Breaking the first rule

Last weekend, while I was in class all day Saturday (Supply Chain Management–woo-hoo!), LOD texted and asked me if he and the kids could watch the football game at my house (I get the channel it was on, and he doesn’t). I said it was fine. When I got home that night they were gone, but LOD had left two beers in my fridge as a thank-you.

I posted about that on Facebook, and so many of my friends said things like, “Wow, you guys have such a great (and weird) relationship!”

What I replied was that I think LOD and I are getting better at knowing what interactions we can have success with, and are trying to only have those interactions, and not others.

We used to fight about all sorts of stuff. Even when we didn’t realize we were fighting, we were fighting. Or at the very least competing. The fights were all the same. The competition was all the same. The fight was always, “You are a bad, inadequate person, and I don’t value what you have to offer.”

Now that we don’t have to be yoked together, and we’re essentially just co-workers working together to parent these kids (and to write this blog), it doesn’t matter who we are. And the things we have to offer the kids are things the other values. So it’s easier to have successful interactions most of the time.

Having said that, we still fight, because we both have hard heads. Some discussions (not actual fights) we’ve had lately have included:

whether or not I (Moxie) am a hypocrite because I am adamantly opposed to leggings as pants when I used to wear (in the late ’90s) tight black pants that LOD asserts were at least as revealing as leggings.
which college football team/conference is the equivalent of the NY Yankees in arrogance.
XM Radio stations: Backspin (me) vs. 1st Wave (LOD)
whether it’s advisable to cook beef in the crock pot with a can of Coke

Boring is really freeing. But there is one actual fight that we have that’s ongoing, and it’s caused us a lot of pain. It’s about having our younger son in the Boy Scouts. We are both very passionate about how we feel about the Boy Scouts, and I know it causes me a lot of pain and guilt and frustration to be in the middle of this fight. However, the two huge differences in how this fight feels vs. how fighting when we were married felt are that: a) we each get to go home and not keep having the fight constantly, and b) it feels like we’re getting somewhere. Slowly. But it feels like there’s motion. So stay tuned on the Boy Scouts issue, because it might turn out OK for us.

Anyway, yes. Successful interactions. I’ve noticed that for us, successful interactions seem to involve either beer or coffee. But Halloween’s coming up next week, so maybe we’ll be able to add Fun Size Snickers to that list. (And I’m going to let LOD tell you the story of Last Halloween and How We Were Both Left Speechless.)