"Mom always gets hysterical when she's lost"

I think I said that Wife had taken the kids to a sporting event. Afterwards everybody was going to go out for pizza, but Wife has no sense of direction and got completely lost.

She called me at home on her cell phone, shrieking about how she was lost and it was the direct personal fault of this person and that person and especially the other person too. Son 1 had gone off to the pizza parlor with another member of his team; Son 2 was in the car with Wife, crying. And I was supposed to fix it.

Really this was easy. I told Wife to come on home. Son 1 was really the one who needed to be at the pizza fest anyway, and he was already there. Then I called the coach and asked him to make sure somebody else brought home Son 1.

But I was a little worried about Son 2. I know that when Wife is upset she can yell for hours about what everybody else did wrong to put her in this pickle, and Son 2 is very sensitive. What's more, the night several years ago when Wife blew up so badly that she was arrested ... Son 2 had woken up and tiptoed out of bed, and he saw the whole thing. Of course he kept silent until the police had driven away, but years later he mentioned it to his brother so I know he remembers.

So when they both got home I wanted to talk to them a bit, to make sure Son 2 was OK and to try to encourage Wife to be a bit less self-righteous. I understand she was scared -- scared of getting lost, scared of losing Son 1. But I was hoping she could ground out the frantic energy rather than letting it make her crazy. I asked Son 2 how he was doing, and by this point he was quite chipper. I mentioned that the reason Wife had been shouting and screaming so much was not that anybody did anything wrong, but that she was scared because she was lost. And Son 2 said nonchalantly, "It's OK, Mom always gets hysterical when she is lost."

Wife herself was a little harder to calm down, and I think she is still seething on a slow simmer. But for the most part I think she is getting over it.

All the same, I do have to wonder: if Wife finally leaves me for Boyfriend 5, is she still going to call me on her cell phone when she gets lost in traffic? For decades that has been pretty much her only strategy to get out of this kind of a jam -- since before cell phones, in fact. But is another boyfriend going to have any idea how to deal with her? Or will she keep calling me because she always has?