her advantage and treating me like garbage, of course (i.e. the fight where my son fell down in my Fights post). But I'm not the one who deserves the bulk of the blame when most of these fights start, because it's my wife who always escalates.

Recently, I've come to understand another of my wife's methods of starting, then winning, fights that shouldn't have even occurred in the first place, much less have her bashing me for inane reasons. These are her basic tactics:

Step 1 - I do something completely innocuous that upsets her.
Step 2 - She goes silent, or explodes.
Step 3 - I ask her what's wrong.
Step 4 - She provides the very barest of explanations.
Step 5 - Using the very little information she's provided me, I rebut what she's said.
Step 6 - She dumps a truckload of unknowable information that she was keeping to herself the entire time, then uses that as a club to berate me for how stubborn, selfish, uncaring and stupid I am.
Step 7 - I apologize, or try to find a compromise.
Step 8 - She goes into martyr mode, and yells at me to do whatever I want.
Step 9 - I insist that I'll do what she wants.
Step 10 - We repeat Steps 8 and 9 until she's had enough.
Step 11 - She goes silent and seethes.
Step 12 - I play with my son, and she takes a nap.

This actually happened a few nights ago, but I didn't mention it because the tiff started and ended in just thirty seconds:

Step 1 - Our son jumped on her in the bedroom, then she stormed out to sit on the chair in the living room and seethe.
Step 2 - She went silent.
Step 3 - I asked her what was wrong.
Step 4 - She told me, "Our son jumped on me."
Step 5 - I said it was ok; he jumps on me all the time.
Step 6 - She got mad, thrust her hand at her belly, and snarled, "HERE!"
Step 7 - I apologized.
We skipped Steps 8 - 10.
Step 11 - She seethed.
Step 12 - I told my son not to do that, then played with him. She went to sleep later.

She usually sleeps on her side, and I assumed she would have added that extra word to be more clear ("Our son jumped on my belly"), but she didn't. She just wanted to start a fight. So that brings us to today.

Step 1 - My wife told me that the doctor couldn't find our baby on the sonogram, even after a month and a half had gone by. She told me that she needed me to sign a piece of paper that said if the doctor couldn't find it this Saturday, that they had to assume it was in the "wrong room," and they had to "take it out." I told her that I didn't want to sign any papers that said our baby would die until we were absolutely sure that there was nothing we could do. I asked her if she could just give the baby another two weeks to show up on the sonogram, and if there was still nothing, I would sign the paper.

Step 2 - She started to get upset, and said that the doctor said that there was a 50% chance that mothers come down with this, and we couldn't do anything about it. I knew that statistic was complete crap; I've never heard of an epidemic so widespread as that among pregnant women.

Her first doctor, when she was pregnant with our son, told her about the same condition. But because I'm smarter than my wife is, I know he was just telling her about a magical problem that could fix her surprise pregnancy through a no-choice abortion, and by the time a few months had gone by and she realized that the baby was truly coming, she would have come to terms with delivering our son. It was just a way of soothing her mind with an outside chance of going back to her old life, until she got used to the idea of being a mother.

Step 3 - I asked her what the condition was.

Step 4 - She looked up the local word on the internet and showed me: ectopic pregnancy, a term I've never even heard of before. Without even looking at the definition, I knew it would be something that affected less than 5% of women worldwide. And when I read it, I saw that it was actually only 1%.

Step 5 - I told her what the site said, that it was very unlikely that this was her case. She said she knew that, than I asked her why she said it was 50%. She tried to dodge the question until I repeated it, then she transparently lied that her English wasn't so good, so she misspoke.

At this point, I only had a few pieces of information to go on:

- Her family may or may not have been pressuring her to have an abortion.
- She talked about abortion just a few nights before, and was evasive when I asked her if she wanted to kill our child.
- She was here, again, talking about abortion because of a problem that affects only 1% of women, one that she claimed she had.

Piecing it all together, I got a pretty crystal clear picture that she had either fallen under her family's influence, or decided herself, to abort the baby. I asked again if we could just wait two weeks to give the baby a chance, and said that that would be the best for it.

She went silent.

I asked again.

She stayed silent.

I had had enough of this stupidity, so I said, "Hello?"

