I had the most idiotic meltdown last night. I’m hoping I’m not alone. So, I want to know: what are your stupidest meltdowns ever? I have two. And be warned: these are long, hence the username.
When my husband and I were living together for the first time, I had no idea how to tell him to get out of my hair so I could have five minutes to myself in the morning. Not needing any time to himself, my husband had an unfortunate habit of following me around, so the only way I could get away from him was to go to the bathroom for a long time or wait until he left for work, then bask in the silence of our condo for five precious minutes before going to work. Finally, one day, as I was gently nudging him toward the door before work, I snapped. It happened when I was kissing him and telling him goodbye and he said, “You know what? I’m going to come back in and hang out with you until you go to work, too!” It was like being in an alternate reality – suddenly I was hopping up and down (literally), frustrated beyond belief, yelling, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” It was one of my stupider moments. Sometimes I’m surprised that the man married me at all. Then last night happened, which leads me to meltdown #2.
Picture it: a rainy Sunday. My husband decides to work outside anyway. All day. I’m stuck inside with an energetic four year old and wakeful five month old baby. Both my husband and I have our own agendas – he wants to work in the yard (obviously), I want to clean the house in preparation for his father’s eight-day-long visit on Saturday. My husband has a significant advantage in that his physical presence isn’t required for the feeding of an infant. Oh, and did I mention I’d let him sleep until 10 so he could catch up on sleep? Anyway, after I’d spent the morning washing and cleaning with a baby strapped to my chest and he’d spent a full morning of working outside, he comes in and I say, “Hey, would you watch the baby so I can shower and take these kids somewhere to run errands after naptime?” He balks, I get annoyed. He finally concedes and I shower. After naptime, I take everyone to Costco – sans husband – so I can get diapers, wipes and a few sundry things we happen to use in bulk. I come home to find that husband has been playing video games even though he’d professed that he needed to “do some things” that could only be accomplished while I took the children out alone. I roll my eyes, then get to work on dinner. Fast forward to after dinner and bedtime. Our daughter had started solids that morning – again – and was apparently uncomfortable. Again. So she couldn’t sleep. My husband generously offers to help me anytime I need since he got so much extra sleep. But damned if he doesn’t fall asleep at 10 p.m. on the dot, leaving me with an extremely restless baby who’s decided that she’d like to talk all night. She might as well, since she wakes herself everytime she farts anyway (thank you, solid foods). By now it’s nearly midnight. I’m exhausted. Remembering my husband’s offer, I call for help, knowing he’ll hear me over the monitor. None comes. I walk in and nudge him. He doesn’t wake up; instead, he snores louder. Finally, I set the baby down gently in her crib, kiss her, murmur that I’ll be right back, then return to the bedroom and do the next logical thing: start throwing my laundry in frustration and yelling, fortunately not waking our son. (I hate midnight whack-a-mole. You know, where ones goes down and the other wakes up?) The irritating thing? My husband neither fully woke up nor helped. And, I had to fold all that damn laundry again. So the whole tantrum was pointless. Utterly pointless.
Okay, please tell me I’m not crazy. Or at least share your silly meltdowns so I don’t feel so alone.
Dangerosa, my wife gets mad at me quite frequently for things I do in her dreams. She knows it’s irrational – but she really does spend a few hours being kind of pissy with me.
The emotion is irrational, but it occurred in a dream where you don’t have control over your rational thought - and those “I’m pissed” chemicals are sitting in your brain and you need to wait them out.
I once got absolutely furious that my wife ate the last of the cappicola.
See, she’s Japanese and misses home at times. She buys special groceries for herself at the Japanese market and I think it makes her feel a little better. I likewise buy certain Itallian things that remind me of my grandparents and my childhood. Generally I stay out of her stuff unless I ask first and she says it’s OK because I know these thing have meaning to her.
So one day I came home from a shitty day of Saturday work (my day off, which I get no additional comp for) and I just really want to sit on the couch and watch the last half of the Cubs game and have a sandwich.
The resulting argument lasted a week. In hindsight it probably wasn’t worth it over $2 of spicy ham, but at the time it seemed very important.
I can’t remember the particulars thankfully, but my FIL was staying at our place for a week to help my husband with part of the remodeling effort. I cannot remember exactly how this worked, but I had purchased asparagus specifically for the FIL and as I was cooking dinner, he said something about “why would you cook asparagus”. I completely flew off the handle and ranted and bitched about the asparagus (really? asparagus?)
But ultimately, it worked out so that he respected my boundaries and knew that I could be pushed too far.
OP, I don’t think you’re needlessly flying off the handle. Your husband should be helping you with your kids- that’s not something that should ever even have to get to the point of you melting down. If it does, that’s a big problem, not a mistake.
My spouse and I once had an absolutely enormous meltdown over…the fact that I didn’t want to turn off my computer when I came out to watch a half-hour TV show. He was yelling at me that I should turn it off to save power (which was ludicrous, since he’d never showed the slightest concern over it before) and I was refusing because I didn’t want to have to boot it up again since I was only going to be away from it for half an hour. We just kept getting more and more stubborn about it, neither of us willing to back down. I swear, that fight very nearly got physical (and we never do that!) It lasted for several days. We call that kind of behavior “butthead momentum”–when you know you’re being a stubborn idiot but you can’t stop.
