As I finally recover from Wednesday night's emotional semi-crash, I'm gaining a sense of perspective on what drove it. After all, it isn't as if the evening's choice dynamic was any sort of aberration in and of itself, and I've been successfully dealing with this primary choice pattern - as opposed to simply ignoring it or, worse, gnawing on it - for quite a while now.
But Wednesday I think I was especially vulnerable. We'd spent most of a week apart. I knew my wife was still battling the effects of her cold, and generally not feeling well, so I was glad to take care of dinner again, despite having done so again and again when she was sick before she left and when she got back the night before. She seemed genuinely appreciative, and had expressed earlier in the day how much she was looking forward to our having time together.
Before she left we hadn't had enough of that, which was at least as much my fault as hers. I was fully embracing the MLB postseason for the first time in decades - far longer than the O's absence, as their last two appearances had coincided with the most challenging time of my adult life. She was supportive of my enthusiasm, for which I'm grateful, even if that may have been partly because it freed her from any guilt about her own entertainment choices. Between the two, we chose to spend very little quality time together over the week before she left. She wasn't eating because of her pancreatitis, so we'd even gotten out of our long-term habit of having dinner together and our shorter-lived one of playing a game together after eating. Her last night in town was marked by mostly better decisions, if only because I took the initiative to make sure we didn't spend our last night "together" separately. Still, it was not really enough to make up for the draining of our "love bank" brought on by our choices over the previous week, including choices which in our home invariably accompany the new television season.
So I was really looking forward to our time together on Wednesday evening, just as she'd earlier indicated that she was, too. I think that's why it hurt so much when I came into the family room after choir and asked what she was watching and she guiltily replied, "Oh. Something you won't watch." In this case it was a program that I used to really enjoy but quit watching when I started having nightmares about it. It wasn't as if she was very far into the program, or as if it wasn't being recorded by the DVR. It was just as if the energy to make another choice was beyond her, and I was completely deflated by that.
Even after last night's much better night together, it was this morning before I began to really recover from the hurt of it. Until then, I had no recognition how low we'd let the "love bank" get. And I'm concerned about thought processes I've still had to correct this morning. But it is better to recognize them and address them than to ignore them and let them do their damage.
I have shared my feelings on this issue with my wife many times over the years. Still, now that we are a couple days removed from it, I'm going to have to discuss this specific example with her, with the hope that we can both better apply its lessons in our decision-making in the future. (I hope we apply it to our small decisions, and if we don't we'll need to make a bigger one.)
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