Let face it. The wife gets to be a humorless harridan, keep score and blame you for things that are not your fault. You, on the other hand, say one thing that conflicts with her skewed view and your ass is grass. Also, sex is indexed to the price of tea in China and you’ll not say anything about that, either, or else it’ll get indexed to the temperature of the surface of Pluto. And you should be thankful for this, BTW. 
(humorless harridans please note the ).
I’m going to assume that when you wrote that you didn’t know that Bearflag70s wife is the full time caregiver to a child less than 2 years old who has a serious, and likely terminal, medical condition. Because if you did know that, and wrote the above anyway, I will see your ass in the Pit, where I can fully express my disgust like the humorless harridan I am.
I am fully aware, and I pity your lack of sense of humor almost as much as I regret my poor attempt at it.
Dear God, that was an attempt at humor? I’m so sorry. Have you considered having that looked at?
This seems like a bit of a strawman to me. Lighting a match in a room filled with flammable gas is a very clear mistake that almost anyone would agree is a bad idea given a moment’s thought. Having the dog unleashed is more of a balanced risk/reward scenario. Presumably she feels the dog is happier off the leash and that the risk of him running off is small enough (in the context of two people there to stop it) that its a risk worth taking. You disagree. However you mentioned having him off-leash at the river and seemed fine with it - presumably there is also some risk there that he will run off (and indeed you say he has done), but you feel the risk/reward ratio there makes it a risk worth taking.
You are effectively insisting that the judgement she has made is wrong and also that she is not capable of doing what she thinks she is (noticing and stopping the dog if it runs off). You may feel that your reasoning is entirely rational, but so may she and you’ve just questioned her judgement and abilities - I can see why she’d feel a little irked.
Yes. It was pretty sorry of me.
I know the analogy isn’t perfect because the risk of getting blown up in the gas case is a lot higher and more obvious than the risk of the dog getting hit by a car in the leash case. However, I was thinking more about communication techniques involved and less so on the analogy itself… but I see your point.
[Also, the more I think about it, I think of the squirrels. The dog could easily lock into a squirrel and give chase. It doesn’t matter now, but I just wanted to get that out there.]
I think quite often people mistake Reason for Rationalization. In my experience, the very people that claim “they’re just being logical” are the ones typically rationalizing their position.
Even if you’re not “emotional”, I’d bet you can be irritable. And I’d bet the response would have been a lot different if you’d asked if she minded that you brought the dog in or took whatever step you felt needed to be taken. Heck, you could have suggested that she was right that the dog needed fresh air and grabbed a leash and took it for a walk.
As an aside, a friend of mine’s mother raises Italian Greyhounds. I’d never trust one off a leash outdoors without a seriously enclosed yard.
How you get along is at least an important a goal as making sure things get done "right*. In most cases there are several ways to get things done right and which method gets chosen depends on the weighting of all sorts of personal perspectives and preferences.
10 people aren’t going to stop a whippet from bolting, let alone two people mostly focused on giving proper care to a special needs child. They also wouldn’t have the perspective that would let them accept having their judgment overridden even if it’s reasonable to do so.
Bolting into an area with vehicle traffic IMO is a substantially higher risk than running around off the leash in a more bucolic setting. A whippet is faster than anything it would likely encounter in a natural settting, but with cars, not so much.
Yes, I think the assumption you’re making is that your wife hadn’t given any thought to the danger and would immediately agree with your risk assessment once you pointed out the danger. It sounds like she’d already thought of it, decided it was not a high risk and didn’t like being overruled.
In my experience, squirrels put an end to dog-chasing quickly and effectively by going up trees. The dog I walk still chases them - not sure whether he thinks one day he’ll get them quick enough or that one day he’ll climb a tree, but he’s damn well going to keep trying.
Agreed on all points, except my wife, friend, and baby were all right next to our trees. The only available trees to a squirrel scampering on our lawn or in the street were across the street.
Here is a mildly annoying situation from today. My wife put the baby in the stoller and covered her up to her neck with a blanket. As we started walking, I thought it was quite a warm day so I said, “It’s pretty warm out here.” I moved the blanket down to her waist. I thought nothing of it, but my wife thought I was once again substituting my judgment for hers.
So she got a bit annoyed and I wondered to myself if I now need to express concern and then ask permission to change any little thing my wife has done. Little shit like this is driving us bonkers when we should be focussed on bigger things. It’s sad.
Why didn’t you tell her that you were worried that the baby might get too hot?
Communication patterns are really hard to break once they are entrenched and when bad feelings are there. You might have to be more open and explicit with her.
Start at a time without conflict. Tell her that you understand she feels you are trying to sub your judgement for hers but you really trust her implicitly. Ask her for suggestions as to how to approach these types of situations.
In a situation be really clear what you are thinking and reiterate that it has to do with your comfort level, not a criticism of her.
So yes, you might have to bend over backwards for awhile until new patterns and trust are in place.
I did vocalize my concern over the heat when I moved the blanket. I figured the blanket was just draped over the baby, it was hot, and I’d just adjust the blanket accordingly. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had placed any special thought into blanket placement. It also hadn’t occurred to me that something as simple as moving a blanket 6 inches had to be run through the blanket committee. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.
You know it’s not about the blanket right? For whatever reason (fair or foul) she believes you don’t trust her judgement. She probably worries over everything she does for your little one and doesn’t trust herself. So she sees confirmation of her own insecurities in small actions by you.
You may have to give more support than you think she should “need” to break this pattern. Do it with love, trust and empathy and you’ll get a further than with annoyance and frustration. She needs your help, so help her.
I think you should spend some time examining whether or not you do trust your wife’s judgment. I know that my husband would have denied that he didn’t constantly second-guess me with our son, to say nothing of home improvement projects, but his behavior told a very different story.
Yes, the root of it is she thinks I don’t trust her judgment. The odd thing is I do trust her judgment pretty much all the time. She’s with our daughter a lot more than I. When I see them doing this or that, there’s no issue. However, now and then, I see a red flag and I raise the issue. So she zooms in on those occasional times as evidence I don’t trust her judgment yet she fails to consider the vast majority of times when her judgment doesn’t come into question at all.
So perhaps I need to do a better job of reinforcing what a great job she does all the time to avoid allowing those occasional red flags to skew the picture.
I wonder if maybe the time she spends caring for Getty alone is more pressure than you realise. It sounds like a lot of the time you’re around, you’re both there, so you don’t often have the level of worry that comes with even temporarily being solely responsible for her. Perhaps your wife spends a lot of time worrying and second-guessing her own decisions and that makes her very sensitive to any perception that you’re also second guessing her.
I think this is a very good observation, and I would add to this that many women, and especially women who are primary caretakers, feel like they are supposed to magically know everything–if they really loved the baby, they would have this perfect intuition–and are scrambling like hell to fake the perfect competence they think everyone else expects of them. There mothers seemed to “just know”–what’s missing in them that they don’t?
If that is the case, having you move the blanket is basically like saying that she’s such a lousy mothers she can’t even do this most basic fucking thing–tell when the baby is hot (even though in reality that is not easy or obvious, it feels like it should be) and that just reinforces her worry that she really can’t do this. Since taking care of the baby is all she does these days, it’s like attacking her very reason for existence. She’s no longer helping support the family, she’s no longer any good as a wife because the baby’s needs always come first, she’s no longer any good as a friend because all she can talk or think about is her child and her child’s special needs (not to mention she has no time), she’s no longer particularly interesting as a person or attractive, she’s sucks at pretty much every single thing, because the baby has to come first. And then, apparently, the one person who’s opinion she can even begin to care about anymore turns out to think she can’t even handle the basics there.