Outnumbered Two to One

My husband has a temper.

Don’t get me wrong, I get angry too. Blood-boiling-teeth-grinding-white-knuckled-anger. But for the most part those moments are fleeting. Little flashes here and there where I lose my mind and shout myself purple (sometimes at no one in particular) and then whoosh, it’s gone. Maybe I don’t have the stamina for sustained anger, even though my children consistently challenge that theory.

My husband, on the other hand, suffers from explosive anger. Don’t worry, I’m not making excuses for him pounding on my face or kicking the dog or anything. It’s simply a case of mounting frustrations creating a pressure cooker of emotion inside his head. The bulging vein in his forehead is a clear indicator of the amount of steam building inside his skull. But when he erupts, voice booming like the most volatile of volcanoes, well, he occasionally makes an ass of himself.

Here are a  few examples:

In the early years of our marriage, after an especially harrowing trip to the grocery store to buy feminine hygiene products for moi, my husband returned with said purchase gripped in his fist and promptly chucked the bag of Always pads at my head.

After a day of battling rush-hour traffic in downtown Miami, my husband returned from work, tell-tale vein bloated and throbbing, with a gallon of water in one hand and his lunch cooler in the other. This full gallon of water was thrown full strength at the kitchen wall where it immediately exploded, drenching the entire room in spring water.

Bringing home milk-shakes and burgers one night from the BK’s, he accidentally dropped his large and much anticipated Vanilla shake on the pavement just outside our apartment. Then he put a dent in our front door with his fist.

My reaction to all of this?

Laughter, pure unadulterated WTF?-Are-you-crazy? laughter. Every time. Because it’s absurd, because it’s ridiculous, because that’s how I manage the crisis. Having your spouse laugh heartily at your expense has never failed to diffuse the situation. Pressure released. We can move on with our lives.

It works both ways. Nothing snaps me out of a vicious funk like my hubby turning my melodrama to satire. We laugh at ourselves. We laugh at each other. We laugh at our children. It’s therapeutic to say the least and definitely beats counting to infinity.

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This post was brought to you by Sprite’s Keeper: The Spin Cycle, a weekly writing adventure introduced to me by Casey over at Half as Good as You, check out her entry too. Fun for the mom blogger in your family.

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