I almost wonder if she couldn’t be resenting being a stay-at-home mom. What did she do before the kids? Was it her choice to stay home with the kids?
Someone above stated it sounded like she could be setting you up to fail so she could play the martyr. That’s exactly what it sounds like to me, after living through my mother’s constant martyrdom until i cut my relationship with her off. She used to do this exact same kind of stuff to our entire family.
I’ll have to go along with everyone else here who said couples counselling sounds like a must here. I’ll also say that if you guys ignore the need for counselling, it sounds like you guys will eventually end up hating/really resenting each other, past any resentment that may already be present.
I agree completely that there is an elephant in the room apart from the construction paper or clothing choices.
Corner Case, you admit yourself that you always like to appear right and have some reservations about discussing your relationship on a message board. Does this reticence to admit your mistakes extend to your relationship?
In the two conversations you recounted I observe you never said I’m sorry, I made a mistake. Maybe she continues to be frustrated with you because every time she calls you on something, she gets an argument or a justification rather than an apology or an acknowledgement of error. You could have said, “I’m sorry, honey, I’ll go get the other outfit. Where did you say it was?”
Also, just to step into your wife’s shoes for a moment (ouch!), perhaps she’s thinking, If he gave me these things to do, I’d have got exactly what he asked. When my husband wants the large-size box of Honey Nut Cheerios, I don’t substitute the store brand unless I’m angry at him. The only reason that I would have got something different was to deliberately provoke him.
I’ve just got done reading What Women Want Men To Know and Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know by Barbara de Angelis, and I found them both to be informative. The more I hear about relationships which aren’t working, the more I see that the author may in fact have some good points. If counseling doesn’t sound like your bag, try one or both of those books to see if you recognize anything in them you (or she) might be doing wrong (or right!).
Even if the books aren’t perfect, they’re cheaper than counseling, you can do them alone, and you still might learn something.
What does he owe her any apologies for? Who cares if he gets a different kind of construction paper? They didn’t have what she said so he bought something else. That’s exactly what I would have done and I wouldn’t have apologized for it either.
Here’s how it would have gone at my house.
Me: Here’s your paper.
Wife: That’s the wrong kind.
Me: they were out of the other kind so I got that.
Wife: Blah blah blah.
Me. whatever. I’m going to take a piss.
Conversation over. It’s just not something that matter. I can’t see that the OP did anything wrong. The wife just needs to lighten up.
I don’t think you’re passive-aggressive. Just immature and insecure. This negative spiral you’re locked in with your partner isn’t helping.
Here are two images I get from what the OP describes:
A kid makes breakfast in bed for his mother. He can’t understand why she gets angry when she sees the horrible mess he left in the kitchen. He was only trying to be nice by making her breakfast in bed after all.
A person has their heart set on a blue Honda Civic. They scrimp and save, but before they have quite enough money, their husband surprises them with a Red Toyota. The husband can’t understand why the person isn’t overjoyed, merely exasperated.
So, OP - STOP getting your wife the Red Toyota. She doesn’t want one, it’s worse than nothing because now you can’t afford the Blue Honda, and, what’s more, she can’t really be blamed for thinking you’re doing it with malice if you keep getting her red toyotas when she repeatedly tells you she doesn’t like being surprised by them.
She is correct - you are not helping her when you get the incorrect item or do the incorrect thing. [Whether what a young child wears merits any attention is another issue]. It seems you are stuck in some peanut -butter- kisses- little -kid paradigm were you want her to gush over you because you were thoughtful enough to initiate some action even though the end result is wrong. I think she’s right - either take responsibility for doing stuff and make it totally yours (like dressing a child) or, at the least, don’t expect happiness and light when the end result is not correct. Sounds like you’re doing lots of “favors” because you’re such a great guy - and then get very confused because she doesn’t appreciate them.
Doing what you describe-(“only trying to help” in a misguided way) done by somebody over and over - would drive anyone insane.
I can imagine the poor women surrounded by cases of diet Coke when she asked for regular, walls painted green when she thought you both had agreed that yellow would be better, cheap K-mart cookware when she wanted to save up for good quality, the knock-off rayon dress when she was going to get the wool, etc. etc.
All the while, you never discuss the alterations that you’ve made with her, and, if she complains about the pattern, all of a sudden, she’s the one with the problem. You’re the one trying to be nice and she’s the one too bitchy to be appreciative.
From reading the OP’s description, I think the thing that is most bothering his wife is the fact that he’s not talking to her. He can’t find paper, so he buys something else and doesn’t say a word to her about it. He isn’t sure if he’s dressed the kid in the outfit she selected (the one he told her he’d use), but he doesn’t say a word and lets her discover if he’s right or not.
So, OP, I’d suggest that you stop driving her insane by talking to her more and “helping” her less.
