Tonight’s talk started out with me saying “I am out of clean clothes, do you think you might be able to do laundry tomorrow?” and from there led to “By the way, you mentioned a long time ago that you would like to make dinner once a week or so, do you still feel like you want to do that?” Finally I got to my real question which was, “Do you think I should ’take it easy’ on you and avoid asking you to do things because you are depressed and need taking care of, or do you think I should just start asking you to do the things I want you to do?”
Anyway, I made her very upset, mostly because she feels like now she is not going to be able to do the writing assignments she pledged to do and that I should have known that this was a bad time to talk about things. Yes, I probably should have known, because she DID tell me about the writing projects and I said at the time that I would be supportive. I probably should have just said “Hey can you do laundry tomorrow” and left it at that.
So.. if you do talk to her tomorrow, don’t mention it, and if you do, don’t say any more than “Greg said you had an argument and that he knows it was really bad timing and he’s sorry”. It may be better to not mention it unless she brings it up.
Instead of continuing to go off on her, I will rant here, safely quarantined. It is something I need to get resolved soon, but I’m content to leave her alone for at least a week after tonight.
The reason I kept going because it irks me to have to ask, but that may be an unreasonable reaction. In an ideal world she would wash clothes when it’s needed. but again, she DID say that she had 5 different writing projects that she wanted to do this week so in retrospect I should have known there was a reason for it and I probably shouldn’t have taken THIS particular opportunity to try and make a point.
I do feel like I do a lion’s share of chores, including cooking, dishes, shopping/putting away, vacuuming sweeping mopping cat-litter trash, and even taking food up the stairs and dishes back down. I also feel that when she does decide laundry or cleaning needs to be done, it’s usually US doing it and not HER doing it. But, I have not wanted to say anything about the chores imbalance because I had the notion that maybe if I ease up on bugging her about the chores and just focus on taking care of her, that she may get better faster. I feel helpless in getting her to change, so, up to now doing most of the chores has been my way to 1. show support and 2. do *something* that’s in my control. So, I’m going to start turning that around and asking her to please do the things that she has said she would do, and if she needs help, she shoudl ask me, not wait for me to ask her. It’s going to be slow going, but we’ll get there.