We just had a lovely dinner party with my in-laws  and our dearest friends Stacy and Alyson and their two kids, Maryn and Micah. It was so much fun–we toasted with a lovely rose prosecco for starters, nibbled on artisanal cheese fresh from the farmer’s market, made jokes loaded with innuendo about who was going to handle the pork loin…you know the typical Saturday night good-times.

Then at 9:27 as I was washing the wine glasses, I heard a terrible crash and lots of crying. I ran into the living room to find Dashiell toppled over on a our wingback chair which had smashed into our built-in beveled glass cabinet near the fireplace. He was fine, but frightened and crying. The lower half of the lass cabinet was shattered.

I didn’t yell.

Not even after the prosecco, Pinot Grigio and some gorgeous red I can’t even remember the name of. I picked him up and said, “I’m sure whatever happened was an accident and I know you are scared.” (take that NYT who neglected to mention I too tried to reform.)

But seriously they were rattled and waiting for it, so much so Conrad, put himself in a time out, while Dashiell just cried and watched me gingerly pull the glass hanging from the cabinet and dust off the shards that had torn the front page of the NTY’s of Obama’s inauguration which we put there for safekeeping.

I was calm. But David was not and they knew it. He was not mad in a holy-crap-he’s-going-to-open-a-can-of-whoop-ass way.  His Swedish New England upbringing really doesn’t allow him to do that, but he was angry and he was entitled to be—though at the time I told him right in front of the kids to keep his voice down. As soon I the words left my mouth, I realized that maybe now that I yell less, I’m nicer to my kids, but harder on my husband.

You know how annoying converts are? It’s like when I quit smoking. We were living in Brooklyn and I’d give the dog his midnight walk, we’d  pass a bar or two where hipsters would be smoking with the resident barfly on the sidewalk and I think, so when are you ready for the cancer to come? Sometimes, especially when we were running a lung cancer related story at Self, I’d almost be tempted to actually ask, but I never could.

I know why they were there. So, if I could have empathy for those misguided smokers, why can’t I be more understanding towards my own husband when he has a legitimate beef?   I  knew he was right but I had to chose between agreeing with him or adding another layer of hurt to what they already knew was a big booboo, maybe even the worst in their young lives so far, and I was trying so hard to not be over-the-top angry myself.

Those cabinets are what sold him on the house and now it would be what? $150 to $300, if not more to fix one—not the end of the world but these days, it’s not what we need to spend money on. I don’t remember breaking anything like that in my house. My mother’s insistence that living rooms were meant to be looked at, never actually sat in, coupled with that Brady Bunch episode about the broken horse ingrained in me an understanding of adult versus child spaces that I respected and feared. “Mom always said, ‘Don’t play ball in the house.’”

But back to the screaming. I guess I’m not cured, I’m just transferring the fireworks, because they have to go somewhere. But I want to tell David—you know it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t I make it up to you in small ways all the time? Don’t you know I shout and it means nothing, that I just run a little hot? Isn’t this why you married me?  My name is Francesca Castagnoli for Christ sakes. Is an explosive streak a complete surprise to you? No matter how mad I sound, I still go on loving you like I did before I seemed so infuriated.

I want to remind him of that story about my uncle chasing my cousin with an eggplant when she told him to “go screw himself” when she was 13? He was so mad he chased her up the spiral staircase–and he wasn’t even Italian, he was Jewish! Or the time my grandmother hit my grandfather on the head with a bunch celery in front of four grandchildren because he was feeding their poodle too much broccoli rabe which was going to make her sick.

I told him I’m sorry, but I’m not sure he heard me. I don’t want to sacrifice my husband for my kids, but when my in-laws or even my parents are visiting I feel like the reality show cameras are rolling and I do what I think looks best, not always what I really feel and this choice is usually at David’s expense. It’s a whole other workshop: How to stop screaming so it doesn’t boomerang and hit your husband in the back of his head. When I told him I was going to write a post about not screaming when the cabinet broke, he gave me a phony grin. What?  I asked.

“Right, you didn’t scream at them, later you just screamed at me,” he said.

PS. If I could ever pull toegther that workshop, I’d include an extra session on sailor-mouth interventions. The first topic: how to stop saying mother-fucker, shit, or “what a dick!”  in front of your well-spoken New England mother-in-law when some guy in a BMW steals your parking space in a thunder storm.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Random acts of mothering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.