The Unwarranted Epiphany

We have been having trouble with our satellite reception for a few weeks and some things did not get recorded on the DVR that both my husband and I had been looking forward to, like the season premiere of Prison Break for example. It seems that the back room signal is wonky and all attempts to fix it through Customer Service have failed so far, so my husband and I are relying on the front room signal to record the shows that we really really want to see. He called the other night to ask me to program something in for him and I mentioned that I had put a Mythbusters episode in at the 10:00pm spot. He commented that he had been planning to watch an old Survivor that he had missed when it was first on at 10:00pm, but that it didn't matter. Now, I have seen pretty much every Mythbusters episode and they do tend to repeat them ad nauseam, but I was in a truly terrible mood and snarled into the telephone "Oh never mind the Mythbusters, just never mind, for God's sake!" Click. He hung up on me. I know how my husband feels about hanging up on people, he feels that it is among the rudest things that a person can do to another, so I suddenly realized that if he felt it necesarry to hang up on me, I must have gotten truly out of control. I never got angry or upset with him and I didn't get weepy or feel sorry for myself, I just started thinking that my already low-functioning stress management skills must really be at their limit and I better do something about it but quick, fast and in a hurry. I thought about ways to help myself relax, ways to be more in the moment so kid-raising shenanigans don't overwhelm me so much that I can't enjoy the simple joys of parenthood, ways to let things go and not be such a control freak, lots of things. My husband came home several hours later, came into the house, put away his Diet Dr. Pepper the way he always does and came into the bedroom to say hey like he always does and after the usual "Hey how was your day" formalities were exchanged I said "Let's talk about your hanging up on me for just a second." To my absolute astonishment he said, "I didn't hang up on you, I dropped the phone." Wow. I asked him what was the last thing he remembered me saying and he said "Oh, something about programming in a Mythbusters episode." He never even heard the rude things I said! Everything I thought about was something that really needed thinking about so it was a lucky mistake. I'm still not sure how to turn things around for myself, but at least I had a good think about it.