"Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm”

Sooo....I bought this TV cabinet on Craig's List. For 200 bucks. It looks very much like this one from Pottery Barn.

A little darker, with silver hardware, but very nice – I only had to glue the corner molding back on after H and the next-door neighbor’s husband dinged it up a bit in transit. No biggie – for me, that is.

I got home from work at ten o’clock last night and H proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. The cabinet was CRAZY. Just CRAZY. I had made fun of people for stuff like this. It was HUGE. He didn’t want to be the kind of person who had stuff like this. He went on to rant and rave and spew about the house and the work needed and the toil of everyday life and how unhappy he was and how much he hated his job and how he’d listened to me complain everyday, all day, for ten years and how I had a poochy stomach (No, I am kidding – it might have been the one thing he neglected to mention). He just pretty much had a total temper tantrum/meltdown/breakdown. I really didn’t even know what to say.

If I have learned nothing else in ten-plus years of marriage to him, it is that it is beyond my powers to make him happy. In fact, trying to do so only makes ME miserable. So I keep the house clean and neat, and the children cared for, and the fridge stocked and meals cooked – in short, I try to take care of physical needs, but his emotional needs are apparently well beyond my ken.

And frankly, my emotional state is not always all that stable, so it’s not as if I have this deep, deep reservoir of emotional strength from which to draw. I get through my days with the help of a few choice pills, the occasional alcohol, and my friends, whom I exert much effort to keep close and engaged.

H plays his guitar. I encourage this. I enable it. It’s good and healthy for him to do something he loves, and I wish he did more of it. There’s the reason we got him that pottery class for his birthday. I love him, I want him to be happy and fulfilled, but finally realized that I cannot make this happen for him. He needs to find it within himself.

Also, however, in ten-plus years of therapy, medication, and shrink visits, I have learned that everything can change in an instant.

I could be diagnosed with cancer; something horrible could happen to one of the boys; the house could burn down; H could be hit by a bus. Then would it matter WHERE we live? I know from experience that when someone you love is sick and dying, you could be living in a bus shelter, you don’t care. All your psychic energy is directed elsewhere. This is why people bring food to grieving families – because the necessities and niceties of everyday living fade drastically in importance, and someone else must think of them.

Alternately, things do not have to change overnight.

We don’t need to – indeed, can’t - move to another house TOMORROW. We have some time to fix this one up, look for what we want elsewhere, once we decide where elsewhere is, consider the schools and the neighborhood and the commutes. Meanwhile, we live in this house, so it should be as right as we can make it.

We made that mistake with our old house – we never felt like we lived in it, that it was ours, because we never did anything of our own to it. It felt like living in your first college apartment, with Grandma’s sofa, and Great-Aunt Ethel’s dining room table, and milk crates for bookshelves.I want to live like a grown-up, albeit a grown-up living in a house that seems to be falling down around our ears at times.

What is the point of this? Why am I having my own little temper tantrum? Because I need to, somehow, without taking this emotion out on H who is having a tough enough time as it is. And you, my sweet little Internet ones, have proven, in addition to my in-real-life ones, to be kind and compassionate and ready friends.

Thanks for listening.