A Slowly Learned Lesson

First, my weight today was 354.7 lbs, which is down a tad from yesterday, but that might also be due to the reason that I didn't work out today. Without being overly graphic, I had a stomach issue that kept me in the bathroom most of the morning.

Now, for the lesson that I seem to be slow to learn. That lesson is this: I need to keep my wife's current emotional and physical condition in mind when we talk so I can give a helpful and uplifting response. Let me give some examples of how I am slow to learn this.

In each of our pregnancies, I have known that hormones would wreak havoc on my wife's emotions, but I didn't learn how to take that into account BEFORE I said something from my point of view, at least not until after I had crushed her hopes for understanding with my male point of view on something multiple times in the pregnancy. After she would shut down emotionally for fear of further pain, I would finally clue in that she didn't want my male point of view. She wanted me to understand what she was feeling and thinking and be a comforting listener.

As a related side note, I did pretty much the exact same thing to my sister over the holidays when she was visiting during her pregnancy. Fortunately, my wife knew exactly what was going on and stopped me before I said something I thought would be helpful (but would actually have been just the opposite). Later, as we were getting ready for bed, my wife reminded me that my sister was pregnant, and THEN I understood why she had stopped me, and I completely agreed with it too. I sure am unobservant, or at least very slow to process all of the available clues about a situation before opening my mouth.

Yesterday, I once again realized too late that I was still failing with this lesson. As some background, my wife is likely having an ovarian cyst getting ready to burst this week, which is both painful and hormone-ful. Yesterday, pretty much everything she tried to do with the kids and with her business and with her extended family relationships was going wrong and causing even more trouble. Also, as many of you know, my son has Tourette Syndrome, and we were scheduled to finally start our participation in a study on Tourettes after having put the guy off for probably 5 months for one reason or another.

Last night, around 10:00 pm after the study was finished for the day, the kids were finally in bed, and we'd had a small chance to finish our dinner and relax to a favorite show for a little bit, my wife mentioned that she has a fear of some doctor deciding out of the blue that the diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome is wrong for our son. If I had learned this lesson better, I would have recognized that, after an extremely frustrating, tiring, and emotional day, she wanted to share her fear with me and have her feelings comforted. Did I recognize this? Of course not!

My male opinion (and some of my OCD tendencies) kicked right in, and I made sure that she knew how I would approach the situation if it were to happen, and exactly how it wouldn't make any difference to me what it was labeled, and the technical differences in my understanding of syndromes vs root causes, and thank you for letting me finish what I want to say so my OCD will be satisfied, and a few other things that I thought might be pertinent. 10 or 15 minutes later, I finally got around to asking what she had originally wanted to say, and sorry for interrupting.

Yeah, she didn't want to share with me any more. I had ruined her hopes of feeling close to me by sharing her fears and knowing that I cared about them and understood them. I had ruined her chance to finally release some of the tension and stress that had built up over the whole day due to the situations that only she had been able to deal with, and I'd dumped some more on top of her. She had been vulnerable, and I hadn't noticed a bit as I drove the freight train of my thought process over her plea for help.

It's times like these that make me think two main things. 1) I am INCREDIBLY lucky that she still loves me after the many times that this has happened, and 2) I am INCREDIBLY clueless to this lesson. I hope that writing it down will help me to remember it before I speak instead of after.