I'm likely to be off the air Friday and weekend. Going back to SFBA to talk to my mother about a nursing home. See previous post for some of the particulars.

SpouseKitty offered to come. I love my wife. I really do. But she stresses me out beyond my words' ability to express. (When you're as verbose as I am, that's pretty far.) She stresses me out because she jumps to conclusions, usually negative ones. See previous post for some of the particulars, too.

She offered to come. I went with my gut and said, "I would rather you didn't." I didn't have any reasons coalesced at the time, but was frantically trying to get some together. Instead, she didn't ask "why," or discuss it, she dug in and pushed to go. This was rapidly spinning out of control.

Long story short (and it was a long and drawn out story) she pushed because she felt insulted I didn't want her to come along. Why didn't she say so? Why didn't she ask why? Why didn't she discuss things with me instead of trying to brute-force her way into my intentions?

I didn't have good reasons then formed, but I do now. Some were practical, others were fair, but unpleasant. How she jumps to conclusions. How she overloads me with information. How she doesn't see when she's in "fix-it" mode that other people are frantically flagging her to slow down, to take in the situation first before slapping a perhaps-unwanted fix.

Back then, I wanted to discuss these with her. I don't have a filing cabinet with a folder of "reasons I don't want to go with you to San Francisco when I need to talk to my mom about her going to a nursing home." I do have a gut reaction, and it was reacting very strongly, and negatively so.

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The resolution was long and drawn out as well. I took an Aspie eye to it and moved from one topic to another. She would try to bring up a previous fight, and I would ask, "We're talking about the one we had today. Do you want to table this dicussion and move to that one, or put that one on the agenda?"

We'd all-but-wrap-up one of the post-mortem discussions and I'd ask, "Okay, are we done talking about this one?" She'd jab back, "I'm done with it all, but you're not." I had to explain that I felt we had already paid "tuition" (a price) for this context, so we may as well try to learn what we could from it.

In short, I used a lot of corporate-speak. It's the exact opposite of active writing. "Mistakes were made." "The failing point lies in this area." We worked on what blew up, what fell down, and gradually we both took what we felt were fair shares of responsibility for each individual incident that contributed to the whole.

There was no wholesale capitulation, no it's-either-me-or-you-and-by-golly-it's-not-going-to-be-my-fault binary fallacies. She tried to nettle me and digress, but I kept us on one topic at a time, not letting the conversation meander into areas where she felt utterly justified.

Always I kept in mind the goal was to avoid this happening again, to learn what we could from it, to not make wounds worse. It was very dispassionate, very distant, but it did teach us both some very valuable lessons.

We paid enough for it, dammit.