Jim had spent the evening reading through the government-issued fifty-page voting guide, mailed, astonishingly, to every household in Oregon. Half an hour before ballots were due, he had given me the quick overview of things, told me who he voted for and why not the others, which ones were hard choices and which ones were easy, and I had voted with him on some things and against on others. While he was reading, I was making tuna salad, and Lucy was going back and forth between the living room, where she tried to help Daddy by writing on the pamphlet he was reading with the pen he was using to vote; and the kitchen, where she climbed a chair to reach the counter and helped me stir the tuna. On the first attempt, she levered a chunk straight to the ceiling. After that she stirred more effectively (or anyhow less messily), until she tried to eat off the stirring spoon. When I explained that it was a serving dish and we don’t eat out of serving dishes, she took the half-chewed bell pepper out of her mouth and put it back in the bowl. When I made her a little bowl of her own, she wailed and then ignored it, and tried to stick her baby spoon in the big bowl. When I tried to explain again that we don’t eat directly out of the big bowl, I realized I had just taste-checked the dressing with a big spoon, straight from the big bowl.
After Jim delivered the ballots to the drop-box and Lucy was in bed, we ate the tuna melts. I thanked Jim for all his research, he thanked me for all the backup and for the food, and then I said I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the kitchen and that tomorrow would go a lot better if it got into better shape before the next morning. The table was still covered in nonperishable groceries that needed to be sorted into the pantry, and the sink was full of mixing bowls and baking pans from Lucy’s and my first joint cake-baking endeavor that morning. The counter and Lucy’s chair and the floor under her chair were sticky and strewn with little bits. And in order for anything to move forward, the dishwasher needed to be emptied.
“Sure,” he said. He is better than I am at housework, because he does not as easily get overwhelmed by it; he just gets it done. “I could help with that right now.”
Then he added, “Oh, actually—do you mind if I check in on the election progress first?”
“No, go ahead,” I said, the “I could help with that now” still echoing in my head, assuming the election results would be quick. I usually ask for times on things, because we have had the fight we were about to have so many times already. But it did not occur to me. I grew up in Germany, where we couldn’t vote because we were Americans; my parents voted long-distance before the Internet, and even though I have become marginally aware that some people (Jim’s family included) watch the elections on TV like a sports game, but it did not occur to me that he might mean something like that. I visualized the two-page ballot, and thought, “It’s two pages of percentages on who’s voted for what. Ten minutes, maybe?”
Ten minutes later, he was still at the computer, feeding me fascinating snatches about how many people had voted this year compared to other years. “They’re saying this could be a voting record—if it keeps going like it is, this high a percentage of people won’t have voted since 1916.” That, of course, is fantastic. But the updates had not, thus far, gotten to any of the things we had actually voted on. And I was doing the hardest part of the kitchen cleanup, the initial scoping and maneuvering, when everything is dirty and in the way and there is no room to set anything down, and (if you are me) it begins to feel like the screen in a game of Tetris just before you lose. (Sorry, very young people. Google it.)
“So, are you coming…?” My voice had a thinly disguised edge of irritation. The thing I ought to have done at this point, as Jim and I determined hours later right before bedtime, was to come into the dining room where Jim was reading on his laptop, sit down, ask him to take a break, and go over our assumptions together, beginning with a clear sense of what is involved in “checking up on the elections.” Or, even better (we realized past bedtime), I should have said “I am feeling scared and overwhelmed and tomorrow morning feels like it may be my last chance this week to get much done, because my mom is watching her and I don’t know whether I’ll have childcare any other days since Lucy’s still coughing. And if we don’t get the kitchen sorted I feel like I am not going to be able to take off and go work, because my mom’s watching Lucy here. And it’s already a packed morning, with the earthquake retrofit guy coming for the estimate at 11.” Jim would, he said after the fact, have pointed out that he could cover for me during an evening. He would have asked why he couldn’t do his half of the kitchen later. And I would have said, Well, I guess, okay, but the first part feels hardest. And I might have added that this probably felt overwhelming because housework was always a big source of conflict between my parents. And he (already knowing this since we talk about it plenty) would have said, That makes sense.
Instead, I got more scared and correspondingly more irritated. As I felt increasingly overwhelmed, I held on tighter and tighter to what I thought we had agreed on. And the more I implied by my tone that he was defaulting on a promise, the madder Jim got, until finally, he took off upstairs, leaving me alone in the kitchen.
I decided to listen to Richard Hays’ farewell lecture (he’s a New Testament professor and was at one point the dean of Duke Divinity School). Two people have sent it to me, saying that he mentions the calligraphy I did of Malcolm Guite’s sonnets that is up in the Divinity admissions hallway. I was curious about the mentions, and Hays is a kind, thoughtful, brilliant man who says worthwhile things. As I thought about Dean Hays and his gentle, thoughtful tone, I realized that if I would not be able to get through listening to the lecture without realizing that my fury was petty and out of proportion. Because I felt attached to the fury, I debated whether to go through with listening, and, for the first twenty minutes, tried to preserve a sense of indignation. But by the time he started talking about Bonhoeffer writing that God calls us to come and die, I realized it was futile, and went up to Jim’s room for the first attempt at reconciliation. This ended with him explaining why he wanted to take longer on the elections, which I took as him fighting for his assumptions while telling me mine were wrong, and therefore I responded with “And that’s fine, but—” to which he said “I don’t need your condescending tone! Get out of here.”
I went back to Richard Hays, put in a load of laundry, and finished the kitchen. On the second try, I found Jim watching Live, Die, Repeat on the big monitor at his desk (this also has happened before; it is his cool-off movie). Once he extricated himself, I did a better job listening and realized that it was my taking a reprimanding tone that had upset him so much. At which point it started to feel like all the apologizing that was needed was on my side. That was when we made progress, and I figured out what I could have done instead of getting mad and beating him over the head with what I took as his broken promises, and I began to feel hopeful about having a slightly more enlightened version of the fight next time.