Reading: More articles on haiku, courtesy of John Bailey, gentleman, writer, and poet.

Weather: Still hot, though the weather is supposed to change today.

Listening: Loreena McKennitt, The Visit.

Fishwife

After dropping off Tab at work and Daniel at school, the twins and I went to Kramer's to take advantage of the Wednesday special: eighteen bagels for the price of a dozen. Their bagels are made in the traditional style--boiled then baked--and have a delicious, chewy texture. They freeze well, too. Kramer's started as a small bagel shop in the city but moved to a safer location in a Hamilton shopping center ten years ago. On weekends, the shop is open for thirty-four hours straight, from 6 a.m. Saturday morning until 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon. In those carefree days B.C. (Before Children) Tab and I would often drive out to Kramer's at 11 o'clock on Saturday night to pick up bagels for Sunday morning. The smell of fresh bagels still takes me back to those dark car rides home holding a warm paper bag of bagels on my lap while I snuggled against Tab.

After our Kramer's trip, I set up the wading pool out back for the boys. They happily played with the hose and their water toys while I sat on the porch reading the paper and returning phone calls with the cordless phone. One of those calls was to Mom's friend, Mary. She lives in Texas now but has kept her house here and returns to this area for a few weeks every other month to spend time with her grandchildren. On this trip, she returned to New Jersey in the middle of our first heat wave to find that her air conditioner was not working. Fortunately, she'd found a repairman who fixed it for her yesterday.

Mary offered to pick up some fast food and treat me for lunch. Never being one to turn down free food, I agreed immediately, though apologizing in advance for the condition of the house. I still haven't had a chance to do much cleaning but I'd better get going since we're expecting my mother and Jake down from Maine tomorrow. So Mary came over with BK burgers, and I enjoyed the opportunity for some conversation with an adult today, for a change.

Recently I was reading a few of my offline journal entries from 1990 and 1991, and I realized that while our marriage has evolved past some of our early problems, some other issues are still with us. For instance, in the early days our relationship, I constantly had to remind Tab to do things he should have done on his own: return calls to clients, follow up on job leads, and so on. Finally I learned to let go of most of it: remind him once and then leave it entirely up to him. In general, that strategy has worked. He started taking more responsibility for himself or facing the consequences when he abdicated those responsibilities.

Now, however, I find myself once again nagging him about something, and I hate it. A few weeks ago, Tab had a call from someone who wanted to talk to him about photographing her son's bar mitzvah next January. She's left a couple messages, both on the answering machine and with me, but he has yet to call her back. It is really starting to upset me because this woman was recommended to Tab by a friend of mine, so I feel personally responsible for making sure he follows up. I hate having to remind him constantly, and I resent the fact that he snaps at me for doing so. It especially bothers me because when he asks me to do something, I try to do so within a reasonable space of time. It is a simple matter of respect.

But what bothers me the most about this behavior is the way it makes me feel: like a nagging fishwife. I hate feeling this way.

previous       index       e-mail me       next