The one thing my husband is never allowed to say. Again.

Loving someone is not the same as understanding.

On Mondays I open the new post box and write directly into it. No planning. No editing. Apologies ahead of time.

In 19 years of marriage I have never yelled at Steve as loudly or with as much velocity as I did last night. It was my “best” version of spitting. It wasn’t spewing because that would distribute the malice into a wide area, this was a fire hose of anger.

We were talking about Mental Health. About the ways that depression can mingle with physical pain and create a confusing cocktail. If there is a lot of pain to go around it is hard to know what is keeping you in bed, what is forcing you to slide underneath the regular rhythm of your life and drown there. It is also hard to know if it matters.

We know someone who is sinking. We want to understand and to help. We are past the experts, the therapists, the MDs, and the blood tests. We are in the “hands in the air cause we don’t care” phase of the professionals. The sufferer is left alone in the literal and figurative dark.

“We all go through it.” Steve says. He has his head tilted, brown hair flopping over his eye. He is folding a red and orange patterned napkin even though it is my week to do laundry. “I will do the rectangular items” he offered and I have tossed them in a pile to him, adjacent to the grey shadow of cat hair that covers the corner of the bed. When my aim is bad and the clean laundry lands in the anti-target he lifts the napkin to the light and picks each pet hair off individually letting the hairs fall to the floor where I will gather them with my socks wondering how something can be sharp in a cat and needle-like in my toes.

“We all go through it.” His phrase is bumping around in all echo chambers of my body, skull, chest cavity, heart chambers. I am trying to focus on his hands, working to keep things clean and useful. Steve’s primary negative emotion is hunger. He cries when things with our children are lovely, he screams when he is excited about sporting events. He stays in bed, delicious in the covers wriggling with happiness in has cocoon.

Minutes pass and then I explode.

“Don’t ever fucking say that.”

I am at 11. “You are not allowed to say that. Don’t ever say that again.”

I feel great. Amazing. Elated. My explosion has me floating towards the ceiling like a displaced half dead person on a medical show.

I don’t feel guilty or bad. I don’t want to reassure him that I love him and simply don’t love his words. I don’t want to explain the difference between empathy and sympathy. I don’t want to put myself in his shoes and appreciate his putting himself in mine. I just want to feel righteous and furious and let it feel good.

I just want to feel righteous and furious and let it feel good.

Turning on my anger spigot is so so easy. And it is lazy. Finding a way to breathe through anger, to re-frame and re-phrase, to integrate other perspectives. That is hard shit. It is much easier to yell.

I was raised in a household with daily explosions. We’d be going along at a perfectly reasonable rate and volume and then one of the three of us would blast off the roof with upset over something like the dishwasher. Then we would immediately re-set. I always believed that if if this was a family norm and no one else got derailed by this type of expression it is fine, possibly even good to spit instead of swallow anger.

Last night I was thinking that it is bad for the spitter. It is path away from deep understanding and self reflection. It is an emotional orgasm rather than the long slow build of a connected relationship. One is a lot more difficult than the other.

The hate and anger that exists in our Country is deeply harmful, dangerous way worse than divisive, but it is also lazy. All the ism’s and phobias (rac,anti-semit,trans, homo, sex) are such a self-indulgent way to approach other people. If you feel hate you don’t have to work towards understanding, you don’t need to integrate and learn from historical mistakes, you don’t need to question your own responses, or feel confused and conflicted about your world view. This kind of anger is easy.

So I was a lazy fuck. Steve was trying to join a conversation. I don’t just need to stop him from saying “everyone has this experience” I need to explain to him why I need him to stop. To do that I need to understand it myself.

And that takes work.