The first fight of the day happened in the morning.
‘You have to get up now,’ said Danielle, laying the baby on top of me.
‘Why?’ I said.
She had to go to work early for the weigh-in portion of the PRT (Physical Readiness Test). She told me this in a tone that also said, I just told you about this yesterday. How could you have already forgotten?
So started our morning, with Danielle annoyed with me and me annoyed with her for being annoyed with me. Neither of us had slept very well the night before, and both of us had woken up feeling grouchy.
A little context, here. Danielle is on a shore tour, which is the opposite of a sea tour. On a sea tour, she’s gone, on average, 5 months out of the year with the ship (this is averaging training missions and full 6-month deployments). On a shore tour, she gets to come home from work every day for the duration of the tour, which is about 3 years.
The point is, those of us married to the Navy go from spending 40 percent of our lives alone and self-sufficient—making every decision ourselves, solving every problem, doing (or not doing) all the housework—to having our spouses (whom we love with all our hearts) around all the time. Danielle is in school right now and does a great deal of work from home. This allows us to spend a lot of time together, and forces us to make almost every decision as a twosome.
That’s how we wound up fighting over the space heater in Sean’s room, which was the second stupid fight of the day (the comedian Dane Cook calls these ‘nothing fights’). By far the most ridiculous of our ‘nothing fights’ came that night, after dinner, as I was putting a batch of chocolate chip cookies together. The recipe called for bittersweet chocolate, but we didn’t have enough, and I kept wanting to substitute Baker’s unsweetened chocolate, and Danielle kept telling me I couldn’t and that I should use regular chocolate chips instead. I thought they’d be too sweet. Finally, she suggested I taste some of each, the unsweetened chocolate and the semi-sweet morsels.
I accused her of treating me like a child.
She was finally able to explain to me that Baker’s Chocolate is pure unsweetened cacao that needs to be melted and mixed with butter and sugar in order to taste any good. When I realized the absurdity of this little battle, I asked her if she thought we’d been having these little bickering sessions because we were spending so much time together. She agreed that was the case.
We needed to find a way to avoid these skirmishes, so I proposed that we approach our decision making in a different way. Instead of debating the issues, we would have a ‘dialect.’ In a dialect, the goal is not to win, it is to come to a mutually acceptable outcome. A dialect is not heated. Voices are not raised.
Hopefully, this tactic will keep our nothing fights from escalating into all-out nothing wars.
3 Comments
For the record…it’s not just Navy…it’s ALL military families who have this very same dilemma. My husband is about to come home from a 5-month training. While I’m excited, I’m also nervous because I know it will tip the scales and suddenly “my way” of doing things will not be good enough anymore…Good luck! My advice is to both find hobbies and interests that you can do with friends instead of doing everything together. It will be good for both of you!
Every time my husband comes home we go through the same thing. I think we all do…suddenly, our daughter has 2 parents talking to her, making inquiries about homework, etc. It drives her crazy also (she is 14 now).
The GOLDEN RULE we have is, “Only one person can be crazy at a time.” Believe me, it works! If both spouses can just chill out and lay back and look at who is really feeling anxious (and most of the time it is anxiety about something that causes this -really think about it, why else would you HAVE to have something done YOUR way?), then the other can just give them their breathing room. Sometimes you just have to say, “You may be right.” – that statement alone will diffuse ANY situation.
I so understand this, and it is all the Military branches spouses that go through this. Currently, we are having too much time together and it’s driving us both crazy! It is a hard thing to try and figure out what is best for both parties as individuals, and in a partnership. I do think it’s good to let each person express their emotions, but with tact and not to be vindictive.