xmas eve's acting out

i always chalked up the "feelings are not facts" line to times when i wanted to take a drink. those times when chaos would rear its ugly head and i would want to make a hasty retreat to booze.

christmas eve presented two situations where the line applied, but these situations had little to do with wanting to drink.

rearview mirror: we were enroute to the well-intended circus known as christmas mass. i was backing the van out of the garage. the passenger side mirror made contact with the garage door frame. fine. i was backing up the car and hit the house...but it was not that dramatic. no damage was really inflicted upon home or vehicle.

as we get used to our new digs, i am still getting used to whipping the cars into and out of the garage while still having plenty of room around them. i have made contact with mirror and door frame before. my wife had been poking fun at me around the whole topic lately. when i hit the house on christmas eve, she snapped at me. i lost my shit, slammed the car into park, stomped on the parking brake, started to get out of the car and, in the flurry of movement, honked the horn by accident. i then got into the back of the van with daughter. i exploded because she was giving me a hard time about it and now she was also yelling at me about it.

yeah, daughter got to witness my tantrum. this probably is what pissed off my wife the most. at the time, it seemed like nothing more than a badly handled punctuation to the moment. i overreacted, but the emotions were all out. it was over. we proceeded to church and the hour spent in a tightly packed cry room erased the incident from our heads.

santa's workshop: end of the night, daughter fast asleep. we were assembling a couple of toys and trying to figure out the best way to rearrange some furniture for the optimal christmas morning. hey, there were some big gifts involved and as new parents were engineering a serious kodak moment. rather than tell my wife i did not think moving the coffee table to a specific area was a good idea, i agreed with her—in an angry, sarcastic way that clearly told her i disagreed. it's a trademark reaction of mine. she's tired of dealing with the way i sometimes deal with things. this was one of those times.

in re-reading the above, it all reads pretty simple and petty. the above is not dr. phil or montel material...i know this. you had to be there. bottom line is i still need to feel pissed, angry and more. i also must learn to not act out on these feelings. it inflicts the feelings onto someone else.

ALL feelings, no matter HOW they are created, are not facts. you do not have to act on them. in most cases, you should not act on them.

were you to ask my wife how her christmas eve went, she would tell you it was great. it was a great night. it could have been even better, but at least i learned something from it.