The Raspberry Jell-o Caper (Nov. 2004)

When the bowl exploded, raspberry Jell-o sprayed onto the range and started running down the front of the oven. Fear gripped me like a well-worn driving glove. “You should have known that bowl wasn’t safe to use on the stove,” said Kathleen. “Look at this mess!” I took out a dishcloth and started sopping up the boiling liquid. When she saw that I was not cleaning up the kitchen to her satisfaction, she ripped the towel out of my hands and continued her assault. “I’m not sure who it was that taught you how to cook, but that was a dumbass move on your part.” I noticed that she was now wiping the area that I had just cleaned. My humiliation was now complete.

I waited a long time for the embarrassment of the incidence to fade, for a lighthearted story to replace Kathleen’s anger at my moment of incompetence.

It’s been almost four years.

The raspberry Jell-o caper, as I now refer to it, has become important in my mind as one of the watershed moments of my marriage. The moment where I knew marriage was hard work. Kathleen’s anger was not just about the broken bowl and the messy kitchen. It was that both of those things tapped into her feeling that I was helpless when it came to running my own household and she felt like she had to parent me. My humiliation wasn’t about Jell-o, either. It tapped into my feelings of inadequacy because Kathleen was never content to let me make my own mistakes. Before I could really make them, she’d swoop in and “rescue” me. And at that point, I was not strong enough in myself to tell her to back off… that sometimes mistakes were necessary because you grew from them in order to stop making so many. I was also angry that she knew so well how to tap into my childhood emotions, pushing buttons so that in a matter of seconds I was reduced from fully-functioning adult to insolent child screaming “you’re not the boss of me.”

While that problem was infinitely more fixable than some of our others, the bottom line was that we partnered way too long before either of us knew who we were and how we would react to being in a serious relationship… which is why hearing that one of my friends is planning to move to Phoenix to be with his girlfriend and her two children is causing me more anxiety than joy.

I’m happy that he’s found someone to love, someone who brings him so much happiness. But I fear for him, too. I worry that he is in the same place I was when Kathleen and I started our partnership- deliriously happy to have found each other and naïve enough to believe that if we just loved each other enough, all our worries would work themselves out.

This is another unfinished entry… one of those where I just needed to think my way through this. I want to be supportive, but I also want to be authentic, because to me, sugar-coating the reality of marriage is what gets people into trouble in the first place. It’s a little too late to be voicing too many concerns, though. He leaves next week. I think the best thing I can do is to be there if he needs me, and not worry too much about trying to rescue him the same way Kathleen tried to rescue me. After all, it taught me some of life’s most important lessons.