When you came home from Wal-Mart why on earth didn’t you say to her “I couldn’t find the right paper, so I got something else. What do you think? Will it do or should I return it and wait till the right stuff comes in?” Then she can either say - “Yes, it’s good enough” or “No, better return it.”
See how much better that is than waiting for her to “discover” the paper on her own.
Ok, Dio we get it. It doesn’t matter to you, so it shouldn’t matter to anyone. :rolleyes:
You miss the part where other parents familiar with the rigidity of some teacher’s school supply lists chimed in to back her up? If the paper isn’t right, then the task of getting the paper isn’t finished. You can think ‘there she goes blah blahing’ but that doesn’t alter the fact that the paper-getting task still isn’t finished.
So instead of credit for accomplishing something, you’d have done nothing but add ‘go back to the store without the right paper, stand in the returns line and go to other store with the right paper’ to the Great List of Crap to Be Done. She should lighten up about that because his intentions were good, regardless of the reality?
No, I would just send the kid to school with whatever paper I got and the school can bite my ass.
A lot of people seem to saying that this guy should just cave in and obey his wife’s obsessive instructions to the letter on everything, no matter how petty or trivial, and that if he ever gets anything wrong, he’s an asshole. To hell with that. If we were talking about a man being that controlling with his wife, you’d all be advising her to run to a shelter. Neither partner should be making those kinds of demands on the other.
I’ll stick with the advice of someone who’s had professional experience being a marriage counselor helping hundreds of couples, Diogenes. In any case, I’m not inclined to take your word for it that because it isn’t a problem for you that your behavior doesn’t annoy your wife.
No, actually they’re right about the construction paper. They keep saying now, but even when I was a kid - and I’m 29 - they had to have the same kind, or they would send you back.
What bothers me more is the wife saying he was trying to sneak it by her. Either the OP has a history of doing such things or not, but that speaks to me to be passive-agressive too, just saying nasty comments like that over construction paper. Wife needs to sit down and say, “Look, I get frustrated when I need to do something exactly and you don’t do it exactly.” Not as an attack, though. Husband needs to say “And I feel hurt when you accuse me of deliberately not doing what you say.”
And Dio, you have been doing what **Queen Tonya ** & **Fish ** say you do. Stop! and don’t get mad and don’t rush to defend yourself. Can you just listen to me for a moment? I’ve seen in a lot of threads lately where you throw off casual comments to the effect that if it doesn’t bother you or your wife that it should be OK with the rest of the world.
You & your reasoned arguments were one of the many reasons I joined this board. This is just friendly advice…maybe you need to step back and see how knee-jerk you’ve become lately. It’s gotten to the point where I’m afraid to even respond to you in threads because I feel you’ll bite my head off.
Except it’ll probably be your kid’s ass that will be bitten. Some teachers will take it out on the kids.
Of course his wife over-reacted and they seriously need to get counseling, but not everyone is like you, and just because something works for one person doesn’t mean it works for everyone.
I think this is me you’re referring to. Wrong brand may have been a hyperbole, but I have a good example of what I mean. To add more insight, I’m a stay-at-home mother with a 2 year old. We have one car, which my husband takes to work. There is a grocery store across the street from his work, so every once in awhile I ask him to pick something up. I only do this in an emergency, because it almost never works out. A couple months ago, we were down to one diaper. I asked my husband to pick up diapers. I told him to get the Huggies, in the blue package, the largest size. He came home with the wrong size. Not only is this frustrating because I had specified which size, but it’s also frustrating because he should have some clue how big our kid is. He DOES know how much or son weighs, but he didn’t even really think about it when he just grabbed the nearest package. Why would he do that?
So, okay, that was frustrating, but I certainly wouldn’t yell at him or throw a fit. I just told him it was the wrong size. He offered to go back, but I didn’t want him to go to that much trouble so we improvised (with swim diapers) until I could get to the store the next day. I will admit that it was a little harder to remain calm when he did the exact same thing a couple weeks later.
My final reaction was to never ask him to get diapers again. I just make more effort to plan ahead. It is frustrating that there are some very simple things that I know I can’t rely on him for. He is such a wonderful husband and father in so many other respects, though, that in the grand scheme of things, we can work around it. I still, though, cannot even slightly understand why he can’t manage simple little things when he is obviously intelligent and capable in every other area of his life. It does seem sometimes that he just doesn’t give a shit.
Who knows. Maybe he’s like Dio. I can guarantee that after he’s dismissed his wife’s Blah Blah Blah-ing and gone to make himself a sandwich, she’s having to go behind him and take care of the things he couldn’t bother to take care of.
I have this problem, and worse that people tend to think less of guys who have red eyes due to stress or an incredibily sad incident.
Just to second that this situation seems to some sort of wound that has been festering for quite a while. Maybe she was hurt somehow (and maybe unintentionally) and felt that you haven’t “paid” enough. Not knowing the full story, from courtship to marriage, it’s very hard to pinpoint what’s the problem.
