Motherhood
The one time she yelled
She yelled exactly once in our childhood. It was 1987, the kitchen, a dropped casserole. None of us remember what she said. We all remember that she said something.
Read →Point / Counterpoint
Her side
I learned to express it. It cost me — and it was worth it.
For twenty-two years of marriage I did the small smoothing. The 'oh it's fine' and the laugh that took the edge off and the apology that wasn't mine to make. When I stopped doing it, in 2022, my husband told me I had become difficult. I told him I had become legible. We have been renegotiating since. Two friendships ended. One sister stopped calling. My marriage got harder for eighteen months and then it got better than it had ever been. I do not romanticize this. I lost things. I also stopped grinding my teeth at night for the first time since I was twenty-four. There is a ledger and it balanced.
His side
I didn't know it was anger. I thought she was tired.
For ten years I thought my wife was tired. She would go quiet in the evenings. She would say 'never mind' a lot. She would do all the cooking and most of the cleaning and not complain and I told myself I had married a peaceful woman. When she finally told me she had been angry for most of those ten years, I was not insulted. I was relieved. I had been mistaking the absence of a fight for the presence of a marriage. We have been doing better since she started telling me she was angry. The thing I had to learn — and I will say it plainly because men reading this should hear it — is that her silence had been the cost of my comfort.
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