"Yeah, fine, we'll do that," she replied snottily.

I went out to smoke, then came back in to talk with her. She was sitting in the same chair she always sits in when she's mad, reading something. I guess I should start calling it the Angry Chair. I asked her what day of the week she would be ok to check.

Step 6 - She flipped the ever-loving hell out, and started shouting at me.

"You really made me angry!"

"Why are you angry?"

"Don't you know that I could bleed because of this?! If we have to take the baby out at three months, I might get really hurt! I'm retaining water and can hardly breathe now, but you don't care about me at all, do you?!"

I wish I had thought of the following things at the time:

First of all, waiting two weeks would put the date at two months, not three. That's just a lie.

Second, she says I don't care, when I've asked every night that I've known she's pregnant about how "Peanut" and her are doing.

This means one of two things: either she's lying about me not caring for her in an effort to slander me and win a fight, because she knew that I always check up on her... or it confirms suspicions that I've had about her for some time now: namely, she ignores me because I barely register on her radar. I'm nothing more to her than a sack of meat that she feeds once a day, who gives her over $1000 every month, and who cleans up the house while she sits and lies around.

I'm suspecting the latter, because I've had to explain myself to her about many, many things, over and over, just so she could ignore me every time. For example:

- Why I couldn't fix my glasses.
- Why it's ok to take our son out.
- What she should do if she's depressed.
- What she should do about her mother and sister.

And much more.

Third, she's probably having health problems because she's very overweight: pushing 200 pounds. It's just another thing I've shown her how to fix, just to have her ignore me every time.

Back to the fight:

"I had to go to the hospital alone when I was pregnant before!! You weren't even there for me, and I had to learn about all the ways our son could have died, or how I could have died!! You think I want to kill the baby?!"

"..." (Actually, based on the evidence, I did).

"But whatever!! You think you're smarter than the doctor, fine!! We'll do it your way!!"

Step 7 - "Ok, we can go this Saturday. Hopefully, the baby will be ok."

Step 8 - "NO! We'll do it your way! We ALWAYS do it your way!!"

Step 9 -

"Is this Saturday ok? What time is..."
"I don't care, do whatever you want!! I'll do exactly as you ask!!"
"I can cancel my tutor classes that..."
"Whatever! I don't matter to you anyway!! We'll just go in two weeks!!"
"So would you prefer in two weeks, one, or this weekend?"
"It doesn't matter what I think!! It NEVER matters what I think! We'll go in two weeks!!"
"But this weekend would be best for you?"

Step 10 -

"Like the doctor said!! I TOLD you that already!!"
"I didn't know anything about the problem until you told me later."
"You should have known! I had to know it because I delivered our son four years ago!! But maybe you don't know because men don't care about that stuff!!"
"Now I know."

Step 11 and 12 - I don't remember all the other stuff she screamed about. I just sat there next to her until she got up to walk to the couch and take a nap, while I stayed awake and did the things a husband and father does, as I always do.

This is one of the first times in a solid year that I attempted to solidly push back against my wife's drama and demands, because me losing this fight might be signing our child's death warrant. And I think my wife, selfish, domineering, lazy, power-tripping, control freak bully that she often is, was just surprised that I decided to grow a spine and ask her to do something important, like exploring all options before our child is killed.

I can't stop thinking of the ridiculous point she made during the fight: she asked me how I only cared about the baby, and not about her health. I want to know why she doesn't seem concerned at all about our child.

She did offer one final nugget of information, though, while she was trying to convince me about the dangers of having our child: she told me that it's dangerous for a woman over 35 to have a child, and she's almost there. I'll take that as tacit permission to get a vasectomy in the next few months. I'm not even going to tell her. I don't want to have another child with her; I want to spend as little time as possible with this woman. Marriage devoured my girlfriend and vomited up the monster that now lives in my house.

There isn't a single part of me that wants to see this baby die, even if it means getting my life back three or four years sooner. But if we have no choice, then I'm getting snipped. It probably isn't even necessary, because I have no interest whatsoever in sleeping with my wife for the duration of our marriage. I don't find her borderline obese body attractive anymore, and more importantly, I can't count the number of times I've thought her name in my mind and called her "mom."

No comments:

Post a Comment