I've split this into two parts, The Explanation and The Apology. The Explanation will iterate how I got the point I did this morning, and The Apology will seek to address my misdeed and seek pardon for it.

The Explanation

I’ve been with Susan for eight years now, and I’ve been married to her for six. The thing I learned early on in our relationship is that she can overreact emotionally when the events of life frustrate her well-structured plans. On our trip to Ireland we were on a train that arrived into Birmingham New Street; we missed our connection to Holyhead. Susan panicked. The travel plan was out of kilter; we were going to miss the ferry, and the vacation was ruined before it even began. I found an information kiosk and worked out that we could take another train and still make the connection further up the line. I hauled a panicked future wife and way too much baggage onto a Crewe-bound train with seconds to spare, angry that Susan could break down in a situation like this. On the local train she cried and thoroughly embarrassed us. I sometimes bring that incident up in the worst of my moments, but I’ve accepted that this is what she is, and I love her in spite of – and because of – this.

Susan has the ability to move through her worries. She’s stubborn and driven, and if there’s a wrong it’s Katie bar the door until there’s a solution. She’ll devour books on the subject until she’s an expert. She’ll come up with strong solutions that would put the eggheads at Rand to shame. But before then, she has to decide to stop moping about the problem and start solving it.

Annabel has been a challenge for her. She has no data reference point to work from with her, and the books are giving conflicting – and sometimes scary – answers. She’s never been a mother before. She doesn’t know how to be a mother. And she’s still learning. Thus, her grand insecurity – what if I’m doing this all wrong? – is driving her to worry. What if Annabel isn’t smart? What if she doesn’t read? What if she’s a cheerleader? Yes, Susan’s expectations for perfection in Annabel are bleeding through. She doesn’t know how to deal with imperfection, not in herself, not in others. Why does she hate George W. Bush? Because he epitomizes everything she despises – unread, more willing to listen to cronies than to experts – and everything she despises in herself – stubborn, smug.

And, you have to understand, I love Susan immensely. She’s intelligent, warm, silly, interesting, uber-geeky, and has big boobs. And I love Annabel, too, because I think she’s more like her mother than her father. I accept that they’re not perfect or as I’d like them to be. They are who they are, and only they can change who they are.

Anyone who hurts them will have to deal with me. (cont'd)

This current round of Annabel problems is my fault. Both Susan and I have some mild autism spectrum problems, but I didn’t know Susan had autism spectrum issues until recently, right when we started worrying whether Annabel’s unwillingness to talk was becoming a significant problem. At the time, Annabel had a number of indicators that at least raised the caution flag. Her speech abilities weren’t improving; in fact, they were getting worse. She stopped using several words and sounds altogether in the late summer. She rarely ever showed empathy to anyone. And she never responded to her name.

However, our pediatrician reassured us that she was in no way autistic, having treated a number of autistic kids before. She referred us to the audiology and speech therapy clinics to rule out issues with hearing impairment and Annabel’s tongue tie (an issue we’ve known about since right after birth – and one of the reasons she was a formula-fed baby). At that point, I considered the autism issue dead. Susan did as well, but she still had a problem (why isn’t she talking?) in search of a solution.

The hearing tests came back fine. It wasn’t that Annabel couldn’t hear; she was ignoring us (probably a wise course of action). So, that left the speech pathology appointment and the question whether the tongue tie was holding her linguistic abilities back.

Of course, the next appointment ended up being in January. And that didn’t sit well with Susan, because she needs a solution now before Annabel slips further behind the baby books and the other children she hears about every day on this board and elsewhere.

And here’s where the kerfluffle began. Susan needed to vent. In return, she needed a headpat and a reminder that your baby’s mileage may vary and two months wasn’t going to hurt Annabel in the least. In essence, calm down, breathe, it’ll work out, adjust your plans. She didn’t get that. Instead, in my mind, it turned into a pile-on by a *small* number of posters.

And now, my problem: For the last six years I’ve had to deal with Susan getting kicked in her insecurities in the name of “tough love.” This happened on Salon, and Perfect World, and now here. And I’m tired of it. I’m tired of cleaning up after drive-by “advice” because “it’s all tough love.”

You, O wise dispenser of advice, think you’re snapping her out of her repeating worry-stress loops.

You’re not.

You’re feeding them.

And guess who comes home to them. Guess who gets called at work to talk her down. Guess who gets mad when yet another person’s “help” turns into a three-day pity party that I am forcibly invited to because I’m married to the feedback loop.

Look, Susan needs to let go of her perfectionism and learn how to constructively deal with her anger, insecurity, and worry loops. I know that. Everyone on this board knows that. And Susan is starting to realize it. But the solution isn’t to unload on her. It isn’t to imply that she’s a bad parent.

