Of Legalities and Please and Thank You.

I was the mellow kid in my family.

 

My brother was the emotional one.  Not a see-saw kind of emotional, but he felt things more strongly, the things he cared about, he cared passionately about.  I didn't get ANGRY.

 

I don't think I knew what true anger was until I discovered the true rat finkery of my ex.  As all of my illusions of happily ever after crumbled like blue cheese (stinking just as badly, might I add), I was well and truly--magnificently--pissed off. 

 

Since then I get angry much faster.  But I get angry when I am MAD or overtired/stressed.  What I don't do is get mad over the little things, or things I can't change, or even on a daily basis.  When I get mad, I'm NOT nice.  I admit it.  

 

In everyday life, though, I am nice.  To strangers, to my kids, to my Honey and his family.  It's a better way to live.  It's a NICER way to live.  I can't sustain the kind of anger it takes to get mad at every little thing.  It would ruin my day, drain me emotionally and leave me miserable and mean.  I would be something out of Tolkien, craven and blackened and lurking away from the light.  In the endless email memes that go around, when they ask you what color your aura is, I always answer that I picture it spring green like a granny smith apple-tart and sweet and juicy.  I have no idea what new agey color it's supposed to be, it's just a happy color and it's how I picture it.

 

The Honey makes jokes that I'll leave him because he's broke, or brown, or unemployed.  Last night he was being pissy, and I wanted to tell him that if I ever leave him, it will be because he refuses to speak nicely.  That one thing affects the quality of our lives much more than money or employment.  His contention is that it's the difference between speaking Spanish and speaking English.  I say bullshit.  His sisters don't speak to their husbands like that.  

 

Mind you, I love this man waaaaay more than he thinks.  He thinks my reluctance to marry him is based upon the fact that I don't love him, I'm just stuck with him.   I'm crazy about the fool, but my condition for marrying him is that we go to counseling.  That's it.  Okay, that's not it, I want to go to counseling but I want him to find the counselor, so he can't later say that I chose one who was biased.  He needs some serious communication skills.  I want him to say things nicely.  I casually told someone at work that if Little O brings home a boy that speaks to her the way the Honey speaks to me, you would never find that boy's body.  It occurred to me that I'm training her to look for exactly that boy.  That was during the great Valentine debacle, and since that realization, I take much less shit from him, for my kids and for myself.   His tangles with Big O?  Are more over the fact that he SOUNDS pissed off and on the edge, even when he's not, so Big O goes on the defensive, and here we go again...  Every time the TV cuts out (Oh, digital, you moody bitch), he curses and rails like it's going to help.  Which sets my teeth on edge and makes me not want to watch TV with him, which hurts his feelings. 

 

I also want to go to counseling so I can make him understand that I have no hesitation in tying myself to him for the rest of our lives--as far as I'm concerned, that knot is already tied. When I love you, it's a done deal.  There is no internet boyfriend, there is no flirtation with the UPS Man, I have everything I want.  Here's the hard hearted realist in me, though:  Marrying him in a legal sense means assuming his debts.  I have a friend whose deceased ex's tax bills came back to haunt her NEW husband.  IF (given his health issues) I have to face life without him as my partner, I can't also face single parenthood saddled with crippling debt.  I will convert to Catholicism and marry him in the Church, but let's not make it legal.  Speaking as someone who has gone down the divorce highway, making it legal doesn't make it permanent.  The two of us being committed to each other and ONLY each other--that's what makes us forever.  I'm all in.  I just want to spend my days with please and thank you.