A setback averted

It has taken me a couple days to get both a chance and the perspective to write about this one, but I think it was an important moment, perhaps not so much a watershed as a point to which we might need to refer again (and again).


I entered the family room while the tail end of NYC22 was on; I think this was more of a daughter/boyfriend preference than one of my wife's favorites.  As soon as it was over, my daughter chose a recorded show that she and her mom like, but that has never failed to bother me within the first few minutes of viewing.  I've just quit watching shows that bother me, that promote points of view with which I disagree or are about things that I don't want to be about.  Don't get me wrong, it isn't that I've lacked my own worse weaknesses, but at least there was no denying their nature, which is one problem I have with much of what we choose to entertain ourselves with.

So I asked if we could please not watch this program right now, in the hope that we could hang out together.  My daughter quickly stopped the playback.  My wife was distracted by either the phone or the computer, and the show that was now on in the background - with the sound on mute at the time - was one that I don't watch for a completely different reason: the monotonous performance consistently delivered by its lead actor.  After sitting there for about five minutes with no sign that the channel was going to change again, and not willing to beg - again - for the program to be changed to something I might enjoy watching, I went upstairs to get on the computer.

At that point, I was pretty disappointed in how the evening was going, and what it meant in our larger context.  I'd thought that we'd been making progress, but was becoming afraid that we were slipping back into separateness.

A few minutes later, I heard a call from downstairs (I usually hate that, though I do it sometimes, too, and probably would have especially done so in these circumstances, so this didn't bother me) asking me if I was coming back down, to which I replied that it depended on what we would be watching.  I was pleasantly surprised to be told that they were trying to figure that out. So we watched a program that I personally would have probably been neutral about, but at least it was tolerable and we were able to spend an hour of the evening together.