Here it is. The final Monday before Matt is home. I can’t believe it’s finally here! I still have a few more days to countdown but I am so excited I could pee my pants. But I won’t cuz that would be gross.
Last week it snowed for a day straight and we got about a foot. The three days following were crisp, clear and beautiful. I was able to clear the driveway and Bravo and I had some fun in the snow until he got cold and faked a hurt paw so he could go back in the warm house. The wussy. The snow plows didn’t clear the roads in our neighborhood until 3 days later when the day’s high temperatures were in the single digits and vehicles had had plenty of time to pack it into a dangerously slick surface. Driving to and from work on Saturday was ridiculous, but mostly because of other drivers going treacherously slow and tapping their brakes at every bump in the road.
New Year’s Eve was massively depressing. I was invited to a party in CDA and to the Chandlers’ house in Sandpoint. But I wasn’t budging from the safety of my house. With the roads as icy as they were it would have been scary to drive that far anyway, but with the addition of New Year’s drunks I was not even entertaining the idea. Matt certainly doesn’t want to come home to a dead wife. I chose to get into bed at 7:30pm and channel surf until Matt got online to chat with me at 11pm. We were online together at midnight my time. It was depressing but nice at the same time. At least we were together in a way.
I’m getting very nervous about our reunion. And of course there has to be family drama over his return. Sometimes I just don’t know where I get the patience to be civil with his family. His mother called me while I was at work yesterday to find out when his flight is. I explained that I hadn’t told her yet because he’d asked me not to until it was for sure. He has tickets for Friday, but there is a teeny tiny possibility that he could be home Thursday night. Anyway. She goes on to whine to me “well we all really want to be there but how are we supposed to organize anything if you can’t decide on a date?” Yes, because all of this is completely under my control. Thanks Tami. So after I calmly set her straight on the situation she sighs heavily and says “well, I suppose I can set someone up to cover me on Friday if needed. Thankfully Cait only has a game on Tuesday” (obviously if there were a game that would take precedence over the return of their eldest son from a deployment). Then she tells me that they are all planning on coming over on Saturday to do the Secret Santa exchange that I was forced into agreeing to at Thanksgiving. Thanks for just inviting yourself to our house the very next day. Is there anything else you would like to do to make me want to hit you with something blunt? I steadied myself and told her that we hadn’t done our shopping yet because Matt asked me to wait so we could go together. “Well Addison is going back to college on the 10th so we really need to do it before then.” Fucking kill me. The best I could respond with is “we’ll figure it out once Matt gets home.”
I was still steaming when I got home from work a couple hours later. I sat on the couch trying to think of some way to make their presence at his homecoming a positive experience, but all that kept running through my head was the image of Matt’s mom pushing me aside so she could hug him first. The nightmare continued for a while with various scenarios including me pulling her off of him by the hair, my mom throwing out and arm and cloths lining her before she reached him, and her tripping on my dad’s foot and breaking her nose with a gratuitous amount of blood spill. While I waited for Matt to get online so I could find out what his thoughts were I vented to my mom whose helpful advice was “I hate her” and “she is evil.” Leave it to my mother to stoke the embers of my anger.
So when I was finally able to talk to Matt the conversation didn’t go exactly as I was planning. I really wanted to leave out the details to spare him the stress and the drama during his last few days, but instead the entire story came out and he got all sorts of riled up with me. He basically said that everyone can fuck off and die if they are going to act like that. For once I’m not angry because of how the in-laws are treating me, this time I’m flaming mad because they are so self involved that they haven’t stopped to consider what Matt might want when he first gets home. He’s the one that has been away all this time, shouldn’t it be his decision what happens? I shared my terror of the scene I kept replaying in my head and surprisingly Matt admitted to having the same fear. This solidified my opinion that his family needs to not be there, but I kept that to myself. It isn’t my decision. Matt is the one who has been away and he deserves to have the people he cares about there to welcome him home.
In his rage he said the sweetest things. “it’s about OUR reunion…this isn’t about anyone else but us so they should be listening to us…none of them understand what it’s like to be us so they can go f-off”
I love this man.
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