I was crouched, half undressed, in the dank, yellowing light of my laundry room. I was fighting the simultaneous urge to scream, to cry and to give myself a good slap across the cheek.

I had been an asshole.

The combination of my mother's Swedish hard-headedness and unbridled French temper of my father that made me on the benign end, very dogmatic and convicted yet passionate and perseverant and on the malevolent end, malicious, manipulative and unwilling to admit wrongdoing. I had been representing, unfortunately, the rougher end of the scale in recent days.

In short, it had been a long day.

I would never diminish any career that a person would take to in a time of career confusion. Anything to keep moving and to avoid the magnetic inertia of confusion, I admire that. But there is something very different about the internal writhing of questioning one's identity and life's purpose while you stock shelves at Target.

Integral to the structure and functioning of concrete hoarding is dragging heavy insulated tarps across construction sites, said tarps snagging on cribbing nails, tripping on rogue rebar, jamming up hammer tackers, scaling foundation forms bundled with tarps like a Sherpa. It is a job that would test even the most centred and long-suffering among us. So when you already have an edge that seems to be sharpened by the daily frustrations of ruminating on things just not going according to friggin plan, tensions compound exponentially.

In marriage, it is impossible to protect your spouse from the rough edges of your personality. By virtue of them being your spouse, they are inducted into an unmitigated inner sanctum of your heart, mind and personality. When you are at your best, you are inspired by your love for them and by the profundity and surreal nature of having someone commit to you their life. It is transcendent and subsequently even the occurrences of the day to day become imbued with something...more. You try to be more careful, you give even the slightest things more thought.

But life inevitably creeps in. All of the effort you put into your spouse and you marriage takes more effort now because there is one more ball in the air. And your spouse is your spouse. You vow to do life together, part of which entails waking up on the wrong side of the bed, being impatient, having road rage, having idiosyncrasies -such as the lines on the tea towels need to be perpendicular to the floor not parallel- among other things. And that is not even counting all of the times that you will legitimately let your partner down and they will be justifiably upset.

I had stomped my way through the majority of my day. I had made the familiar excuses of "I was frustrated by the tarps catching", "I bumped my shin", "I hit my head", "I slipped on the tarps", "I fell off the ramp because the tarp caught" or any other manner of ridiculous things that could have befell me to knock myself off of my reasoned, rational, perseverant horse. I will mentioned that I never offered up any of those reasons without a healthy seasoning of expletives.

I had reasoned and rationed my way through the arguments above many times on site, especially when I was curt or rude to my husband.
"I do a very stressful job and I'm not at a good place in my head and I don't get enough sleep and..."
And. And. And.

Truth was I could be a Shithead with a capital "S".

I didn't remember my parents ever fighting. They were not the yelling, screaming, plate-throwing pyrotechnics fighters. When people with divorced parents talked about "seeing it coming", I could never relate.
I do remember the excruciating tension. They were the stomping, huffing, silent treatment, turn-your-anger-into-cancer fighters. It was a festering wound.
The stubborness and short temper combined made for a potentially explosive match in the first place. And then the pride and indignance of feeling let down scraped at that sore spot, chafing it into a blister that never healed.

Pride is a funny beast. It can function very articulately without needing to be fed actively. It can go for weeks, months, years living on one small injustice. While some would describe pride as a monstrous beast, heavy and fat, I think of it more as lean, wiry, like smoke. The smell never goes away and constantly fills your mind with memories of fire.

It was my pride that ricocheted around in my head during the day. Whenever I took out hating my job and wishing I had a different set of decisions ahead of me out on my husband, it was my pride that told me I didn't need to apologize, that I was justified in being in a bad mood and "he should just understand". That smoke began to blanket our encounters, fill the rooms of our house, the space between our mouths when we would talk.

It had been the stomping, huffing, crest of tears kind of day. It had also been day of the secondary guilt of knowing I'm being a shrew but having already wound up the gyroscope so far that to slow it down from its motion would cause it to fall. I had been spinning all day. I had to keep it spinning or wait for the nausea to set in.

"You should go have a shower." His voice was tight and it jolted me.
"I had a bad day."
There was a pause.
"I'm sorry.
Another pause. "It's okay. Go have a shower."
It was not the voice of forgiveness, it was not the voice of tenderness. But it was the voice of reality. It was a tone of wear and tear, not only from me but from life. It was the tone of "tomorrow is a new day".

I pulled the rest of my clothes off, each piece powdered with a film of concrete dust. The thought of a hot shower and a cold glass of water drew me upstairs, of sinking into a pillow that would lead me to believe this day could be forgotten.
The smoke within me was cooling and I coughed it out best I could in the humidity and steam. Slipping beneath the covers, there was something about my lineage that unnerved me. It was seeing the worst of both of them in myself at once. The stillness of the moment, awaiting the coming sleep, I realized I was too many rungs up the ladder to simply jump down and to climb higher felt dangerous and far too easy.