Am I Passive/Aggressive, or Just Married Too Long?

I had a dilemma this morning. My husband’s iPhone alarm went off, and he wasn’t there to hear it.

My husband is an early riser and was already at his home office desk just down the hall from our bedroom. Naturally, he had left his phone in the bedroom. The alarm woke me from a deep slumber.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened. Which is maybe why I spent the next several minutes having an internal debate with myself over what I should do. In my mind, I sounded like Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz:” “Am I a good wife or a bad wife?”

I knew my husband had set the alarm so as not to miss an important appointment. But if he had set the alarm, shouldn’t he have taken the phone with him so he could hear it?

I rolled over and pressed my earplugs further into my ears, hoping to drown out the noise, and tried to go back to sleep. If I went back to sleep, I couldn’t be blamed for not telling him his alarm was going off, right?

The phone alarm continued its charming, harp-like insistence.

Why didn’t he hear it? Well, probably because he hadn’t yet put in his hearing aid, which is a whole other conversation between us that usually starts with, “You know, hearing aids don’t work unless they’re in your EAR!” But I digress.

I thought about just getting up, turning off the phone, and going back to bed. That seemed a little passive/aggressive. I also thought about rolling out, grabbing the phone, shuffling in my nightdress, down the hall to his office, and making a big scene while slamming the still-trilling phone onto his desk. Would that have made me an enabler or just bitchy? And why should I be doing that for a grown-ass man who should be capable enough of taking care of his own phone?

As luck would have it, he came back into the bedroom, frantically searching for his phone, and saw that I was awake. Instantly, he began apologizing. Profusely.

It’s a wise man who knows that his wife likes to sleep in. And it’s a smart wife who knows that if she plays the guilt card today she can be taken out to dinner tonight.