Okay so looking for some constructive advice..
This is a bit complicated to explain but I’ll try to be to the point.
Playing basketball today (me, husband, 10yr old, father in law) at my in-laws. Playing the “pot game” where if you miss a shot you collect the points from other people’s previous scores.
10 yr old asks his dad, how much is in the pot?
Husband answered: 4
FIL says something about 1
Son appears to be doing the math, adding, and says, so, five.
Husband seems to have misheard (or I did), but I noticed no “tone” or attitude with the 10 year old as he said what he said. Husband kind of flies off the handle and it soon becomes clear he heard our son say, “no, five!”
It irritated my husband that our son asked a question then appeared to argue the answer right off the bat. Truthfully, he does this, but I didn’t see this happen there. Just that he was literally putting two and two together. And if it sounded argumentative, that was far from his intention.
And while I’m all for the united front, my husband was soon talking over my son who he perceived as “talking back” (he was explaining himself), and soon imitating our son (which came across as “mocking” to me though not to my husband). So of course I relay what I heard but it seems to make no difference. My father-in-law is calm and seeming to understand it the same way as me.. I think. It’s all a whirlwind.
Our 10 year old is getting more and more upset and it escalated into him throwing the basketball at his father pretty hard. It hit his arm. Son storms off.
I’m just at a loss. Subsequent conversations with husband are highly unproductive. My son did initiate a “sorry for throwing the ball at you” conversation, which honestly I was impressed by. I certainly don’t condone that behaviour but thought he was pretty well provoked by my husband… (who should’ve, in my eyes, modeled some mindfulness, taken a deep breath, and considered he may have misinterpreted the whole thing). Especially when his wife chimes in gently to suggest it didn’t happen the way he thinks.
But even after husband and son have a chat, husband maintains he doesn’t believe our son. (Because if he did, it would call for an apology, right??)
Despite what I saw, his stubbornness on this issue has planted a seed of doubt in me, as I know I’ve misinterpreted my share of events before. But. Why is there no shred of doubt in him that he got it wrong? He claims that i’m not always right (this isn’t what this is about to me), and that I’m super defensive of our child. Something he has been saying a lot about me lately, more generally.
He was acting pissy at our son for an hour after he had apologized. Such as (according to our son) saying “So?” as a response to our son saying he and I got a record of 106 playing catch with a hacky sack.
I’m sour about this whole thing, especially that my husband didn’t apologize himself for his poor handling of the situation. Am I overreacting? Is there anything I could do to smooth this over?
If you read my post from last month about being abroad and my husband freezing me out, well, hi, I’m here again, and I didn’t serve the divorce papers. Choosing instead to work it out. But that’s a whole other story.