Well, ladies
My husband said something on Wednesday morning that was not unkind, was not wrong, was not even directed at me in any real way, and I have been composing a response to it in my head for three days.
He said the kitchen counter was sticky. That is it. That is the whole sentence. He was not blaming me. He was touching the counter and it was sticky and he said so. I know this because I watched his face and there was nothing on it. No accusation. No weight. He wiped it and moved on with his morning.
I did not move on. I built a case. I built a case about who cleans more, who notices what, who has the right to say something about a surface in a shared house. I built it in the shower. I built it while making tea. I built a version of it so detailed and so airtight that by Thursday I almost delivered it to him over dinner and he would have had no idea what I was talking about because he forgot about the counter eleven seconds after he wiped it. ☕
That is the flaw. I do not say the thing. I build the thing. I carry it until it is enormous and then either I say it too late and too big, or I say nothing and feel quietly wronged by a man who was simply touching a counter.
I was at Clare's on Friday. She was doing her heel drops at the kitchen counter, the bone thing she started, and I stood there watching her rise and fall, rise and fall, ten times, quiet, focused, and it looked like something private. Not exercise. Something closer to prayer, if prayer involved calves. She finished and looked at me and said "what" and I said "nothing, that was just nice to watch" and she said "it is thirty seconds, Sonia, it is not a sonnet." 🤍
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But it was nice to watch. A woman standing at her own counter doing one small thing for her own body without explaining it to anyone. That was when I thought about the sentence.
There is something I have been reading about self-talk, not the inspirational kind, the diagnostic kind. The idea that before you respond to a feeling, before you fix it or argue with it or push it into a plan, you write down one sentence about what the feeling actually is. Not what caused it. Not what you are going to do. Just what it is, right now, in your body.
I stood in Clare's kitchen after she left the room and I opened my phone and I wrote: "I feel accused and I was not accused."
Nine words. And the whole three-day structure I had built just folded. Not because the sentence was wise. Because it was accurate. The feeling was real. The accusation was not. I had been solving a problem that did not exist, and I could not see that until I named the feeling without attaching it to a plan. 😌
One sentence. Before you fix anything. Before you build the case or plan the conversation or decide what you are going to say. Write what you feel. Not what happened. Not whose fault it is. Just the feeling, one line, in your phone, in a notebook, on the back of a receipt.
It will not always collapse the way mine did. But it separates the feeling from the story you are building around it, and sometimes that is enough to see that the story is yours and not theirs.
Dani would have said something back to her husband on Wednesday. Dani says everything back. I love that about her and I cannot do it, not because I am afraid but because my version of conflict is architectural. I build it in private. I furnish it. I never open the door. ✨
I am trying to open the door smaller. One sentence at a time.