The ‘emotional bank account’ between the two of you is really in the red if simple stuff like clothes is a catalyst for a full blown-up. (I have this problem with my mum too. Her well-meaning statements come across as attempts to control my life. It has something to do with she doing that before. I think she has good intentions; just needed better execution)
You nailed it right there. Some of us are just absent-minded and tend to do things like this. We don’t mean to, but we sometimes just don’t notice things like sizes on diaper packages. It’s worse when we’re tired or in a hurry, or thinking about something else.
Another symptom of this sort of thing is when we ask you to help us find something that is in plain sight right in front of us, but somehow we can’t see it. I’ve done that twice just this week.
I can’t say for sure that your husband didn’t do it on purpose, but I can say that it’s entirely possible for otherwise intelligent people (well, at least I like to think so) to do that sort of thing with no intent to do it.
Oh, and Mr. Neville also seems to have a slightly different perception of colors than I do- he says things are purple that I would say are blue, and we have an ongoing argument about whether some of our dishes are green or yellow. He’s not color-blind, just divides colors in a different place along the continuum than I do (of course, that just means he learned his colors wrong ). Maybe you should have said “the largest size” instead of “the blue package”.
Sorry to have disappeared. I had an all-day off-site company meeting, plus fires to fight the next day from being away, etc. And being with family versus a computer. I am however learning more about myself and I appreciate the feedback.
5, 3-1/2, 15mos
That sounds quite similar. I am anal and a perfectionist too, so the dishes are done well. I can distract myself and miss something on a shopping list. I’m dilligent when I want to be, so I’ve got to take on a task and not just “help out” and “get it good enough.”
What I think causes a lot is that she, by her own admission, “has filled up every minute of the day” with things to do. We are not the family that is running the kids to 42 classes throughout the day - we’ve already agreed about getting the kids into sporting/academic programs but not overloading them or just giving them a chance to play - but I feel she’s scheduled too much. I finish things in the evening and relax watching TV. She does PTA work and emails, glues together charms on a bracelet, sorts and labels photos, etc. Sometimes I feel like I’m not “pulling my weight” by doing some project all the time, but she never hints that it’s an issue. She’s got things she wants to do and she loves doing them. I just think she puts more stress on herself because, with each moment accounted for, a doctor’s appointment delay here, the wrong item picked up by me at the store there, and suddenly all her carefully laid out plans are shot the h*ll.
Yes. Sometimes it’s feeling incompetent (like thinking, “I’m average compared to myself” so if I make a mistake then I’m below average); all the way to a realization that I can’t change anyone but me, so if I take on (not that it’s true, just that it might be empowering) that I’m the one who can change a situation, then I have all the power to do so. And there’s two points about making decisions. I defer to her when she has a plan I agree with and because I trust and respect her. When she’s at a meeting or work and I’ve got the house, I get everything done my way and the result is the same while the journey is different. She multi-tasks the little jobs well and we spend more time talking than doing when I try to dive in (too many cooks syndrome). I like things done more one at a time, though I’ll get off on a tangent where job X needs job Y done first and then job Z needs to be done before Y, etc. and I forget where I started. Odd though, I program and debug multi-tasking software quite well.
Works, when I remember to take the phone with me. Sometimes, though, if I’ve if I’m balancing the take-it-on-and-figure-it-out-without-having-me-do-the-work-for-you and the just-ask-when-you-need-something-don’t-be-a-martyr I have picked the wrong point on the pendulum.
Yes. If I take on someone’s taks, I need to care as much as they did.
And I think that when I’m wrapped up in explaining and justifying and defending instead of working on a solution, that, well, wou;dn’t you have less respect for that? We had a problem where I zoomed home to take the kids while she went to a meeting. I meant to remind her the car was out of gas but didn’t. She was late. She had swapped keys with me so didn’t have her credit cards (on the ring), etc. We talked about it, I said I needed to not get so wrapped up in the handoff of the kids that I forget to mention that the car is out of gas - and we moved on for topic to topci and talked about the kids and just talked about the day. I remembered (from earlier in the thread) about how I repeated myself and kept trying to make my point. So the big thing is that I just said what there was to say and we moved on. I think that she is more respectful of me when I try and communicate and not try to explain and justify.
Yes, exactly. Having that explained makes sense. To my mind I was just getting stuff that would do - it’s just drawing and cutouts. But it would be unwieldable to have all kids of sizes and papers and never have the right amount of the same stuff to go around. When shopping I remembered that she had said she looked before, but we had no conversation about “the teacher wrote that specifically and we can’t substitute”. I found nothing that matched either, so, since this was our second try at it I “figured” that something good enough was better than nothing at all (where he couldn’t participate or where everyone would go short because he had to share). This is because I had a different view of the situation, I didn’t ask for her entire viewpoint, and she didn’t share hers.
