Wife in tears, part 4

When the boys and I got home this evening, Wife was folding laundry and crying. Dinner was on the stove, bubbling away unattended. After starting the boys on their evening chores (and homework), I asked her what was wrong.

"It ... it just all hit me today. Everything that is happening with us. And it's just too much."

"What's too much?"

"I tried to get the laundry all done today so you wouldn't yell at me about the boys having no clean clothes; and I put dinner on early but it is taking forever to cook, so now you'll yell at me for dinner being late. And I just can't do anything right."

I wasn't quite sure what to say to this. We talked desultorily for a bit, with a couple of barbs thrown back and forth for good measure. Then Wife went out to the kitchen to finish dinner.

After dinner, we talked some more. Wife said she had been crying ever since her psychiatric appointment this morning, as she tried to unpack for her doctor what was going on for us. But she still didn't understand it. At one point she said, "You don't love me and you don't like me. There's nowhere we can go from there." At another point she said, tremulously, cautiously, like a real question, with no defiance but genuine confusion in her voice, "What have I ever done, in all the years we have been together, to hurt you so badly?" Or again, "Maybe you are right that I just can't maintain any relationships of any kind." And all the while, tears were beading under her eyes and rolling slowly, reluctantly down her cheek.

I didn't say a lot; and when I did, it wasn't much to the point. I didn't know what to say. When she suggested that the first few years of our marriage were the happiest, I gently demurred (thinking again of "Stiletto"); when she accused me of not liking her, I asked what I am supposed to do about that. But mostly I just listened and did not get too wrapped up in her version of the story.

The other thing I did not do was to get too emotionally wound up in the situation. I mean, a woman's tears will do terrible things to me -- no doubt about it. And in years past I would have dropped everything to dry them. But today, I just sat and watched and listened. I didn't change any of how I felt, nor any of what I see for the road ahead. And that may be (in some ways) the saddest part of all.

Just before she fell asleep, Wife asked me please to be kind to her: or at any rate, if we have to divorce, please not to go out of my way to be mean and spiteful. I agreed, of course. And she fell asleep.

I need to do the same thing pretty soon. I wish I had something insightful to say. But I think the situation is starting to consume her, and I think she is scared.
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Update added the next morning: There was a part of the conversation that I meant to include, but by the time I wrote this post last night I was too tired to remember it. At one point in the discussion, I said -- for what must have been the hundredth time -- that I found it really hard to understand why Wife was taking this so hard, since she had been the one who for years kept threatening divorce, offering divorce, speaking about divorce as a foregone conclusion ....

And she said, "Didn't you understand that when I said those things, what I meant was that I was begging you to love me? To be kind and affectionate to me? Didn't you get that?"

No, I never understood that. I'm going to have to think about this for a while.