Today I Cleaned The Kitchen: A reintegration story.

Today I cleaned the kitchen. 

This isn’t *that* shocking, I keep a relatively clean house, only because when my house is cluttered my head feels cluttered. 

But this morning, I had no intention of cleaning. 

When you live apart for half a year, or, say, more than half of the past 3 years, or huge chunks of an entire 14 year marriage, sometimes big things happen.   Sometimes a couple grows apart, someone is unfaithful, someone wants to leave, can’t wait anymore or is just plain done. 

But other times, other times none of those things happen.   You are still very much in love.  You’ve never had the time, energy or even the smallest interest in an affair.  You’re in this for life 

Instead something else creeps up when you don’t expect it.  Turns out I got really comfortable alone.  I made my own choices, my own decisions.   If I wanted to leave at 8pm and go shopping, or skip the gym in the morning, or make grilled cheese for dinner all week, no one was there to say anything.

Then he is home and I resent it. He is in my space.  He has a voice in my decisions.  He speaks up and sometimes he says things I don’t want to know or make judgements I am not interested in hearing. 

So things are tense.  Adjusting is hard.  I’m not fun to live with, and sometimes that means neither is he.  Fuses are short.  Sometimes one of us pushes it too far. 

This morning it was Dh, but that doesn’t mean it’s never me.  It just wasn’t me this time. When both of us went to work this morning neither of us particularly liked the other. 

This morning there was mostly yelling.  Dh couldn’t find something of his the kids lost and one thing just pushed every button on both of us. I resented his intrusion.  The way he was talking to *my* kids, as though I was never short with them.  They way he expected things to have been done *his* way.  I was angry as his actions but mostly, I was angry at his presence. 

So when I got home a couple hours before him I had no intention of doing anything for him.
He was the source of my anger and I was certainly not going to do anything to make him happy,  not when he had so much to apologize for. 

Except then I realized he was going to come home and be off because like me, the messy house would make for a messy head.  And we would start when we finished,  still annoyed, still tense.  And I’m tired. 

I’m so tired. 

So today I cleaned the kitchen. 

Because tonight I’m still going to struggle with all that sharing my life entails when all this time alone after 15 years has caught up with me. 

And I’m still going to make mistakes, and I’m still going to get frustrated and sometimes, he will too. Living with me lately has been hard.  Reintigration sucks.  And for me, it seems to suck more the more often we do it. 

I’m going to figure this out. 

WE are going to figure this out. 

Half the battle is remembering that I is still We. 

I may forget that sometimes, and I may put my back up when I don’t need to and I may make this harder than it should be. 

But today I washed behind the stove and under the toaster and swept beneath the couch and organized the tupperware.  Because I love him and this time he was wrong but you know what? 

 

Love is cleaning the kitchen anyways.