Cut the Watermelon, Please!

If you have hung out with Kiel and me longer than twenty minutes, you have probably witnessed, as Kiel likes to call it, our "banter" back and forth over something meaningless. We never really fight over something heart felt because most of the issues that matter we agree on. It's the stupid things that we stumble over and oddly enough it can trip us up for an entire day if we let it. Here is one that happened a couple months ago that I still laugh about. (Now, that day it wasn't funny in the slightest.)

I was making breakfast for Bruce and needed the watermelon to be cut in half and then quarters and then slices and eventually into tiny edible pieces. I tried to cut the watermelon into half and because our knives badly need to be sharpened I was unsuccessful. I asked Kiel, "Can you please cut the watermelon?" So he cut it in half and then proceeded to walk away.

"Where are you going? I need you to cut this."
"I did."
"Kiel, Bruce can't eat half a watermelon. I need you to cut it into slices."
"Well, you didn't ask me to cut it into slices."
"Yes, I did. I asked you to cut it."
"Yeah, you said cut it. You didn't say cut it into slices."

And there it was. The technicality that always trips me up when I'm trying to communicate to my husband. And this is when we banter back and forth. I assume he is just trying to irritate me by not doing what I said and he insists he DID do what I said and that's the problem.

Back to the watermelon.

I was completely confused. I thought my instructions were simple and easy to follow. Surely, he couldn't have possibly thought that when I said "...cut the watermelon" I meant just cut it in half? How could that possibly be of any help? This infuriated me for the rest of the day. And for the rest of the day we continued to have communication road blocks.

Me: "The dog needs to go potty."
Kiel: "Does that mean you want me to take the dog out?"

Me: "Bruce needs a bath."
Kiel: "Does that mean you want me to give Bruce a bath?"

Frustrated, I brought up the "watermelon argument" we had that morning. "How could you not know, when I said 'cut the watermelon' I needed you to cut it into edible slices?"

"We are back to the watermelon again? Fine, for now on. I will always cut the watermelon into slices. Never again will I just cut into half. Happy?"

"That's not the point. It's about our communication. How do you not know what I'm saying?"

"Because you want me to read your mind. I am more than happy to do what you ask as long as I know what you're asking. You just need to be more specific."

"Well, if you don't understand what I mean, you can just ask questions."

"Oh, no. I'm not falling into that trap again. Last time I asked questions you yelled at me."

"That's because you were asking questions to purposely annoy me."

"NO. Me asking questions annoyed you."

And now I was stumped. I thought I was specific. It wasn't until I came across this article: "Why do we fight: Blame it on our Brains." By Katherine Rosman. That it finally made sense to me. I had to laugh out loud. It's not EXACTLY like us, but it's pretty darn close.

To read the whole article click on the link above, but here is the part that sums us up in a nutshell:

"Here is how my brain works," Joe said, pointing to a jumble of charts, lines and graphs. He is a big A Quadrant/upper left guy: strong in quantitative, analytical and technical thinking. When he gets stressed, the analysis explained, he gets even more detail-oriented and focused on the sequence of what happened and who said what (B Quadrant/lower left).

If I needed any evidence of his methodical thinking, I might point to the fact that Joe was using a chart to show me why he thinks we got in a fight.

"I've taken it upon myself to conduct an analysis of your brain and you're are all upper and lower right," he said. I consulted the chart. This means I think artistically, emotionally and conceptually.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know these things about us," I said, tapping into my own Quadrant A logic. Joe looked a bit hurt that I was dismissing his PowerPoint presentation. So sensitive.

So there you have it! Don't you feel like you know us better?