The invisible salad dressing

We had another upset over dinner last night. It was so trivial it's almost not worth talking about, and it's mostly because I was being hypersensitive and irritable. But the train of thought it has sparked interests me, just a bit ....

I was pulling dinner together, and Son 2 set the table. I asked him to put salad dressing on the table, which he did. When I called everyone to the table, Wife came in the room, looked straight at the table, and said, "I guess we need salad dressing"; then she went to the refrigerator and got a second jar of it. I got very peevish about calling her attention to the fact that there was already a jar of the very same stuff right in front of her eyes, realized that I wasn't going to simmer down right away, and removed myself from the scene.

What I tried to explain to her afterwards was that this had nothing to do with the salad dressing, and everything to do with the thousands of other times in the past that she has stared straight at something I or somebody else did for her ... and failed to see it. It's why I get so peevish about her grocery spending these days: she hasn't bought 5 lbs of broccoli lately, but while I was in International City she did buy a pound of rice when we already had 10 lbs in the normal place in the pantry; and a jar of red wine vinegar when I had bought one the weekend before I left; and so on, and on, and on. I have tried to put this in terms of wasting money, because I thought that was a language she would understand (though the dollar cost of an extra pound of rice is negligible); I have whined again and again about asking her to check the pantry before she buys something. But what it comes down to really is the anguish of being always invisible ... that nothing I do ever counts for her or registers with her, not because she is trying to be cruel but because in some way that I don't understand she genuinely can't see it.

I don't know why. But when I framed it to myself this way last night (after stewing for longer than I want to admit), I stopped being angry and just became profoundly sad.

I don't think she was trying to diss me or Son 2 over salad dressing. I think she stared straight at the bottle -- of which she had an unobstructed view smack in the center of her visual field -- and somehow truly didn't see it. I don't understand how this is possible, but -- if there were some way that it were possible -- it would actually help to explain so many other things about her catastrophic interactions with others that I think it would be a useful theory. I only wish I understood how it could be.