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Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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10:38 a.m. - 2008-09-21
After shutting off the TV… "Look, all I'm saying is some things weren't realistic." The tears weren't really about the blender's poor performance this morning, I was crying because Mike had given me the blender and using it brought back that horrible choked feeling of angry 'no way out' helpless frustration of my life with Mike. The blender was a perfect example of how wrong every single damn thing was back then. How stymied I was at every turn. Sure yeah, the guy had gotten me a blender. I'd put 'blender' on my Christmas list, but I had also taken the time to show him the exact blender I wanted. A simple Hamilton-Beech that took up very little counter space, was lightweight and had a dishwasher-safe plastic pitcher. I'd showed it to him at Wal-mart, at Home Depot, at Linens-n-Things. I'd explained why I wanted that one and thought I'd made my case and had done the good wife thing of giving him a screw-up-proof option for gift giving. Did he listen? No. Instead he got that cumbersome idiotic thing. And it was a horror to use. And it was leaky. And impossible to clean well. And took up way too much counter space and blocked the upper cabinet doors from opening so it had to be disassembled and put away every single fucking time. The easy handy blender I'd have used 5 or 6 times a week was instead this half-assed contraption that made my life a million times harder. Worst of all was how I couldn't exchange it or ever point out how wrong the stupid blender was, the revenge Mike would extract for my dissing his wooooon-der-ful gift would make my life even more hellish and the revenge would go on for months. No lie. Nevermind how my needs had been ignored. Nevermind the bother on my end trying to use that piece of crap. Nevermind the careful groundwork and explicit explanations beforehand and how negated that made me feel when they were so blatantly ignored. If I expressed even the tiniest bit of criticism he'd make me pay and pay and pay and pay. Sarcasm, extra helpings of rudeness like farts and burps at the dinner table, especially painful sex, idiot demands for chores to be done, blowing off plans, being nasty to the kids, this shit would go on and on all for the HUGE 'crime' of not liking the blender he'd brought home. A stinking awful blender than was way more work than it was worth. Sounds nuts, I know. But that's the way it was. All the time. About everything. Mike would fuck things up, break stuff, lose stuff, barge around like a total oaf, demonstrate his complete lack of concern about anyone else and rub my face in how fricken bad he was at even the simplest of life's incidentals, and I had to suck it up. If I were to even hint at the damage he was causing, the money he was costing us, the time he wasted, the feelings and bodies he bruised, then he'd ramp up the hell until I was sweating and puking and completely panicked about where the next hurt was coming from. Because that was the ONLY thing he was good at. Making life worse. He fucking excelled at making messes and pain. Mick, oh my beautiful Mick. He saw the tears and after I told him why he poured the smoothie out of the leaking pitcher and then grandly marched it over to the trash. Dropped it in, thumbed his nose at it, came over and hugged me and said, "Baby, we'll get you the right blender this afternoon."
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