It's Saturday. What do I care?

It was a bad night last night.

I had a fight with Gabe. A bad one. A really bad one. He says I was already upset or mad, and that I picked the fight. Maybe so, maybe it's true and Paula's departure yesterday has affected me in ways I fail to realize. But last night I just could not deal anymore with something that has been going on for so long. I blew up. I opened the floodgates. I had all this anger and upset inside me, and it just came rushing out.

I can be extremely blunt when I am angry. In normal, every day interactions, I tend to keep myself in check. I don't like to make people feel bad, I do not derive any joy of it. As a young person I was picked on, so I am very mindful of how my words can hurt others. But there are times when my evil doppelganger shows up and takes over. You know, the one with the mean streak. The one who is very adept at coming up with zingers. The watered down version of the aggressiveness that seems to run in my family. I had a great grandmother who stabbed a man once and broke another man's arm on a stone mill. I had a grandfather who hit my father on the head with the blunt edge of a machete when my father was a kid, and who as a grownup was just plain mean. I had a father who I likened to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a good person who turned bad whenever he opened the bottle of Cutty Sark. Once I saw him come into the bedroom, drunk, and throw a book at my mom's head while she was in bed sleeping.

So that is my pedigree. I have what we jokingly called a herencia maldita when I was growing up. A cursed inheritance (or a family curse). In me it mostly manifests itself as these dark, dark moods where I say incredibly mean things without being able to stop myself, sometimes even saying them with glee. Once, years ago, I was so agitated in the middle of a fight (this was in the era pre-Gabe) that I poured a pitcher of ice water over my head to calm myself down.

Getting back to last night. I love Gabe very much. I feel like we "get" each other in so many areas. But I also feel disconnected from him at times. We never ever have time for ourselves. We don't interact much in areas that have nothing to do with the household or the kids. He may have read this blog twice, and I have been keeping it since November. He is always either too busy or too tired. And last night I had it. I said many things that were not necessarily meant to hurt, but rather to illustrate my views and my feelings. The only problem was that my views and feelings were somewhat distorted last night. And the things I said were not akin to constructive criticism. So we fought. And I told Gabe that I had no interest in celebrating our anniversary (coming up in 10 days). That's got to hurt.

How do you get someone to truly understand that the things you want from them will not cost them a penny? My husband grew up believing that the way to show someone your love is spending money on them. He wants to do nice things, take me on a vacation, take me out to dinner, buy me the proper gifts. The traditional gift for a 3rd year anniversary is leather. How do I know this? Because he looked it up. He cares about these things. And it is very sweet. It really is. But it is not what I want, it is not what I need. And I feel like a horrible, ungrateful bitch for feeling this way.