Sometimes I’m an Ass

My husband and I had a fight the other night.

It was the end of the week, and we’d just gotten home from an after-school charity event in which I was playing basketball with some colleagues and community members. I’d been out of the house for 13 hours and was exhausted, both from the basketball game and from a long, fairly stressful week at work.

But the next day my hubby was scheduled to preach a sermon at our church, which he does periodically since we don’t have a real pastor. He’d spent hours the day before preparing it, and he wanted me to hear him run through it before he had to present first thing the next morning.

“Is this going to take long?” I asked, but he assured me he would just skim through the highlights and it wouldn’t be more than 20 minutes. It was after 9:00 (which may not seem late to some of you, but when you routinely get up at 5:30 it’s bedtime, man!) so I was hesitant to sit through 30 or 40 minutes of him talking. I know, way to be supportive, right?

So he started going through his slides, and I tried my best to listen. But I was honestly exhausted and found it really hard to focus. Soon I wasn’t really listening, but had my own internal soundtrack going, which went something like this:

Oh man, it’s already been 12 minutes and he’s not even 1/3 through his slides!

Can’t he tell that I’m not interested?

Why can’t he just say what he has to say and be done with it?

Once or twice we stopped to discuss something, which lengthened it even more, and by the end of the slides I was feeling near tears with the overwhelming desire to be in bed. All I could think of was how irritated I was that he had promised to be concise and then proceeded to talk for 40 minutes. And so, the only comments I could seem to make were bitchy ones about how long it was.

“You really need to watch the time—people are going to get bored.”

“You said this would be quick and it’s been 40 minutes!”

“You weren’t even saying every detail this time, so I know it’s going to take even longer than that tomorrow—you just can’t have an hour-long sermon!”

He got defensive and told me I could just go to bed if I was going to be that way, so I said, in my best teen voice, “Fine, I will!”

But on my way out the door I couldn’t stop myself from letting fly another little barb—“It’s just you really do have a problem with time. You can’t even remember to go to lunch unless you have an alarm set.”

It was all so uncalled for and driven 100% by my selfish desire for sleep. Of course, I couldn’t remember in that moment that he had just spent several hours of his evening sitting out in the heat watching me play basketball. I went to bed in a huff and felt royally terrible about the entire episode.

A few minutes later he slid into bed and told me he loved me. There was no trace of animosity in his voice and I knew we’d be fine, just like we always are after we “cuddle it out.” But I still felt awful for treating him that way, when all I needed to do was sit quietly and nod and tell him he had done a good job.

The worst thing was that during those moments, in those instants right before I said something rude, I knew I was in the wrong and that I was about to make everything worse, but I just didn’t have enough self-control to stop myself.

When everything’s coming up roses it’s easy to think my spouse and I are just awesome people who don’t struggle as much as other people do with loving each other and being nice, but moments like these reveal in no uncertain terms that we are far from perfect. So, I just thought I’d let you guys know. I can be a real ass sometimes.