Probably not milk

Amber said that she didn't have the emotion "mad." She has recently become interested in cognitive behavioral therapy, which my job has made my background vocabulary. She has other emotions that fill in that space -- sadness, regret, frustration -- but she didn't think she could be mad.

I, doting husband, make jokes about this and contrive things she could be mad about, dredging up times the world wronged her. (The best I can produce is when Bard kids raided her community garden plot and ate the watermelon she had been nurturing for months.) It seemed perhaps unhealthy not to have the whole gamut of human emotions, as though someone had locked anger away from her. But, no, she wasn't mad at these slights. She experienced her subsidiary emotions, but not anger.

Friday night, I take to reciting angry monologues to show her want the emotion looks like. Amid one from Arthur Miller, I break down weeping, the tears exploding out of me as I flee into the kitchen and lean against the oven for support. I don't know from what well this emotion is drawing -- I was never this good an actor -- and it terrifies me.

Amber waits a moment before realizing that I am seriously sobbing and don't know why. She embraces me, trying to soothe me. I say, "And... scene" to make a joke of this, but neither of us believes it.

Whatever this kindles in me won't go away, provoking me to relive issues that I believed were handled. I tell her, "I thought I was fine, but now I feel like a tightrope walker barely balanced above these deep pools. I've pretended to be walking normally long enough to forget the truth. I feinted, and now I've fallen in."

She tells me that I can talk it out with her, but I try to convey that it won't help. I have experience enough to know that encouraging these issues further to the surface will make me feel worse and involve her in ways that will only hurt. "You aren't saying the things going on in my head."

"Maybe you are reading my mind," she suggests.

I pull away, horrified. "Don't say that. I can't mind-read. It will torture me to think I can glean things people aren't saying. If you are thinking the things in my head, we are in trouble."

Whenever I have an issue with Amber or seem to feel discontent, it is rarely because of her. When I argue with Amber, it is usually a version of Amber I have conjured only in my head that bears only the most passing resemblance to my wife. If I were to lose her -- and I do not want to -- I would still be with myself, the source of my issues in the first place. What would be the point, then?

My depression doesn't go away for a solid day, during which I try to resist how awful I have made myself feel, how horror-stricken I am that there are things in me still that are so violently provoked if I make the wrong joke or get too loud.

We end up fighting, something that is rare for us.

It isn't about what it was ostensibly about. She was concerned for me, made sad and nervous by my sudden depression. Then I asked her if she intended to use the milk in the fridge that she had made clear that she hated (it was the only lactose-free option available and, by dint of having twenty grams of protein, has the thickness of a yogurt drink). Upon my revelation that I had begun to put it in my cereal to not waste it, she told me that she had plans to buy bagels eventually, and then she would use the thick milk for hot chocolate (which I grant would be a practical use for it). I had now ruined this plan that I could not have fathomed existed. All I knew was that she complained enough about the thick milk that I had purchased pints of more suitable (but still not correct) milk, one of which she had opened instead.

"I just don't like having three cartons of milk open at the same time," she says. "Now it is going to go bad." (It will not go bad. I've used a quarter and would use another cup to make us chicken pot pie the following day, but that doesn't matter at the moment.)

It wasn't about the milk, but it became the most pressing issue. She says that what I did made sense to me, but I should have asked her first. I acknowledge this, amending some bit of programming in my mind to do this next time before I assume that she won't use a food she said that she didn't want. (She asks me when else she doesn't use food, then answers herself that she does it with leftovers.)

She then brings up the milk twice more after I assumed it was settled. Alluding to a Zen story, I say, "I put the milk down. Are you still carrying it?"

She stands before me a moment later, informing me that this was a rude thing to have said and that I had succeeded in making her mad. (Technically, holding back tears, she says she is offended by my "carrying comment." So much time had passed in my mind since that point that I must ask her to explain what I did to hurt her.) I then cop to having been flippant and explain that I thought she was attacking me after I had said I was sorry and was visibly trying to cope. I state that I didn't say what I meant. I should have said again, "I do understand your point and am feeling attacked right now, as though you think I wasn't serious in my apology and promise not to do it again. I'm sorry I didn't ask you before opening the milk." I have been working with a student to say what he means rather than deflecting jokes, so I should have applied the same technique to myself.

Things are supposedly fine with us after, but a part of me cannot believe this is so. I am still depressed, but I am more mindful not to be snappish or outwardly demonstrative because of it. She reminds me that I should never raise my voice, even if I am joking or reciting a monologue. As I feel I have just ruined my weekend by reciting After the Fall, I tell her that I will adhere to amused stoicism so that I don't provoke whatever is apparently too close to my surface.

In the morning, I buy her thirteen bagels. She has them with vegetarian cream cheese and hot chocolate.

last watched: Brooklyn Nine-Nine
reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel