Text Tiff

My husband and I have been together for thirteen years, lived together for eleven, been married for eight and have three children together.  This morning I was annoyed at him for leaving the car full of crap and with an empty tank, so I phoned him and told him.  We then proceeded to deal with our disagreement in a mature, civilised fashion…we had a text row.

Firstly, he wouldn’t take responsibility for the fuel thing and argued that it still had some in last night when he drove it.  We went back and forth like this for a while, and then I told him to ‘get lost’ (which I haven’t told anyone to do since about 1991) and hung up.

I then sat in the car outside nursery and rattled off a furious text, telling him he was not only ‘selfish’ and ‘thoughtless’, he was making me ‘sound petty’ when I had ‘enough stuff to do’, including his banking.

Next, I did the grown up thing…I climbed firmly onto my high horse and ignored the call when he tried to ring me back.

Now normally, in this situation, one of us will call a truce (usually my husband if I’m honest), but this morning he had the AUDACITY to send me a sarky text back, telling me that if I felt like that then not to bother doing his banking anymore, he would do it himself.  (I knew he was mad because there was no kiss on the end).

At this point I was in full blown adolescent mode, so I told him to ‘do that.  And while you’re at it, you can also…’ and proceeded to produce a long list of his more serious crimes around the house, like not putting the new toilet roll on the holder and just leaving it on the cistern instead, and not putting towels back on the radiators.  I was angry and indignant and there were a lot of misdemeanors, so it was a lengthy text.

That’ll teach him, I thought crossly.  He’ll feel bad now, I thought confidently.  He’ll ring now and apologise, I thought smugly.

‘No probs’ was the reply I got straight back (no kiss).

So I set off to toddler group, feeling outraged…then mildly annoyed…then amused.  By the time I got there all I could do was to laugh out loud at the childishness of it all.  So for the first time this morning, I acted like the thirty five year old mother with a mortgage that I am, phoned him and sorted it out.

‘Whatever.  I know you are, you said you are but what am I?’ was the reply.  Not really, but he said that he’d been thinking that was about our level.  We exchanged, ‘I love yous’ and ‘goodbyes’ and hung up.  But the next time he does anything like that, I’m going to give him a Chinese burn, a dead arm and then tell my mum over him 🙂