The problem is, I’m not exactly sure what the solution is myself. I know that yelling at her doesn’t work 95% of the time. I know that ignoring it doesn’t work either. I do know that eventually the loop breaks. It may take hours, it may take days, but eventually she steps out of it and moves on. All I can do is do the things I know will help the loop die its natural death – remind her of the facts, remind her that’s she’s in a loop, and reassure her that I still love her no matter what. And eventually, once we have money again and can find a good counselor, she will learn how to break these loops herself.

But yesterday did not help. I am not kidding when I say that I spend three days dealing with this. But I think I was moving on from yesterday (as was Susan) until someone implied on a friends-locked LiveJournal post that Susan deserved the “tough love” that was coming to her yesterday.

Of course, Susan was one of those friends. And hey, let’s kick her in the sensitive spot and start it all over again.

Again, “tough love” does not work on Susan. It only exacerbates the problems. True tough love is supposed to be a shot of reality given with love. I see shots of reality, but I don’t see a lot of love. And tough love is supposed to short-circuit the loops of stupidity. In Susan, they’re exacerbating them, and worse still, they’re giving her false conclusions – she’s a lousy parent.

And between that, my three hours of sleep thanks to Ms. Oh I’m Supposed To Sleep Through The Night At Eighteen Month?, missing a meeting I was supposed to be at because I overslept thanks to insomniac daughter, the ongoing horrors of work, the horrors of Seattle traffic at its worst, and the growing well of anger inside of me… well, a valve blew. Or something. But I sailed right through anger to wrath. Despite the fact that the problem stemmed from only one person (and indirectly one LiveJournal post), and despite the fact that I should only have been angry at that one person with the correct measure of ire, I was very quickly angry at everyone and the history of things, and the full measure of white-hot rage was going to come out. I skipped past the correct action (e-mailing the problem person and calling her a putz) and went right to board terrorism. Big F-bomb, big boom, big attention, and damn the safeties of walking away and not hitting “post.”

The Apology

This morning, I posted an inappropriate remark on this board. I used offensive language to make a blanket statement about the general populace of this board when I should have made a pointed comment to a single person in private.

I regret making this comment, and apologize deeply for any injury this may have caused to everyone on this board. I ask pardon for my irrational, inappropriate, and offensive behavior.

I love to grocery shop. It's a sickness, really. I'd be perfectly happy to do it for other people.

Seems like just yesterday you were contemplating the best way to flirt with him.

And repeatedly thwacking him over the head with a sword turned out to work just fine.

Careful; you're starting to sound like you fence epee....

I don't think I've ever had the goulash/slumgullion/magazine casserole concoction.

I'm Maria. I'm Italian American. My Father is a resturanteur... you people speak swahili as far as I'm concerned when you talk about campbells soup as a base for a dish.

you're starting to sound like you fence epee....

Nonsense. Thwacking doesn't work in epee -- that remark is pure sabre and you oughta know it.

Thwacking doesn't work in epee -- that remark is pure sabre and you oughta know it.

Now THAT'S Swahili.

I at least understand the concept of Campbell's soup.

For what it's worth, Dylan, on my part - apology accepted. (Although that might be easier for me to say since I wasn't around when you originally consigned us to hell, so it didn't really ruffle my feathers.)

As for Tough Love - I don't even know if that's so much an issue as thread dynamics. As you note, this has come up before with Susan's participation in other online communities. The repeated looping presents a particular difficulty in an online community - you're faced with the quandry of either (a) taking it seriously - in which case you're along for the ride on a crisis of the week; or (b) not taking it seriously - in which case you're being disrespectful to Susan.

At the very least, Aimee's original response took Susan's concerns seriously and tried to address them as such.

I know that I have had to curb my tongue from making the same kind of post - and haven't always been successful in keeping my mouth shut. Though I do try to keep such responses brief and non-inflammatory. It still amounts to: Don't Flip Out! or the popular variant, You're Flipping Out Again!

What else can we say when the same issues come up? When we see Susan following the same intractable path that's so obviously a worried, worst-case-scenario loop?

For all that, I will note that I am fond of Susan and have really come to appreciate that she is very honest about addressing her own issues, and gives them a great deal of serious thought.

A blessing on all three of your heads. Y'all deserve a break, and I hope the pressure eases up for your family in this coming year.

Dylan, thank you for that.

There is just 1 thing I want to address about what you said.

True tough love is supposed to be a shot of reality given with love. I see shots of reality, but I don’t see a lot of love.

I know you delurked relatively recently (compared to Susan, for instance), and I know that you did lurk in the past, but I don't know how extensively, or for how long. So, I don't know how much you've seen in the past of Susan coming in here and expressing her worry about Annabel, and, by extension, how much you've seen of the responses to her in the past (yesterday excluded).

The way people have responded to her worries in the past -- offering advice, sympathetic stories of their own children, reassurances -- is, to me, *very* loving. If yesterday wasn't loving, the past 18 months (and prior) have been. Please know that.