Stupid Stuff Couples Argue About
In this post I let co-blogger, bed-sharer, super-babe, mega-talented writer and mother-of-my-kids Julie Williams take me down good and proper.
Julie is a fantastic spouse – if the main job of a spouse is to bring your partner down to earth, while loving him still.
Over to Julie…
What we argue about most
It’s the dead of winter. It’s also the dead of the night. So everyone should be dead asleep, right? But alas, the love child you and your partner foolishly brought into the world is stirring. You lie under the warm blankets and look over at your partner. He is, ironically, the only one sleeping like a proverbial (mythical) baby. And as you shrug off the covers and slink into the dark, cold abyss, you begin to really hate his guts.
Sadly, this is less a fictional story than it is an actual auto-biographical account of my life. So as a means of free therapy (for me), and a good laugh (for you and at my husband’s expense) here are some of the things my significant other and I argued most about when the kids were a little younger and the nights were a whole lot darker…
Whose turn it is to go in
You’re finally alone – snuggled on the couch together watching a series. The baby begins to cry. Pause the series, and all feelings of happiness: it’s time to argue about who went in last and who should go into the lion cub’s lair next.
Whose life is actually harder
We seldom would say this overtly, but we’d subtly try to let the other person know what we were up against… hoping that our hardships would somehow lead to more lee-way in the above-mentioned shift timetable.
More recently, we argued about who had it harder on a long family roadtrip. My husband drove most of the way, and so he thought it was justified for him to block out the chaos of 5 kids trapped inside a metal cage for 15 hours by generally having his earphones in. I was not so lucky. Half-buried alive by an assortment of snacks, books, jackets, juice bottles and other things I deemed essential to have at hand, I spent the whole trip passing around snacks, breaking up fights, and perpetually answering the eternal question of whether we were almost there yet. Whilst I leaned over into the back of the car to sort out some kind of drama, my hubby took the gap to steal a swig of my coffee. What he only realised very soon thereafter, was that the coffee had already been drunk. And what was actually in my Vida E cup with the lid on, was in fact, his own child’s urine. Ah, the sweet, sweet taste of karma.
What the correct name is for very common things
This never really was an issue before we had kids and I had to start asking my husband to fetch certain things for me. If I had a penny for every time I asked my husband for something and then he asked me where it was, and then I told him, and then he replied that we do not have a ‘set of drawers’ or a ‘kist’ or a ‘mantle piece’ and while he’s here looking, what in the world is a ‘romper’ anyway? An actual conversation with my husband that occurred not too long ago:
Me: “Please bring me a face cloth.”
Him: “I don’t know where those are.”
Me: “They’re in the 3rddrawer of the cabinet.”
Him: “What’s a cabinet?”
Me: “The thing in the bathroom with the drawers.”
Him: “They’re not here.”
Me: “Yes they are – in the third drawer in the bathroom cabinet.”
Him: “Oh – you meant 3rddrawer from top not the bottom…”
Me: (Silent eye roll)
Him: “… and these aren’t face cloths – they’re mini hand towels.”
Whose the kid anyway?
Sometimes I would put on my big girl pants and scold my husband for doing something obviously reckless or thoughtless – like feeding the kids pure sugar at 8pm, or play-wrestling them into a hysterical state of alertness just before bedtime. But then just as many times, he would tell me to go to bed early because I looked like something undead from an apocalypse movie, or to rather not eat all the chocolate for breakfast, and I would have to devolve into the teenage dream he never dreamt of and get all eye rollin’ and “what eva” on him.
Still, if I had to choose between having him around to eye roll and passively aggressively resent, or not having him around at all, I’d choose the ditz holding the miniature hand towels every time.
