A Simple Misunderstanding

“It is easy to find.” This one, seemingly innocent-sounding sentence set in motion a chain of events that eventually ended with the wife in the emergency room.

After I told the wife that DHA is good for pregnant women to take, she messaged me at work and asked if my mom could buy her some when my parents come to visit us next week. 

Jessie: Can your mom buy two bottles of DHA vitamin for me? It is easy to find.
Me: OK.
Jessie: OK, what? You didn’t answer my question.
Me: What question?
Jessie: I asked you a question.
Me: And I said OK. As in, OK, I will let my mom know to buy you some bottles.
Jessie: That wasn’t my question. I said, “It is easy to find.”
Me: Alright. It’s easy to find. Thanks for telling me.
Jessie: Why don’t you answer my question?
Me: What question?!
Jessie: It is easy to find!
Me: Oh, I think you mean, “IS it easy to find?” That is a question. “IT is easy to find,” is a statement. I didn’t know what you were talking about. You had me confused. I thought you were just telling me that the vitamin would be very easy for my mom to find.
Jessie: F*ck you.
Me: That’s not a very nice thing to say.

After picking the wife up from work, she was still upset, and I guess I didn’t help matters along by giving a 10 minute explanation of how I didn’t understand her. She accuses me of being condescending and replies back angrily that English isn’t her first language and if I really wanted to understand her, I would write everything to her in Chinese. 

That response didn’t make any sense because I wasn’t criticizing her English. I just merely said that she had made a grammatical error and I had misinterpreted what she meant. I told her if she really felt that she had trouble writing in English, she could just write in Chinese, and I could translate what she typed using an online translator. Apparently, that wasn’t the correct answer, because she drags in other matters that have made her unhappy over the past few weeks into the argument. 

With things starting to get out of hand, I finally tell her I’m not going to argue with her anymore. We ride the rest of the way home in silence while I try to hum a tune that seems more tense than happy. As I’m parking the car, she tells me she’s going out to eat by herself. Knowing that it would just annoy her even more if I followed her, I let her go, thinking that she was going to walk over to her mom’s house for dinner, which is only down the street. 

An hour and a half later, I get a phone call from her. She’s crying and hysterical. She says that she’s fallen from a bus and is hurt. She makes sure to emphasize that it’s entirely my fault. I ask her where she is, but she’s incoherent and says she’s going to call her mom. 

I call her mom, find out where Jessie’s at, and start running over there. By the time I get there, her mom and dad are already tending to her. They’ve called an ambulance and it’s on its way. I check Jessie over and ask her if she or the baby’s hurt. She doesn’t know and seems to be in a bit of shock. 

At the emergency room, she’s able to finally tell the doctor and us what happened. As she was getting off the bus, she slipped down the steps and landed awkwardly on her hips and back. They do an ultrasound on her and find that our baby is OK. Jessie only has some bruising on her thighs and back. The doctor tells us that the next four hours are the most important and for Jessie to be conscious of any unusual pains or liquid discharge. 

It’s a sleepless night for the both of us because she’s in pain and can’t find a comfortable position. I help move her to the bed, then to the couch, then to the bed, and then back to the couch several times. She finally settles for a sitting position on the couch. I keep her company in case she needs anything. It’s cold and uncomfortable, but I tell myself that this is no different than trying to sleep in the economy section of an airplane. Except on an airplane, I can get packs of salted peanuts.

The next morning, we go to the baby doctor to make sure everything is OK. The doctor says he’s seen worse falls. He tells a story of how a pregnant women fell face-first off her motorcycle and landed on her stomach. Her baby escaped unscathed. He said that the womb is set up to absorb bumps and bruises. I feel a bit better knowing this. And since Jessie landed on her bottom and back, the chances of anything happening to the fetus is relatively small. He also confirms that we do indeed have a girl. 

I expect that Jessie’s whole family is going to swoop down and tear me to pieces over what happened. How could a husband let his pregnant wife go off by herself? How selfish, immature, and irresponsible could I be? Instead, they are just thankful that nothing worse happened and point fingers at no one. 

This makes me feel even worse. I wanted someone to lecture me. I wanted her brother to punch me in the face. Come on! Let me have it! Maybe they have some sort of family rule where they don’t hit people with four eyes. My glasses may just have been my saving grace.

By nighttime, Jessie is moving around a lot more comfortably and is able to lie in bed. We talk about what happened and agree that we were very lucky this time around. Arguments are a part of every relationship, but there’s a right way and a wrong way of going about it. For her part, she said that she’d try harder not to get so worked up over little things. For my part, I said that I would try to be less stubborn and more willing to see things her way. Hopefully this is a lesson learned.