Keeping Conversation in Marriage.

One day last week, I had a very nice day - work wasn't too stressful and things were rocking along like normal.

John and I agreed to divide the responsibilities we had that afternoon: that he would go home and let the dogs out and I would run a couple of errands on my way home.

Everything went as planned. Until I pulled into the drive way.

John was in the front yard along with our mischievous fur babies. I could tell immediately by his body language something was wrong.

He had let the dogs out and gone back inside. He swears it was just for a few minutes to take down child gates etc. No matter the time - they had the opportunity to leave our yard and visit our neighbors. 

{I have a love/hate relationship with our neighbors...mostly hate.

Not these neighbors in particular although I'm not particularly fond of them either - 

it's neighbors in general. They're close, and they're nosy and they don't know how to mind their own business!}

Apparently John was yelled at by our darling neighbors, not for the dogs coming over...

but because they have fleas.  That if she sees them (from across her yard) with fleas again she'll call the Sheriff for animal abuse.

(one of our fur babies also has a skin allergy that is flared up right now so he has no fur there - pretty sure she saw that and assumed that fleas were causing that, I promise those are separate issues)

Okay, I get it - fleas are unplesant. However, we live in the country fleas are a part of life.

We wash our dogs a minimum of once a week, they're also hosed off at least once a day.

They get flea treatments and wear flea collars.

Well instead of talking to her and explaining what is an obvious misunderstanding and smoothing things over - he stomps off mad that she had the nerve to talk to him like that.

So now I'm mad at him for not fixing the problem, now it's a bigger issue and I'm going to have to deal with it. And of course in my mind I'm thinking "if he'd just stayed out there and watched them none of this would have been an issue". 

I sat there and fumed, and steamed in my anger for an hour!

I decided that wouldn't work (I couldn't get my blood pressure down!) so I talked to him about it.

It wasn't a fun conversation, but we worked it out.

I felt so much better!

And it was a much more positive outlet than just sitting there stewing and being angry when he had no clue why I was so ticked off. 

I thought by keeping my mouth shut I was avoiding a fight

but who really wins when you're upset with each other and can't vocalize it?

 

*for the record - we washed them that night... we found like two fleas.