We Disintegrated Twice Before Lunch
The way only a marriage partnership can push the buttons that beg our deepest evolution.
I was mean to my husband this morning. Not snippy - mean. We were in the kitchen trying to get breakfast into the twins, and I didn’t like something about the way he was going about it, and instead of saying that, I said: “Yeah, great. Setting a wonderful example for our children.”
A direct shot at his fatherhood, over breakfast. He went quiet like I’d slapped him in the face.
Here’s what we used to do with a morning like that. He’d get pissy. I’d get pissy. We’d stonewall each other in parallel until about nine at night - two trained professionals, both adept in the sciences of being human, just not talking.
Highly evolved.
This time it broke sooner, and not because either of us got calm. He got pissy, I got pissy, and eventually I said, in a properly pissy voice, “So, you’re just going to be pissy all day then?”
And he said, “Yeah, probably.”
That broke it.
Not calm - that.
“Yeah, probably” is real, and real is the only thing that ever breaks the barrier. He was being the most real he could be. He saw me see him, and instead of that being a stone wall, it was a window.
So we cleared something immediately. He said, “I just feel like that wasn’t fair.” I apologized for the way I’d said things, and knew even then that there was some feeling that I’d been trying to express that was done utterly poorly. My recognition that my meanness was both uncalled for, and a sign of something (because it is almost always both) was a close on the matter for then.
When the twins went down and there was finally space, we moved on with our day. I apologized again for the way I’d said things, and reflected that the topic of how we model things for our children was a conversation worth having. We never had it. Stuff like that always feels enormous, and we feel right now as if we have so much to do.
So we moved on, but we were not finished. Roughly an hour after our first altercation we blew up again. He was looking at my latest social media post, and he complimented how I looked in it. Not the content. Not the thinking. How I looked. And I was shitty: “Yeah, cause that’s exactly the first response I want people to have to my content.”
And there it was again. Not enough. Not good enough. Can’t do it right enough.
Twice before lunch, in the hands of the woman who loves him.
Because that was the thing underneath the whole morning. Not enough. I’d hit his not-enough as a father. He’d tripped mine as a woman trying to be taken seriously in her work, and my swipe back had landed on his not-enough all over again. One wound, two costumes, taking turns wearing us all morning.
And if you want to know the two places that the “not enough” wound lives loudest in nearly every human I’ve ever worked with, it’s exactly these two: how we show up in the world in our gifts as professionals, and how we show up in the world as parents. Both of these are situations where naturalness is assumed to exist. How we show up is therefore a direct reflection of something - or so it seems. Am I enough out where people can see me. Am I enough where it matters most. And is my natural self enough, period.
Everything sold to us about conflict says a morning like ours is what failure looks like. Regulate first. Communicate nonviolently. Seventeen filters over your personality, then exchange your needs from some ascended calm. And the reason it gets said is - it’s true - calm conversations are easier. But calm didn’t find the wound. The pissy exchange found it, and the shitty comment found it, and the willingness to go back in again found it. We had to come apart twice to get one layer down. And it didn’t take a non-violent-communication constructed sentence. It took me snarkily pointing out his pattern (being pissy all day), and him staunchly witnessing mine (his “I can’t say anything right, so I might as well not say anything at all” leading to me feeling rejected when the point of my barbed response was to ask for a need to be met).
But both of those are terrible ways to respond, because they’re just ineffective. Being sullen and me being pointedly rejecting of a comment as a way to ask for what I need: neither achieve the result:
Being met in our pain.
When it comes to our marriage, what gets us to keep going back isn’t a technique. It’s a belief we manage to hold even while behaving like children, and oh gosh do we behave like children sometimes.
The Belief?
He is as right as I am.
We are as right as each other.
We just have an entirely different experience to this point.
I have never entered a pissing competition with this man believing I held the only valid position. And he’s the only one in my life that I have let truly point so directly and brutally to my patterns that I could own my wrongness against his rightness.
What this means is that every blow-up becomes two people on the same team, fighting badly, and seemingly against each other, but actually pulling in the same direction, toward the thing underneath. Toward resolving the pain. And if we’re going to ever stand a chance of resolving our pain, our patterns, and our pissy-ness - well… it has to come up! Of course it does.
So here are a few things from this week’s story that you can release from the burdens you might be carrying:
the idea that clearing it once should have been enough. Clearing sometimes just gets us beyond the moment, and that’s all. It’s ok to need to go back - even if to get back we have to blow up again
that the second blow-up proves the first apology was fake. All it “proves” is that the first apology didn’t capture the essence of the thing. Layers are real when it comes to our wounding. Two blow-ups means two layers, nothing more
Some wounds don’t come up in one go. You return, it ruptures somewhere new, you return again, and that time you find what was actually there.
These topics my husband and I were touching on - these weren’t one and done things. They weren’t entirely about our relational dynamic. They weren’t small. And they aren’t done.
Nauseating and irritating as it might be, seeing this stuff up repeatedly in our relational dynamic actually REASSURES me, rather than makes me fear stagnation or regression.
Repeating a step is never repeating a step.
We don’t do this once. We go over it, and over it. That isn’t the relationship failing. That’s the relationship working its way down to our individual depths. It’s what relationships are for. Meeting each other WITH our wounding so that we can unravel it all together.
That’s the practice. One real moment a week, and a way back. This week the way back took three tries, and they all count.
The doors to more from me, if you want them:
The Gifts (my “Be With” decks and Human Design Parenting by Type Guides, free and whole) live at mrsvictoriagreer.com/gifts ·
My deeper one-to-one work lives at thetemenos.space - and, for parents and children, at themothercraft.com ❀ And you can always just reply here, it’ll reach me.
I’ll return next week,