A Parable for Our Times

The other day, my wife and I had a big, knock-down, drag-out fight. She yelled at me (yet again!) for not loading the dishwasher back to front, I countered that she’s still leaving used tissues on the kitchen counter even when I told her to stop that. And that I almost always do put the dishes in the back, but just overlooked it this one time. But she didn’t buy it.

 

Now the reader should know that I have a long history of my father always criticizing me, telling me that no matter what I was doing, I was doing it wrong. Because I grew up with the sense that I could never satisfy his demands and thus, could never earn his love, this fight was triggering my trauma and grew to giant proportions. So I did the only thing that assured me that it could be solved, once and for all.

 

I filed an Incident Report. 

 

Some days later, the woman in charge of the IR Committee wrote back and said that my wife was guilty of no wrong-doing. Suspecting some woman-to-woman bonding here and discovering that the IR head had a predisposition to loading the dishwasher back to front. I now filed an Incident Report against her.

 

She took it to another female colleague, who then accused me of being the kind of man who thinks women can’t separate their subjective feelings from their objective duties and proceeded to file an Incident Report against me.

 

Meanwhile, upon my appeal, the IR Committee agreed that they would have two new people on their staff, one a man and one a woman, to give a more impartial ruling. However, in the course of reviewing the case, the man and woman had disagreed with each other’s point of view and now a Mediator had to be called in. 

 

Back at home, my wife and I hadn’t spoken to each other for the four weeks it took to work to process all these reports and were in fact, strongly advised by our lawyers NOT to say a word to each other for fear it could be used against us in any future rulings. But one day at breakfast, while my wife was reading a newspaper, I broke the silence and said, “Can you please pass the salt?”

 

She did and then said, “Hey, the new Downton Abbey movie is playing at our favorite movie theater!”

 

I replied, “I heard great things about it. And it's been forever since we've been to a movie."

 

Then at the same time, we both looked at each other smiling and said, “Let’s go!!”

 

On the way to the movie, I said, "I don't even remember what we were fighting about!"

"Neither do I!" rejoined my wife and took my hand as we walked into the theater and  settled into our seat with a shared bucket of popcorn. Peace was restored.

 

CODA: As the movie began, Carson was complaining to Mrs. Hughes that Thomas had served a dinner guest from the right instead of the left. He was aghast.

"Such breach of proper conduct cannot go unpunished!" said Carson firmly. “But I know what I have to do.” 

 

“No, dear, not that??!! Surely not that??!! ” replied a shocked Mrs. Hughes. 

 

“I simply don’t see any other way.”

 

And so he filed an…  Incident Report.

 

And they all lived miserably ever after.