Here’s the tricky part. Many times I think I am quite clear. Sometimes I think I am clear until I get to the “store shelf”/“the task”/etc. and then find I have questions.
Gosh, maybe your right and I’m wrong again … But, yes, it works better when I’m state my case and stop being defensive. I also notice that I’m at my worst when I worry more about getting something wrong than getting something done.
Yes I do. I want everyone to like me so when I get caught up in that I’ll be defensive and try to explain and worry about doing “it” right. When I put that aside I can focus on the task and get things done. She consults me and asks my opinion and asks me to do things saying, “You’re good at this can you…” A few mistakes on my part, in a row, and I swing my pendulum over to feeling stupid, instead of a healthy balance in the middle.
That’s right on the mark! The only difference is the end. I offered to return the papers, but she said I still didn’t get it. “Don’t go wasting more of your time driving back and forth, and not being with the family, when I’ll be at the store again before school begins. You can’t just do ‘whatever’ and then just think that you can fix it later. You’ve got to think things through.” Well, I felt it was more efficient to return to Wal-Mart 2 miles up the road and save her standing in the return line another day with three kids. But we have different points of view.
Yeah, I thought of that too. But I don’t want to bash her, I want to understand her, and me. She is ‘controlling’ - she’s got ideas and common sense and the intelligence to control some good shit. I’ve gotten “grow a pair”, “you’re human”, “stop being a doormat” and kunilou’s summary which is great. Neither of us is a dick, we just have to communicate better. Oh, I’ve yelled back and gone almost horse at times. Understanding and trying to change whatever I can change has just worked better in the long run than saying “fuck it.” I think I won’t take suggestion of starting a pit thread.
[Sally Field]You like me! You really do![/Sally Field]
Uh, not that Anne is saying she’s a guy, mind you. I hate confrontations and I get all red in the face and easily teary.
Well, I hate to talk about it when she can’t respond, but she’s told friends, so I guess it’s okay. Her brother and father are that way and have a tendency to say whatever will get them the end they want, so I can see her slipping into thinking that of me in the heat of the moment. I grew up with just my mom and we never argued. - Not that I’m a saint. I’ll bend the truth to get myself out of a jam. But I have been presenting the quotes in this thread as best I can literally remember them.
I do but I always couch it as “and here’s my logical reasons why and you’ve got to understand!” So it’s really my way of saying I’m right. I know I’m doing that, and I need to stop it when I do. What the OP was all about is, when I’m shopping or driving or doing tasks, etc. whether I’m subconsciously forgetting stuff or messing things up to get back at her. In the light of day, not trying to be a martyr or doormat, it sounds ludicrous.
I think that second sentence. I never dated much and my first short marriage was when I settled and she lied (she said so). And the ‘favors’ part too. She doesn’t want to be on a pedestal, just a partner, and I need to ‘help’ less and take more ownership.
And I’ve done the same wrong thing again too. And she’s said that too. I just don’t want to become “unreliable” in her mind (or mine either!).
I think the upshot of all this is fairly clear (hijackery aside), in that you need to sit down during a quiet moment and talk to your wife about all this.
Good luck to you in this – it can be difficult to establish how we will work together with the people we’ve chosen to yoke ourselves to. For what it’s worth, I think you sound like a hell of a nice guy and a good husband, not a doormat.
I’m not, frankly, thinking so highly of your wife. Admittedly, this is based just on what we’ve heard on this thread – your side, in other words. But I’m really not liking the way she seems to speak to you. In addition to her jumping too often to the worst possible assumption about you (that you are passive-aggressive, or trying to ‘slip things by her’), she really does seem to talk down to you when you make these small errors. And I use the word ‘error’ cautiously – the first thing with the outfit I don’t consider an error; it was more a difference of opinion on what the kid should wear. The second example was more of an error – especially if she had explained to you that the kid had to have the specific items on the list. But still, a small error. Anyway, I’m feeling that she talks to you as if you were one of the kids – a subordinate, not an equal. This is the type of thing that would really piss me off if my husband did it. So you might want to think about that and, if you decide there is some validity to it, talk to her about it sometime.
She’s always got something on the go, always got something scheduled. She doesn’t schedule in any flex time, in case something does go wrong? Then she’s asking for a breakdown. There’s nothing wrong with having a schedule, but when your day is planned down to the second, and the wrong box of tissues picked up at the store or a 10-minute delay in traffic will cause an unrecoverable fall-behind, then you’ve got issues.
The sentiment that you really need couples counselling is a good one, and needs to happen soon rather than later. But at the same time she may also need her own “me time” with a counsellor, in order to better work on time management and coping skills for if things on her little schedule to get knocked out of whack. She sounds like there’s some serious control (as in control of her surrounds and life) issues there.
