Fighting, Bears, & Ghosts
A comical resolution to a fight I had with my partner, and how much my fighting style has changed over the years.
Robbie and I got into a fight the other day. We’re fine now, we’re always fine, and very quickly.
Fighting is something that no one prepares you for when you’re young. Along with managing our finances, we should be taught how to fight in school. Because when you don’t have healthy examples of what relationships should be you get stuck figuring that out on your own. Obviously, I’m talking about conflict resolution and vulnerability training, not fisty cuffs.
Sorry Mom, but healthy conflict resolution wasn't modeled in my childhood home. This made me believe that a perfect relationship had no conflict at all. Then later on I decided that if you didn’t fight passionately (angrily) so there was no love. That’s an extreme contrast but it makes sense to me. A hope versus how toxicly comfortable I was in chaos. I was used to emotions at the center of control, pulling the strings and pushing the buttons. What I saw in my home and the media was that our emotions were always right and that people would react violently to one another in the name of those emotions. It was normal to go from 0 to 100 real quick. Boundaries and empathy were foreign concepts to me, and I was comfortable only with what was familiar. I lived on a spectrum of extremes.
We’re all a product of our environment, and I don’t blame my parents for fighting the only way they knew how. My mom grew up in a household full of passive aggressiveness, and my dad grew up without love of any kind, left to figure out life on his own… How do you learn anything but survival techniques from those two places? If my parents taught me anything it was how to fight to win. Which protected me for a long time, but also disconnected me from connections that I deeply needed.
I don’t feel like Chaos is a place I can call home anymore. I like the peaceful protective aura that encompasses my life and the relationship I have with my partner. My steady 10+ year relationship with a stable partner who never ran for the hills or took his frustrations out on me, aside from a dangerously aimed coat hanger once, has shown me that my predispositions weren’t exactly the picturesque ideal of what a relationship in conflict should be. Being with Robbie gave me the space and patience to figure out what healthy was. Granted we both made a lot of mistakes walking down that road.
Do we fight perfectly now? I don’t think so. I don’t know that there is a perfect version of an argument, or that conflict can be had in any kind of ideal structural model, but we do ok. With every argument or fight we have we learn how to exist around each other better. Which is the point of a long-term relationship isn’t it? Ofcourse aside from companionship, and the youthful dream of a celestial soulmate experience which I still believe in, but not with as much conviction as I did when I was a lonely teen, convinced that my ‘Patch’ would show up at any minute and sweep me off my feet toward a life of escapism. (Hush Hush reference).
Fighting with Robbie also taught me how to fight with my friends. I’ve learned through our conflicts how to advocate for myself, how to be kind, and how to be clearer with my intentions in all aspects of my life. It’s shown me how to let go and how to love people through tension and hurt. Most importantly it has shown me that people can come together again with as much love as they had before the anxiety of an altercation.
I’ve been experiencing some supernatural phenomenon in our home lately, and maybe it’s because the anniversary of my dads passing just past, and his birthday is not far away, so mind is preoccupied with him. Either way, I keep seeing shadows and my dog has been acting strange in the middle of the night.
I’m on edge because of it, avoiding looking in the mirror when I fill up my water during the witching hour and ignoring the shadows dancing in the corners of my eyes. I’m not sure why I think that if you ignore a ghost it’ll leave you alone, but I do believe that. Like spiders, they’re more scared of you than you are of them… I freeze and think that if I play it like I'm not phased by their presence they'll give up on trying to scare me.
During our fight last week Robbie slept on the couch. I attempted to get up and sleep there myself but as I rose and grabbed my pillow he beat me to it and said, “If you’re going to leave, don’t, I’ll just leave”.
Even in anger he gave up his comfort for my own. That’s Robbie, that’s always been Robbie. If that’s not love, I’m not sure what is. I can’t say I’d have done the same seeing as I’m a little more selfish than he is. Ok, a lot.
Robbie tells me after we resolve our fight, that he woke up in the middle of the night and saw a ghost. He doesn’t believe in that stuff, he doesn’t disbelieve it either, but he’s not as convinced as I am.
So I’m stunned by that, curious than all hell, and ready to order ghost-hunting equipment on Amazon.
Tell me more. What the heck did you see!?
He said he woke up and thought he saw a shadow, and that in his groggy sleepish panic, his mind went straight to thinking, “There’s a bear in the house!”
What in the Northern Ontario kind of reaction is that!? A Bear got into the house?
My stomach would have dropped out from my ass and went and hid in the pantry with the snacks. Screw a Ghost, and my teenage dream of some kind of immortal being coming to take me away and make me immortal too, I’d have thought there was a demon in the living room. Paranomral Activity style.
I see a plaid shirt draped over a chair, and I start praying to a god I don’t believe in.
Robbie thinks there’s a bear in our living room.
To be fair, I’m not really sure which outcome would be more likely but how wildly different we are shocks me sometimes. I’m not sure how we work at all. But we do. When we’re not fighting, those differences keep things interesting. They connect us with laughter, and give us fun things to fill each other in on. They give us reasons to reconnect while we catch up on the two days we missed fighting over nothing that mattered enough to keep us apart.
Thank you for reading,
Rach.