Take My Advice, I'm Not Using It!
2 Comments Published by Chris on Sunday, March 26, 2006 at 10:24 PM.
God love her, she thinks she's helping.
Mom called tonight. Unfortunately she caught Jen and I in the middle of a small fight, so I wasn't too talkative. And mom, quite uncharacteristically, wanted to talk about my feelings.
"Are you ok?"
No, I said, and I don't want to talk about it.
She persisted. A few prodding questions and several dull answers later:
"Are you sure you're ok?"
No, I never said I was ok. I'm not ok, ok?!
"You wanna talk about it?"
Didn't you say you were going to bed?
"Yeah, but I can stay up for this!"
I should have let her sleep. Clearly she wasn't firing on all 8 cylinders and was in no way prepared to give me advice.
I told her that Jen and I don't get enough time to spend together because of my work schedule and her school and work schedules. We rarely see each other. When we do see each other it's just in passing.
Mistake #1
"I know, your father and I were like that when he had that night job."
This is a mistake because they are divorced. And it was an UGLY divorce. So much so that I thought there might have been gun play at our wedding when they were forced to breath the same air for extended periods of time. No one wants to hear that. It's the equivalent of telling the crew of the Love Boat that their ship was drawn from the same plans as the Titanic. It kinda makes it hard to enjoy the rest of the cruise if you're constantly scanning the horizon for icebergs.
I went on to tell mom that sometimes, quite against my own best interests, I find myself arguing in a manner that reminds me somewhat of Dad.
Mistake #2
"And we all know how THAT relationship ended!" mom countered.
See also Mistake #1
In retrospect, I kinda set her up for that...but I wasn't going to tell HER that!
Wow mom, you're really bad at this aren't you?
"I'm sorry. I'm not good at advice. I really good at empathizing though!"
I don't know what her idea of empathizing is, but it's clearly not anything you or I would recognize as comforting.
Well, I went on, when we do see each other we don't get enough time to work on our relationship. We just get enough time to take care of the routine crap. Mail this bill, sign this check, buy a card for your grandma. That crap. It's like we keep running and running and running only to find ourselves at the starting line. Or, to torture another metaphor, we spend a LOT of time just treading water and never get anywhere.
Mistake #3
"Well, sometimes you have to tread water until you get where you're going."
If you are treading a lot of water to finally arrive at you destination, you know what? You were already there. It was only later as I was relaying this story to Jen that I realized why mom's analogy failed so miserably: Mom can't swim.
Well, Jen and I are not fighting anymore. But don't be so quick to congratulate us. We didn't really fix the problem so much as just table it for later. We did agree on one thing though when it comes to our problems: DON'T ASK MOM.
This is ever the way with mothers.
My husband and I had a very hard time the year he was in Iraq. Miscommunication abounded thanks to time zone differences and irregular phone access. We wrote letters, sent packages, tried to keep in touch, but basically we just accepted that this was going to suck, that we would just try to hang on and get through the sucky time. We realized that there wasn't going to be much growth or development of the marriage till we got back. We were essentially just marking time, so we tried not to take problems too seriously or personally. Didn't always work; we're not saints, but we tried. And once we got through that awful time we could start working on the relationship again. And we did.
But it seems like you have already figured this out yourselves and acted accordingly. Which suggests to me you'll probably be okay.
Good luck with all this. It's never easy in that situation. Hopefully, you won't have to deal with it for too much longer. One tip that I've often heard is that you should schedule your time together. Put it on the calendar and make it just as important as school, work, doctor's appointment, etc.
It sounds crazy, but it just might work.