Today is my mother-in-law's birthday. Since Esteemed Spouse "forgot" to send her anything (more on that later), I sent her a lap desk from Levenger. It won't get there in time, obviously, but at least I did something. She's a great mother-in-law, a great mother, a wonderful grandmother, and much under-appreciated, as so many quiet people tend to be.
Loud, obnoxious people, on the other hand.... I got out of class yesterday and ran by the studio to gather up what I needed to bring home. Then I headed South. Once I reached Grand Rapids, the traffic was horrible, and I could see that it was backed up for miles with flashing lights and signs of accidents in the other lane (north bound). So I got back home, at last, and was in time to see Esteemed Spouse before he headed out for dinner with one of their job candidates. I warned him about the traffic, gave him a quick kiss good-bye, and off he went.
He'd warned me he might be as late as 9 p.m. returning home, and sure enough, as I was dozing on the sofa, he came in the door at 8:55. The phone immediately started to ring, so he snatched it up--it was BFF, whom he had just left not ten minutes ago--and off he went into another room to talk. No sooner had he hung up to face my frowning face than the phone rang AGAIN, and it was BFF AGAIN. We had a bit of an argument. I told my husband that I would appreciate being number one in his life, especially as I have to be gone from Monday until Thursday evening, and that the least he could do would be to tell BFF that the time on Thursday evenings and during the day on Friday belonged to me, not to him. I told him that my dislike of BFF was growing into pure hatred, that the man was insensitive, self-centered, and clueless, and that one of these days, I would be unable to stop myself from saying something really horrible to him.
I also reminded my spouse about the time our marriage nearly broke apart, when our older son was a baby. My husband was working 7 days a week, 12-16 hours a day, leaving me to be a single parent. He believed he "owed" it to his bosses to put in those kinds of hours, and even when he was home, his pager would summon him back to the restaurants at all hours, forcing any family plans to be put on hold or cancelled altogether. After devoting himself so assiduously to the job, he was repaid by their demoting him from supervisor to single-store manager because his restaurants weren't performing as well as they wanted them to perform. (Maybe if he hadn't been given supervision of the stores in the low-income areas of town, he could have achieved the same sales figures as the stores in the affluent parts of the city.)
I think I'm going to make him reread Ellen Goodman's essay "The Company Man." It's certainly an eye-opener for people who believe that if they give 100 percent to the job, they'll be rewarded. If these same people gave 100 percent to their loved ones instead, they'd be happier, and so would their families. The workplace is a shark-infested world, and rewards for jobs well done aren't seen often, certainly not as often as punishments for jobs done poorly. There IS a happy medium, but my all-or-nothing spouse seems unable to draw the line. Apparently, I'm going to have to draw it for him. Even if that means telling BFF to go eff himself.
I'm also still on pins and needles waiting for the Arkansas bar exam results. It would be wonderful if we could call Mimi for her birthday and tell her Stephen had passed the bar.
Meanwhile, Esteemed Spouse will be gone all day again today with the job candidate du jour. Sigh.
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