It’s a bad time to be non-political, y’all (wait - apolitical? Pan-political? Anti-political? Non-politics-specific? I’m not sure which term is accurate, and with all the labels we throw out nowadays, I can’t keep up with all their meanings. I just know that I’m not interested in any of it and I know that sounds naive and immature, but this isn’t about maturity. It’s about politics. And divorce.)
I’m the most non-political person you’ll probably ever meet. Part of the reason I never fully side with one party or political figure or another is because there are always parts of a person’s stance that I agree with, but then also parts that I don’t.
And it’s hard for me to feel confident in taking a firm position against a policy when I’m 100% certain that I don’t have all the facts.
When people get themselves all lathered up over something governmental that they disagree on, I think, “Wait a sec, do you have all the information? No.”
Because unless your job is to know all the ins and outs of every one of the policies and laws and bills - and even then, unless you’re at the very tippy-top of the government food chain - you don’t know every single pro and con about decisions being made at that level.
Everybody just needs to calm the eff down.
Mark and I disagree on a lot of what’s happening “out there” right now.
He’s very pragmatic and judges our President on decisions he makes on behalf of our country.
I judge our President on the type of person he seems to be.
Mark can overlook the immature, bullying comments and behaviors of Trump, and I just cannot.
I want our leader to have some freakin’ dignity, for crying out loud. Trump has none.
Money does not give you class, y’all.
The last year has been hard for us. We’ve had lots of changes in our family (we moved to a new town and new school district for our youngest and our oldest moved off to college), and - I’m almost embarrassed to say it - the political environment and the Civil Rights era-feel of our country the last year has played a role in the division between me and my husband.
I know it sounds weird.
But for Mark to be able to shrug off the locker room talk (which, by the way, I realize men - and women, too - have "locker room talk," where they say vulgar things in jest, but (a) they're not the President of the United States, and (b) my issue with Trump's "locker room talk" was what he said he'd actually done: grabbed women by the pussy), or the mocking of a special needs person makes me question whether he and I have anything fundamental in common, anymore.
I never would have expected him to support someone who behaves this way.
He doesn't allow this type of behavior at work. He's very rule-followy with that kind of stuff.
And he's raised our boys to be respectful to women, especially to me.
His support of Trump and his ability to overlook the raunchy comments and the childish tweets seems hypocritical to me.
He and I had a discussion about this a few months ago (by “discussion,” I mean that we had a shouting match in the warehouse section of IKEA, while our son ran up and down the aisle pushing the flatbed cart, which kept getting tangled up in pieces of plastic packing straps that were annoyingly left behind by someone who didn’t give a damn about potentially jamming up the wheels a flatbed cart, causing a 10-year-old to repeatedly interrupt his parents’ fight to ask for help, to which we were unified when we'd shout at him, "Just a minute, can't you see we are talking?!).
The IKEA fight was disguised as an argument about how he didn’t want stuff we had to assemble, and I was trying to convince him that I had found the perfect Pin on Pinterest and it would be worth the heartache of assembly to make it look like the Pinterest picture.
But that was just a disguise for what the argument was really about, which was this division that had been bubbling up between us ever since Trump hit the campaign trail.
It's been hard for Mark, too. He gets angry at the way the media reports on Trump, and the way they seem to focus on his behavior versus the job he's doing.
So really, it’s a bad time to be political, too.
The intensity of division is putting a rectal expression on people's faces, and it's more disgusting than stepping barefoot into a pile of fresh dog sh*t.
I suppose what it’s really a bad time for is to be non-political (or whatever) and to be married to someone is very political.
Since that day, things are so much better between us. What changed?
For one, Mark removed all the social media apps from his phone. Not seeing all the hot button news all day, and people’s reactions - many that he disagrees with - has kept him from getting all riled up.
He says he’s a much happier person than he was before he removed the apps.
Secondly, I don’t watch TV very much, anymore, and I almost never watch the national news. I stick to HGTV (Chip and JoJo FTW!) and Food Network. I don’t even watch my beloved Today Show that much, anymore, just because hearing Trump’s voice or anything about him is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Besides, I’m still grieving over the loss of who I thought Matt Lauer was (I know I said I wouldn’t say anything else about it, but I’m still mourning, so I’m asking for you to cut me some freakin’ slack, mkay?)
I know this is very “stick-your-head-in-the-sand,” but it's a necessary move for my mental health.
And for my marriage.
I choose what to allow into my brain, and since I’ve gotten Mark on-board with doing the same, we’re a better couple for it.
