With all the commenting on The Boy, I’ve realized I haven’t been doing my fair share in the way of illustrating other important relationships in my life.
Let’s take a look at one of the finer nuances between myself and Jackie.
Now, I’m going to do myself a kindness here and say that, compared to the Early Years, Jackie and I don’t argue very much, nor do we argue in ‘public’ (by which I mean “in places where our friends are forced to either leave the room or pretend they have gone stone deaf”) as much as we used to either; certainly, we continue to enjoy our particular brand of refreshing banter (sometimes referred to as “verbal sniping” by our braver friends), but the old addage holds true: the longer you’re married, the longer you go between… you know… really horrific, tree-clearing, geothermal hotspot-level melees.
Then again, it could simply be that we’ve managed to spread our particular brand of loving, caring, death-do-us part… umm… supportiveness throughout the rest of our relationship (not unlike horse manure over a rosebed), and done it so well that we no longer need to have a good fight to enrich the emotional soil.
Case in point:
I’ve been having a lousy week at work and it is, in essence, my fault. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with a really good-sized company, and I had forgotten that Productivity is not enough to counterbalance Perception in an environment like that.
To whit: it doesn’t matter if I make every deadline, turning in copy the likes of which has not been seen since the early years of Tennyson, hand-carving each word into manually-hammered sheets of solid gold — if the Perception is that I’m not, say, slaving away at my desk for 42.5 hours a week, then Perhaps I’m Not Emotionally Engaged in The Job.
Doesn’t matter if I’m working from home. Doesn’t matter if the results of my efforts are pure sterling silver. Perception is everything.
The fix, of course, is simple: stop taking any liberties with the supposedly-flexible-but-in-reality-about-as-fluid-as-the-bowels-of-an-octegenarian-with-a-cheese-fetish salaried employee’s ‘time sheet’.
It’s a simple fix, I acknowledge that: but after work I’m still surly and pissed off because quite frankly I want to live in a world where the Final Product is God, and how I get it done is my own damn business.
Jackie makes an effort to comfort me, to find possible solutions (which, as I said, are limited, but simple) and finally, exasperated at my still-grumpy demeanor, gets a small bright light in her eye.
The light that usually marks some of our patented Caring and Nurturing Support.
“You know,” she says. “This reminds me of something that happened to me a couple years ago that might actually help you figure out how to fix this problem.”
“Yeah?” I mutter, still staring blankly at the far wall.
“Yep.” Her lips pop on the ‘P’, which gets my attention. “I had this boss who was a real ass, and I didn’t like working for him much, and I was coming in a little late in the morning… like, 6:15 instead of 6 am, and he was getting mad at me for coming in late, and was trying to get me in trouble, and I came home upset, and my Loving Husband talked to me about it. You know what he said?”
“Nope.” Actually, I vaguely did, but I wasn’t sure and since I wasn’t sure I definitely wasn’t going to guess. (What I said might be worse, and she was already going back two years to pull out this gem.)
She nodded, expecting the answer. “He asked me, ‘Well, are you coming in late?’ and I said “yes”, and he said… do you remember this now? He said, ‘Well, fucking stop it.‘”
She looked at me. I looked at her. One of us was smiling.
“So, I have a little advice for you, honey…”
The funny thing is that that really was helpful… that is, if you’re us. It sounds like the most unconstructive, nastiest kind of thing you could say at a time like that, but it actually cheered me up.
I mean, she finally admitted it was good advice. :)
