What I Didn't Know I Was Carrying

 

Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

Resentment is a weird thing. Sometimes, you don’t even realize you’re carrying it because it manifests in such subtle ways.

Since the beginning of my marriage, I’ve routinely picked my wife’s towel up off the floor. The first few years, I found it to be a major irritation¹. Then, I realized it was a symbol of her presence. Then it turned into a kind of game where if she happened to hang it up, I would ask her what I did wrong that she wouldn’t leave her towel for me.

I suppose you can look at the towel though as a kind of proxy for things I felt like I was owed — quid pro quo.

I’m a bottler so any difficult feelings I had were kept sealed up inside like some of my grandma’s peaches. I never stomp my feet and rarely do I start fights. I generally just tell myself a story: I care more about order, and she should know that. Of course, the story also included that she should care about it too because it was important to me. I never asked her to care. I never told her it mattered. But I expected it anyway.

You never do that, right? Have expectations for other people but never voice those because “they should just know.”

Anyway, back to the towel. As I mentioned, the towel stopped being an offense and became the reminder that we were still together. That whatever tension it once represented had long since dissolved into something closer to partnership than accounting.

I stopped trying to balance the scales… with the towel.

I didn’t know I was carrying other things. Resentment about work. About dinners I hadn’t planned on cooking. About responsibilities I thought I had offloaded but were still somehow mine. About the fact that we couldn’t sit down and eat dinner together because her coaching business had taken over the kitchen and she always seemed to be in the middle of a call, coaching someone or helping them celebrate a breakthrough.

She was doing good, important work; work that was changing people’s lives. Literally.

I just didn’t want it to cost me anything.

There was this night, sometime during all of that, when I came home exhausted (not unusual). The table was covered in coaching business. The kids were hungry. I was frustrated. I started rummaging through the fridge, looking for something I could throw together fast.

Pivotal life moments are so interesting because you almost never find them where you look for them. For no good reason, I went from the fridge to the spice cupboard and grabbed some small, green bottle at random — actually dusted it off — then twisted the cap and inhaled its aroma.

Then again, slower.

I had no idea what it was. I turned the bottle around to read the label.

It was rosemary.

Before that moment, I don’t know that I could have picked rosemary out of a scent lineup. The scent was, I don’t know, woodsy — like pine — a little sharp; warm somehow.

And I just stood there, just breathing, inhaling the scent over and over. I was tired, but I could literally feel the resentment melt away.

That simple, dusty bottle of rosemary changed my life.

I’ve always loved cooking, but my wife’s better at it than I am.

That night, though, I really cooked. I wasn’t upset anymore. I cooked because I wanted to make a nice meal for my family, and because I knew my wife was working just as hard as I was.

My family noticed. They actually loved the meal that I cobbled together. My wife was appreciative. I can’t even remember what I made, but I remember the feeling because it wasn’t a subtle shift. It was a tiny moment of reconnection with something I loved to do — in a way, a part of myself. I felt closer to my wife than I had in almost two years, closer to my kids.

It just felt good.

It’s so crazy to me how many stories we carry about what we’re owed. About what someone else should do for us, or what their role is supposed to be. It’s wild how long we can carry those stories without ever stopping to think about the vast distance they can create between us and the ones we love.

A switch flipped that night and the resentment disappeared into a cloud of memory. I remembered that I used to take foods classes just to impress girls. I made dinner for my wife’s entire family once, even before we were seriously dating, just to win them over. Somewhere in the chaos of parenting and business and survival-mode, I forgot that I loved that.

Cooking became something I leaned into again.

I knew I was carrying the story that cooking was her job. That because she worked from home, it should be on her. Never mind that most of her clients were available in the evenings because they were home from work. I saw it as: if I cooked, it was an act of generosity instead of just being a grown man contributing to the home and life we share.

We still don’t eat at regular times. We converted a bedroom into an office for my wife so her “creativity” could exist somewhere other than the kitchen table. Some nights I cook, some nights she does. Some times, our kids — who are a bit older now — just fend for themselves. Honestly, I’ve stopped keeping score.

What I didn’t know I was carrying wasn’t just resentment. It was a fixed — and unspoken — picture of what support looked like. What sacrifice looked like. What my wife should be doing for me and our kids. And it kept me from enjoying a part of my life that was trying to open back up to me.

Now — and this is no joke — I keep rosemary stocked multiple jars at a time. I have mild panic when I’m almost out, and it’s not even because I need it most of the time, but because that moment — tired, hungry, and holding a dusty, unfamiliar bottle in my hands — was the first time in a long time I felt like I was standing in my own life again.

There’s a lot of chaos still in so many areas of my life, but that evening in my kitchen marked the last time I ever kept score with my wife. We still have the occasional disagreement, but she’s my best friend, my partner in this often ordinary life we’ve created together. That I love.

Maybe the most powerful lesson I learned: I don’t want to miss the moments that remind me who I really am because I’m holding too tightly to who I thought I (or someone else) was supposed to be.