Complete

I've been known to lament how hard marriage is. I've been heard to talk about how much easier it is for me to be a mother than it is for me to be a wife. I know a lot of friends probably roll their eyes and think, "Duh, if you'd married your 'soul mate' you wouldn't find things so difficult."

And then, I slap them because, wow, whatever.

But...yesterday was one craptastic day all the way around. It was just horrible. My stress level was through the roof. With meetings ruining my work day, bankers and realtors ruining my house-buying day and people just being people and therefore annoying the crap out of me, it was just a horrible, no-good day.

And then I left work. And when I leave work each afternoon, I call Tom because even if marriage is hard, I like my husband and I enjoy reconnecting with him each day, even if only via phone.

Like a lot of husbands, he likes to tell me how productive he was that day, going through the list of all the things he got done. And like most wives, I make the appropriate sounds of approval and maybe even a little heavy breathing just so he knows how much I appreciate him.

Tom is a doer. He likes to start jobs and finish them in one sitting is possible. He is also one to do a job well. I often tell him he's got a touch of OCD just because of his perfectionism.

I'm...well, I'm not like that. If anything, I tend toward the ADHD side of the spectrum. I will start a job, do it for ten minutes, get distracted, start another job, do it for ten minutes, remember that I was in the middle of something else, return to the first jobs I'd started and nothing ever really gets done. I'm not proud of this, it just is how it is.

That and I'm the mom, so I tend to get interrupted more often than he does.

Sometimes his tendency to be single-minded drives me crazy, just as I know that my scatter-brained behavior sometimes makes Tom nuts.

But yesterday, as we talked, and laughed over our differences, it made me realize how well we complement each other. I can make him relax once in awhile after he's worked himself like a fool and he can sometime (okay, rarely) get me to focus and get things done.

I told him how glad I was the he was doing the home improvement job he'd taken on earlier in the week because we both know, had I started the job, fifteen minutes in I would have been bored and looking for ways to get out of it.

Or! I'd have rigged the tv at the top of the stairs so I could watch season 7 of Star Trek: Voyager (which he'd have given me as incentive to even start the job) and I probably would have gotten quite a bit done, with breaks in there to change discs every four episodes. There it is... I need to be entertained, especially when I'm doing a job I find excessively boring. Whereas Tom can just put himself into a zone and do what needs to be done.

But yeah, when it comes down to it, even after a horrible, awful, stress-filled day, he made me laugh, made my blood pressure come down and made me realize that I wouldn't want to do this thing called life without him.