Straws

*This is what I wrote, just to have some release from carrying it, some time last year (in 2013). It lines right up with my Storms piece, which also was written for the release, and also for a log, just in case I should need one for any reason.*

I am thinking about straws. You grasp at them, snatching hope; or, they quietly pile up on you until they break you. To despair is sin, and to be discontented is surely to be on the path thereto. Right now I feel certain that an attitude of gratitude, which is quite right, would somehow be merely a cover-up, and that only a purging will ready me for the turnabout.

There are the little things, noticed individually so many dozen times each day, that they can be collectively ignored. I am used to them, but that does not mitigate the irritations. If I were an oyster...

The kitchen island "miscellaneous" drawer's pull comes loose several times daily, since the proper length screw was never put in. The brand new sink drain leaks into my brand new sink cupboard, custom built by my father-in-law to replace the decades-old, leak-rotted one. Mention this leak, and I am told, "why don't you fix it?!" The television set is on during the day, tuned to shows full of bleeps, while my husband naps and lets the little boys play in front of that. Then the set is on all night, playing loops of the sexually-perverted and deviant Law & Order SVU. Or, it is set on rough, "real-life" shows of policemen in Alaska, or deep-sea fishing, full of bleeped-out cursing and other vulgarity unbleeped, the volume turned up to cover the noise of the fan, while he sleeps on the sofa, in his underwear, sometimes with barn smuts still on arms and legs, and reeking of all his honest labor. I hate the socks and the underwear on the bathroom floor, the newspapers we don't take but are gifted every few weeks, thrown up on the bathroom counter, where they are splashed and bleed their ink. My own dad, a farmer born and raised, never wore barn boots into the house; ask my husband however sweetly, not to do that, and he will usually swear at me. At the least, he'll crack that cleaning it up will give me something to do. I grew up in a household where I never once heard my dad swear at my mother, or mock her. He did not disrespect her in front of us children, and we never heard them fight. Somehow, I have landed in a marriage with a man who learned only to have it all out wherever he feels like it, which is always where it will put me on the defensive and make me look terrible to our babies. I have become someone I was not when we married, and I know it is in response to feeling hated, disrespected, and unappreciated.
I sometimes tell myself that one root of his behavior may be that he feels hated, disrespected, and unappreciated - since I had to get out of the barn chores. I had seen it coming, when I went back to the barn, for evening milking chores four nights a week, two weeks after giving birth to our fifth child, and while homeschooling four of the children already. The laundry was scarcely ever caught up, we had less-nutritious meals than I knew we ought to have, and the house was a complete dirty disaster, compared to now. So I warned him fairly, "if this happens again, I won't be coming back to the barn afterwards. I just can't spread myself this thin. I'm not doing any of my jobs well, this way." He didn't believe me: he scoffed, said I'd be so bored I'd have to come back. Anyway, we weren't planning on any more children. Then we had number six, and I was 38 and tired. By the time the baby was born five days late, releasing all the tension of waiting through the holidays, the 3 yr old was learning his letters and numbers and ought to be put to some sort of higher learning. There was just enough, already, for me to do, with mothering and all that it entails, and running on a year of nursing several times each night.
And the girls rallied, and stretched, and teamed up to take my place in the milking shifts. In the evenings that I had anchored mostly alone, without my husband, they filled in,not quite tall enough to reach the pipeline to plug in the milking machines without a stool. I had some trepidation for them, taking this on suddenly, and enduring the tongue lashings I could hear from across the road in the house. It took some steel, to assure myself that they had the stamina, that I had been doing this work with my father at their ages, with much more cumbersome equipment. Just, my dad sometimes swore at and beat the cows, he didn't swear at me.
I see these are no longer little things. My husband began to swear at me quite often, call me the most vulgar names, always in front of the children, and scoff at me if he thought I'd said something wrongly informed. No thought of saving a correction for later in private, or for softening it at all. He began to come to the table for meals either in a manure-specked shirt with arms in the same state, having wiped off on my kitchen towel, or in his underwear. I am unable to take this in any other way that intentional jab at my "good breeding" which now he despises.
I hate being hated. I have certainly filled in my former barn chore hours, with better meals, a more regular sweeping of floors, laundry upkeep, time to plan school lessons and to correct schoolwork, care of some hens that keep us in eggs as well as bring me some joy, and I can do so much more in the way of vegetable gardening, which actually does cut the volume we buy in the summer months. And out of all the adjustments, my husband has gained now a corps of four sturdy helpers. Just the two youngest children are usually with me, to give each other some afternoon and evening childhood, to help me in light chores, and to keep me limber through the whole day. But as I attend to all this, I am castigated for "contributing nothing," "not doing anything," and told that I "own nothing in this house, nothing - not one thing!" or that "no judge would ever give you custody of the children - why don't you just go?!" He reviles me, and later, when he is all sunny again, says he doesn't remember a word he says once it is out of his mouth. While I can never forget.