The OP did nothing wrong. There wasn’t a single thing in the description that pointed that the OP should be blamed for anything at all. It is highly likely his wife has a mental health problem, which they need to get professional help to work on it for her. No amount of change of dinner plans is going to cause her not to become irrational and lash out at him. The fact that afterwards she admitted she didn’t know why she behaved that way is pretty clear evidence of that.
Living with someone like this is very hard, and I defend the OP to show frustration in having to deal with it. When someone is dealing with even mild cases of anxiety and depression, everything can be perfect but they will manufacture something is wrong to justify their agitated behavior. From what my friend told me about his wife, it took years before they were able to finally get her professional help and taking medication for it. He told me about all this one evening after he changed insurance plans and mentioned the medication she was taking and that it was covered.
The OP is telling us he’s always right. I find the enchiladas delicious and my boys don’t. I tell them they’re wrong and I’m right. I mean the boys aren’t allowed their own opinion on what food they like. The OP was
. And for the record I despise creamy sauce on enchiladas but according to the OP I’m wrong on that point.
I’d love to know what was so “over the top rude”. Disagreeing with you? Getting frustrated after being badgered to like it and venting? Maybe that is learned behavior from dear ol’ dad. Check out the tone set in the first paragraph.
So the wife wants a “thank you”. He goes on about how he defended her food (not like that’s condescending) but never a “Thank you for taking your time to cook tonight.” or “Wow, thanks for trying out this recipe. You really made it good, dear.” No it was how in defending her food he was right or rather how she was wrong about him not thanking her and I guaran-fuckin-tee That was not a one-time thing. Obviously the lack of a thank you (from hubby and Thing 1 and Thing 2) has been been a silent issue for some time.
The OP did ETA that he did thank her.* I will give him the benefit of the doubt and agree he did thank her for her cooking. But does he leave it at that?
*I’m not convinced he did or if he did it I think it was the reflex “thank you” like when a the office managers gives you a stack of post-its. Not an honest thank you meaning “Thank you for taking your time and energy after a day of work to cook dinner for us.” But that is immaterial to the disdain the OP has in the last line.
I think this is a really good point, but I would put a slightly different spin on it.
The expectation, and the example the OP could have set, is to thank mom for her work in making dinner. Regardless of whether or not the kids are adventurous eaters, or if they do or don’t like the food, you can start every meal by saying “thank you for making dinner.”
After that, if the kids don’t care for it, there’s no arguing. Depending on their age, they can be excused from the table to go do whatever, or whatever your family plan is for when they don’t wish to eat dinner. adaher, and others, have made the point that there’s no benefit to any back and forth about whether the food is “good” or not. It doesn’t work and it annoys the pig.
For what it’s worth, I get why your wife’s response was so aggravating. I think a lot, many, maybe MOST people would see that “OMG, this is delicious, I love it!” as incorporating the sentiment of appreciation without actually saying the works “thank” “you.” Maybe it’s just that your wife is a person who likes to hear the actual words, but even so, she could have waited to express that thought in a calm moment. But if you decide to work through this, or if you decide to divorce tomorrow (so really, anywhere on this spectrum), it’s not that big a deal to get your kids into the habit of thanking mom for making dinner. Likewise, this should carry over to everyone (including your wife) thanking you for comparable stuff.
Good grief, do you have kids who are picky eaters? They are allowed to have their own opinions, but their opinions are ridiculous and need to be flexible. We had one kid who would eat nothing but mac and cheese for almost a year. Another who ate only chicken nuggets and hot dogs. Trying to expand their palate is not disrepecting their opinions. That’s parenting.
Did you forget that I was VENTING? When dealing with the boys’ behavior, I wasn’t upset or yelling or anything, it was all very matter of fact. The rude behavior was that when he came back to the table with a loaf of bread for making a sandwich, he spilled half the loaf out on the table, then immediately said, “That’s not my fault, I’m not cleaning it up. YOU clean it up.”
Condescending? What the hell is wrong with you?
This all happened near the beginning of the meal. There was no practical TIME for a thank you, other than the perfunctory thank you I gave her as she served it. This entire story happened in the space of 2 minutes… I was talking to the boys, taking my first couple bites, sent the one boy to his room, then as the boys and I are continuing the discussion, she lashes out at me. Posters who continue to look for the logic in her “no thank-you” complaint just have to give that up because there was none and SHE HAS AGREED with that.
She is hung up on this idea of her Grandpa thanking her mother when she was a child. This is a common pattern for her. She has an uncomfortable feeling about a situation, she relates it to something in her distant past, and then complains about the discrepancy. Even if in the current context her complaint makes zero sense, as was the situation here.
Thank you for your considerate response. She is indeed the type of person who needs to hear the specific words. She has very specific expectations. I am working on being better about trying to fulfill her need to hear the exact words, and she is also trying to work on not having such specific expectations. Btw, on the occasions that she prepares the dinner, I rarely say the exact wording of, “thank you for making dinner” it’s usually something like “Thanks, hun, that was really good.” I think, if you asked her right after I said that, if I had thanked her for the dinner, she would say “No” because it didn’t meet her exact expectations.
The focus of the discussion seems to have zeroed in on the single situation the OP describes regarding the Battle of the Chicken Enchiladas. How he handled it. How she handled it. Good vs Bad parenting. Kids rights. Whether Donald Trump sucks or not. Blah blah blah.
I think we need to get back to the CORE of the OP’s problem.
