How I talk to my husband

We had a great Valentine’s Day!  I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all probably tomorrow or Friday.  For now, some thoughts I had on Monday.

Most of the time, my words towards my husband are warm, caring, gentle, loving, encouraging, happy, complimentary, cheerful, appreciative, or pleasant.  I say a lot of “thank you” and “I love you” or just give him a big hug and say “mmm.” This afternoon when we met to hand-off our car, the first thing I said to him was “you look so sexy in a suit.”  So most of the time, I speak kindly to Mike.

But then there are other times when my comments are snappy, short, biting, or accompanied with an eye-roll. These lines of snappiness come out so quickly that I don’t even realize I’m saying them until it’s already stung. And they hurt my husband. I don’t want to speak to any person like that and certainly not Mike.

I don’t know where they come from either. Two examples:

  1. While we were making the cake balls, Mike asked where the sprinkles were. I said “here” or something along those lines and when he turned around and looked for them on the other counter, couldn’t find them and asked again I pointed with head and eyes and said “they’re right here” and rolled my eyes as he picked them up.
  2. This morning I was sitting in bed blogging when Mike came in and turned the heat on. Within 5 minutes, I was really hot and snapped saying something like “it’s so hot in here, can you please turn the heat off?” with a tone of serious urgency. When Mike was like “uh, yeah, sure, what’s with the attitude?” I replied by saying “it’s just so hot in here I can’t stand it” and proceeded to storm out of the room saying that it was “frickin’ ridiculous.”

Like, why do I this?  Clearly, none of these things deserve attitude.  And honestly, sharing my behavior here is a little embarrassing. Luckily, Mike is pretty easy going and lets things roll right off his back. But that doesn’t make these outbursts ok.

I don’t want to get in the habit of treating my husband like this regardless of how infrequent these things are. So what do I do? Try to take a deep breath to compose myself before I make a rude remark? Apologize instantly if I let one slip out? Try to be uber-aware of my facial expressions and keep my eye rolls to a minimum?

I’d love to know:

Do you have moments where you’re snappy like this?  Where do they come from and why do we act like this? How do you rein it in?