2006-07-03
Oh that feeling of foreboding! I’m going to be completely (and perhaps unacceptably) sexist but I have my suspicions. It’s four weeks since our last blow-up and I’m thinking PMT may be involved here.But there again nothing has actually happened yet, and as I’m away from here for three days, and if I’m right, it may have blown over by Friday. But I could see it in her face as soon as I came in this morning, and despite a reasonably happy conversation at lunchtime I know the signs of an undercurrent by now.
Which is a little bewildering as we were distinctly frisky on Friday night before we left for the weekend. There was a continuation of the conversation we had late at night from my hotel room the week before last, there was talk of how she had an all-off waxing when she was in California and how it heightened the pleasure. There were memories explicit and memories alluded to. ‘So many positions to try, so little time to get through them..’
And lunchtime on Friday she started telling me how she has started to understand me, or least the me that couldn’t leave home for her. She understands better now what the shared experience of parenthood does for a couple, knows why leaving my children or contemplating sharing them just wasn’t an option. She said she’d always kind of assumed that we were starting from the same place: that my marriage was like hers ‘two people who shared a house, shared a bed but didn’t really have a strong enough reason to stay together’. And now they do, ‘even though we’re still those two people and we still don’t really get on, there’s a glue that keeps us together. I just wanted to say I understand now, better than I did, what that meant to you. And I don’t want you thinking I’m holding a grudge, that I hate you for it’.
To which, of course, I couldn’t help reminding her that she does, or has hated me at times. And it isn’t too far back to remember how bad it can get. Not that I blame her.
So what was seemingly harmonious, understanding and forgiving had a slight testing edge. And I saw how that had developed over the weekend. She asked for her career review, postponed from the last time we fought, to be on Friday – just before I go on holiday. I’m steeling myself.
Meanwhile, in another part of my world I became an uncle again. My brother Michael’s second daughter arrived on Thursday last week. Which is nice. My sister’s daughter gets married in September – the generation’s well spread!
Oh – and England got gubbed in the World Cup, but you knew that already didn’t you?