epiphany

This afternoon, I experienced a mega epiphany.  Still stressed out from yesterday's events & personal calamities, I was thrashing the events of last night & this morning out with John as we drove from Warminster to home.  Was still stunned how EVERYTHING he did on Friday seemed designed to intensify, not lessen, my stress levels.  

Amidst the barrage of justification was one comment, something said almost to himself, low & quiet - "Your stress stressed me."

WELL, if that didn't beat all!!  He blamed ME for his callous disregard, he put it on me AGAIN, he made it MY fault.  He never ever did anything to make difficult situations easier to handle, he never changed how he handled things, he never...  EXCEPT, it hit me, he did.  He HAD made changes in how he responded to things.  When things go wrong, he doesn't say, "I am so stupid" or something similarly self-negating that sends his brain a negative message;  now, he just says a fairly neutral, "Duh."  That might not sound like much, but to me it is HUGE.  Where he once really did always launch into some wild justification for why he did something that negatively affected me,  now he just says, right off the bat, "I'm sorry."  

Those are BIG steps.  And I was being unfair in saying he'd made no progress.  

I apologized.

What drove me nuts was John's INSISTENCE that if a similar situation happens again, he won't reflect my stress.  Ha!  Stress is involuntary.  But he insisted that NEXT time...
 
About an hour or so later, it hit me that John is seriously unable to detach himself from my stress if I am wigging out.  John may possibly always frazz when I'm seriously stressed & need him most - it's just not something he can offer.  And that is perfectly okay. What drives me cuckoo for Coco Puffs is him insisting that he WILL, when experience shrieks the odds are against it.

A while later, a second epiphany struck - John has good company.  Dad couldn't handle it when Mom got stressed either.  On the other hand, I am likely to step back & look for context.  Once I caught onto that - and the fact that John has GOT to stop assuring me that he'll respond differently next time when experience says it ain't going to be so - my upset ceased.  It made sense, which is what matters to me.  Understanding has always been my key to making sense & finding peace.

Which lead to my 3rd epiphany of the day - that quality of snapping out of the worst dark times when something goes from obfuscated to clear is one of the things that absolutely positively drives Mim around the bend.  We share totally different ways of processing information & (more importantly) emotions.  If she is distressed by something, it typically takes her a long time to process through from one side to the other.  Not me - it can take just an instant to change from freaked out to "Oh, now I get it."  That drove Mim bonkers - she could NOT accept that fresh new understanding could hit so swiftly.

For a day that started with me feeling still totally frayed from yesterday's baking misadventures & what felt like John's inexplicable behavior, it turned out to be a mega epiphany for me about how John ticks, for him that it's okay with him to be a virtually useless support in my times of stress (and, I suspect, serious illness) as long as he doesn't keep insisting that NEXT time h deliver the most healing support.  Ain't going to happen - accept & deal with it.  And I could understand anew how being me could drive Mim utterly completely intensely around the bend.  

What a blessing to be able to welcome epiphanies when they arrive on my door step, even they show up lookng like a ruptured romance & mangled marriage.