That stuff like this happens ALL the time. Stuff that makes the OP think “what the hell”?
Sure this ONE situation could probably be spun anywhere from the OP is a Saint to the OP is an idiot and no wonder the wife went off.
But it sure looks like to me it is probably 80 percent wife and maybe 20 percent husband.
AND IF most blow ups are like this and happen frequently, something has to give. Discussions about this ONE incident are kinda fruitless (heh).
A major reason my ex is my ex is related to this. It came to point that EVERYTHING became an argument. EVERYTHING I did was somehow wrong. EVERY fight (that she almost always started and escalated) was about stupid stuff. Obviously EVERY is a bit strong of a word, but IMO it is close enough.
That crap gets old. If the OP is dealing with a nearly daily barrage of “What the Hell?” then I can certainly sympathize.
Now I’m really just curious, does she make a point of thank you in a more formal way for your stuff? Does she say to you “thank you for mowing the lawn” or whatever your house jobs are?
I know you’re frustrated with some of the comments you’ve gotten in here, but this particular response is over the line. Please don’t drag things in from other threads just to insult someone.
Speaking purely as a poster, I admit to being perplexed by some of the assumptions other people are making about the OP. I’m not sure where people are getting that he never cooks, or that he’s blowing things out of proportion based on a single incident. Whether you agree with him or not is one thing, but it seems like some folks are going out of their way to misrepresent what he’s actually said.
Yeah, here’s the thing about me. I have zero expectations. I can’t think of a single time in my life where I have thought “Man, I wish this person would thank me for what I did.” To me that almost seems selfish.
So my radar is not attuned to notice the exact tone and wording of each thank you, if you know what I mean. But I think for the most part, she is good about thanking me for the things I do to help her out. Not in a formal wording way, but in a good heartfelt way.
I don’t know if this (which immediately followed my reply above) was at all aimed at me (along with others), or was just coincidentally the post that came after mine.
I didn’t assume your wife did all the cooking (although I considered it as a possibility). I also tried not to assume either that your wife was reacting as she did because of your behavior or that she reacted as she did for unrelated reasons.
I did opine about your policy towards your kids’ eating habits. I would not have wanted to grow up in your household, no offense intended. And I did consider the possibility that your interchange with the kids was what was really pissing your wife off.
This seems to be at the core of your dilemna, you walk away from an exchange thinking you were nice and thanked her and she walks away thinking that you should have thanked her but you did not.
In any relationship it is not enough to express love, you have to express it in a way that your partner interprets as love. We tend to think the way we experience and express love are universal but they are not.
An example that they tell teachers is that in some cultures making eye contact with an adult is considering disrespectful and in other cultures it is rude to not make eye contact with the person talking to you. Thus a kid who is trying to be polite can make a teacher feel disrespected.
So if you tell her “Great job on dinner, hon” that can be heartfelt gratefulness to you and flippantly dismissive to her. That is probably why your therapists worked so hard on communication. You probably have different communication styles.
I don’t know about your wife, but most women seem to be bad at voicing expectations and are born with the assumption that if someone really loves you they can read your mind and anticipate your every emotion.
That quote came from the OP; he escalated the situation when his wife started behaving as she did. Whether he was 100 percent in the right (which we only have his word for it on that point), he always had the option of, you know, not doing that. You can say that he didn’t start the fight, but I don’t think that you can say that he didn’t do anything wrong.
That works in households who are on the same page about “the kid won’t starve overnight.” It doesn’t work so well in households where the adults aren’t in agreement, and this doesn’t sound like one of those households, because the kids won’t end up not getting dinner - someone will cave eventually.
It also doesn’t always work in households where a lot of adventurous stuff is served. Growing up, all the food my parents put on the table were variations on a theme - middle class midwestern white people cooking of the 1970s - where taco night was adventurous and sometimes you added pineapple to the jello. My kids get Thai and Korean and Indian - and tacos and meatloaf and spaghetti and tater tot hotdish. My daughter is somewhat pickier and likes less spice than the rest of the family. So there are times where the food it too spicy for her. Since there are times where food is too spicy or too rich or too sweet or too bitter for me to enjoy as an adult, I get that. Since she eats Thai and Indian and Korean (and sushi and escargot and lamb and pork belly and bone marrow) and is far more adventurous than most of her friends when we’ve had them over for dinner and is polite about turning down food, giving her a choice hasn’t been bad. Its kept dinner more pleasant and given my kids a risk free way of trying different foods.
You’ve lost that battle. You ceded that ground when you let them get away with that when they were younger. And gaining back that ground is not going to be done either without a hell of a lot of bloodshed, or with very small steps.
Frankly, what difference does it make in their lives if they are picky eaters? One of my Girl Scouts (they are 10th graders) is the current Valedictorian of her class. She’s a wonderful kid - polite, considerate, a hard worker. She gives her parents no reason to worry. She has also never, to the best of my knowledge, moved beyond Kraft Mac n Cheese and Chicken Nuggets (she eats some other things, but not many). My husband didn’t eat fish or vegetables when I married him, yet he managed to spend weeks at a time in China on business eating natively 20 years later - he grew out of it, but not because his mother was still riding him about it. If picky eating is your biggest parenting fail, you’ll have it good - you’ll have missed coming home drunk, the pregnancy scare, the not passing English, the refusing to talk to Grandma and the sneaking out after curfew.
Save your energy for the big battles, and learn which is which.