To this day I will not watch “Seinfeld.” The half-hour show I was coming out to watch was the series finale (I never watched the show, but the finale was being touted as an “event” show at the time).
We also once had a fight in a car on the dual carriageway during a trip to England because I tossed a candy wrapper in the back seat.
Did I mention that the spouse had (at the time) undiagnosed clinical depression? We had a lot of meltdowns in those days, but those were probably the two worst. We haven’t had another like them in years, thank goodness.
I think she’s saying that, however justified the emotion is, the manifestation of the meltdown served no purpose, since her husband wasn’t even awake to appreciate her reaction.
I’m downstairs, hubby is up. I’m still fuming over a comment he made at lunch. It was nothing, but he said it in front of a bunch of people and embarrassed me.
He made a comment about my lunch. I’m overweight, so is he, but he walked for a half hour before lunch and I didn’t. My lunch was a third of the calories of his, I had diet coke, he had a margarita.
I told him, in the car, that his comment embarrassed me. His response was “Well, I’m concerned about your weight. I’ll go back in and apologize”
I know I’m fat, damn it. I don’t need to be reminded. If he didn’t want me to eat mexican food, why did he insist on going there? Was I supposed to sit quietly while he had his “treat?”
Yes, I’m being petty. I’ll get on the treadmill now.
Mother’s Day, 1993. I’d had our second son March 31, so maybe I was having a little bit of postpartum depression- now I look back and it seems funny, but at the time it wasn’t funny at all. My (now ex-)husband decided that the perfect Mother’s Day gift to me would be a bottle of tequila and some margarita mix. This was NOT the warm, loving, heart-rending Mother’s Day gift I had in mind. I had a huge meltdown and cried all day, frequently expressing my feeling that this was the worst Mother’s Day in all of history, anywhere. Then I called my best friend, expecting sympathy and commiseration, but instead she started laughing, which at the time felt like “at me”. So I threw the phone at my husband so the two of them could be assholes together and I locked myself in the bedroom for hours, crying the whole time.
So, in July I took the Bar Exam. In New York, its a 2 day exam that is the culmination of the 2 month death march of studying for the Bar, which immediately followed the 2 week death march that is finals.
As background, my deaf, renally compromised cat would get confused, lonely, and hungry in the middle of the night and wake me by screaming frantically at the top of his lungs (imagine the sound of a baby being stabbed repeatedly, and you’re close). I had literally not had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in that whole 3 month period.
So I finish my Exam which I attacked with such single-minded focus that someone was taken out of the exam on stretcher right past my desk and I didn’t notice. So I head out of the Javits Center, then there’s a walk to the train station, a trip on the train, and the 3 blocks home. By the time I got to my stop the adrenaline had worn off and I was so deeply, deeply tired I briefly considered calling a cab instead of walking (again, 3 blocks) home. But I drag myself home, trudge in the door and sit down on the couch.
My husband Idly comments that he’s thinking of making pasta, but we need sauce.
“Well I’m not going out.” I mutter.
“What? What do you mean you’re not going out” he asks. Suddenly it’s all just too damn much.
“I Just. Want. To Sit. Here.” I state, in the flat, expressionless voice of a serial killer.
“I… wasn’t… asking you to go out…” he gently points out. Oh no he DI’IN’T
“I’M JUST EXHAUSTED AND I’M NOT GOING OUT.” I scream. And then burst into tears. And sit on the couch, sobbing, while my husband stares at me, agog.
I think meltdowns are much more common when you’re exhausted. Lack of sleep just seems to break down those rational barriers to acting like a crazy person.
This is pretty much it, though Diosa, you’re right - my husband should be helping. That’s one of our “best hits” argument themes. He seems to a) forget we have children that someone needs to take care of while he’s doing whatever he wants to do and b) single-mindedly attack any of his tasks as though he were wearing blinders. In the meantime, I tell myself it’s okay when I don’t believe it, then when it gets to be too much, simmer until I lose it.
But it was so damn anticlimactic to have a spectacular meltdown, only to be greeted with a “Wha?” and a snort. Then, of course, I’m still thinking that I’m trying to be more organized, so I had to fold the laundry. As far as meltdowns go, it was pretty underwhelming.
I once smacked my nephew in the face for bending a cheapo screwdriver.
He took the time out of his busy schedule to help me with a specialized piece of machinery that he was much more knowledgeable about, and that I had been having a headache with. He bent the tip of an ancient Craftsman screwdriver which has a LIFETIME WARRANTY and cost all of about $5 anyway. I just went off on him, calling him all sorts of awful things. Then I backhanded him(pretty hard) and asked him if he was a fucking idiot.
To his credit he didn’t retaliate. He’s a huge beast of a man and could have killed me with my own bent screwdriver if he’d wanted to. He simply told me to fix my own fucking problems and got in his car and left. I apologized a couple hours later and we met up for drinks and laughs. We cool now, we cool.
Hm, I had been working 2 jobs, 7 am to 5 pm in a machine shop, and then 6 to midnight in a kitchen. About 5 months into this hell schedule I find out that my live in college student boyfriend is fucking around on me [I had cut my hand and come home early to find him screwing her on the couch.
After screaming at both of them for about 5 minutes, throwing both their clothing off the third floor balcony, the couch went off the same balcony.