Before your head has lifted from the pillow, before your feet touch the floor, before the first sip of coffee, you have lost the battle. You just don’t know it yet. Day 3 of the boiling emotion has you troubled. Patiently and with every ounce of information, gathered in a lifetime, you’re controlling your temper.
The freezer door is stuck shut. You have no idea why and you’re trying again to open it…shaking, pulling , shoving a wire in the narrow crack to ajar. The last and final attempt works perfectly. You rip the door off the slide with the sound of one big crack!, plastic flying. Upset, walking away is your solution. “I need to cool down.”
Typing a story has been a therapy that has helped in the process of avoiding the “temper tantrum.” With each stroke of the keys, the non-responsive wireless keyboard adds to the already explosive attitude. Then you lose it. Boom. The internal bomb has exploded. Folding the plastic keyboard in half was the beginning of your rage, smashing it on the corner of the desk, plastic pieces flying. Next was the sticky drawer of the built in cabinet. Pull-and-dump, was a quick process of emptying it onto the living room floor and was the perfect fuel you needed to keep the fire inside hot. Now you’re looking for something to destroy.
Of course mother’s arrival time was perfect. Just after the peak of the volcanic eruption, she pulls into the driveway. I walk out the door and with a stern warning broadcast,”don’t even say a word,” as I head for the garage.
The argument has begun.
As she enters the war zone, I can see she is disappointed in the condition of the clean house she left just hours before. Rage has a way of creating debris. Bickering turns a little ugly, and I am chewed-out for breaking her keyboard. The defensive position I take is it was a piece of $%^#@ and I tell it to her face loudly. Our 21 years of marriage, celebrated just 3 days before, is a candle of peaceful bliss doused with a hurricane. I start the engine and rapidly leave the driveway with a black mark on the road proving the rusty blue Chevy has some power after all. I head to my office to fetch a keyboard.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep from the night before, or the smell of cigarettes again, maybe I needed to use some other way to respond to the building situations, but in the end…in the end I cursed God loudly with a bold kind of pissed-off and that was the truth. No sugar, no frosting, no lie. That is the bottom line of my internal brawl. I procrastinated for 3 days trying along the way to open the door that no man can open. Time and pressure, time and more pressure, explosion.
I returned with the prize and replacement keyboard, unhooked the computer, and took it to the garage. Peeking with just the corner of my eye to catch a glimpse of mother’s response of me returning, I held my defensive gruff. The purpose was to blow the dust out of the machine and allow the dust to settle a little longer before I had to face the woman I loved.
My great pride had to be swallowed with a big gulp. I burped up an apology a little later. I fixed the drawer, replaced the keyboard, and found a way of repairing the freezer door. All was repaired, and I am happy again living in peace with the woman I love. I will say even on rare days when emotions seem to beat up on my marriage, my wife and I always end up cuddled together when it’s time to go to bed. She needs her pick and scratch, and of course I need the butter ball turkey, along with a place to put my cold feet.
Still in love.