Flogging yourself over television?

This morning I had to take the boys to an activity that lasted an hour and something. When I came back, Wife was in bed watching TV. More precisely (this becomes relevant later) she was watching an episode of a TV show on a rented DVD. OK, fine, no big deal. Right?

Wrong. No sooner do I walk into the bedroom saying "Hi, we're back" then she stabs the Pause button on the remote and starts talking compulsively about all the chores we have to do today.

Pause for cognitive dissonance. In the first place, if she really intended to turn off the show she would have hit Off or Eject, not Pause. In the second place, she was halfway through an episode and none of what she wanted us to do was that blasted urgent. Why not finish the episode first? I know I hate it if I get halfway into a story and then get yanked away from it without a good reason.

I could have understood it if we were talking about a show that would take all day to finish, but it was going to be another half an hour. I could have understood it if she had been watching something like pornography which would be totally unacceptable around the boys, but she wasn't (and doesn't): we're talking about Charmed, which is not exactly salacious or dangerous material. I could have understood it if she were a couch potato who spent hours in fron of the TV anyway, but she doesn't do that either. Most days -- the vast majority of days -- Wife spends zero hours and zero minutes watching TV. Catching an occasional episode of Charmed from rented disks is one of the few TV-like pleasures she ever allows herself.

And she is always furtive about it. I don't get this. If we walk in on her while she is watching one of these episodes, she acts like we caught her masturbating. This baffles me. I mean, it's only TV.

I asked her what was the problem, and got this tortured explanation that made no sense at all ... something about how since I work to support her, she thinks she has no right to spend even a single minute on anything but work around the house ... or at any rate it was something kind of like that and just as asinine. I don't pretend to have understood it very well.

I could be catty and point out that if she truly feels this way, a look around our house would persuade you that she has masterfully overcome this particular disability. But more important is that this whole concept -- I mean, that she somehow owes it to me never to have any fun -- is crap.

Not only is it crap, but it is poisonous crap at that. She will feed herself this diet of battery acid every day, and then suddenly -- without warning -- she can't take it any more. The problem is that when she hits that point, it suddenly all becomes my fault somehow. One day a switch will flip in her brain and she will start railing savagely at me that she can never have any fun around me, that I am a complete wet blanket, that it's no surprise she'd rather fuck anybody else in the world but me because I'm such a slave driver and I insist that she stay cooped up in this crummy house doing crummy housework all day long and she can't even take an hour off to watch an innocent little TV show and how can I possibly be such a horrible tyrant in the first place?

The first dozen times that I heard this tirade, I was completely baffled by it. I had no idea what she was talking about, or who this mysterious fellow was who was forcing her to do all these things and whom she had erroneously confused with me. But then after a while I began to catch on, and the furtive guiltiness over finishing her TV show today is the kind of thing that gave me a clue.

The fact is that she is the tyrant who drives herself like this -- or at any rate, if she doesn't get around to doing all the things on her to-do list, at least she berates herself mercilessly for falling short. She is the one who has set these insane standards for herself, and therefore she herself is the one against whom she rebels when she can't take it any more.

Now, I can sympathize with rebelling against the idea that you can't even squeeze an hour out of the day to do anything fun. That's just lunacy. But why does she do it in the first place? And why does she blame it all on me?

Admittedly, since I know her mother, it's not too hard for me to play sidewalk-psychologist and surmise that the reason Wife holds herself to these punitive standards is that her mother held her to those standards when Wife was still a little girl living at home. But then her mother was a bitter, evil, vindictive harridan who deliberately set her children at each other's throats; I would like to hope that when Wife got out from under her thumb, she would have been able to break free of this pattern.

"I would like to hope" it, but I guess I would be disappointed. Wife recognizes intellectually that the way her mother raised her matches every single line of the dictionary definition of child abuse -- and I am deeply grateful that she doesn't treat our boys exactly the same way -- but she can't free herself from believing in her heart that her mother's sadism is the true touchstone of personal virtue. And if she doesn't measure up to these impossible and contradictory standards, she flogs herself.

My wife sees nothing wrong with sleeping around, but she flogs herself relentlessly over watching a single hour of television. And then it is all my fault that she can never have any fun or a moment's peace. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?