I need to write about my feelings over and after Thanksgiving to try to understand my anger and frustration.

I was very upset about Josh spending so much time hiding in our room during the Thanksgiving holiday when his parents and sister were here. I was also very upset at how uncivil he was to his mother and sister. I was embarrassed by his behavior. I was confused about his wanting to have them here before they came and then not responding well when they showed up. I was angry that I felt like I had to do so much of the "hosting" by myself, when it was his family visiting.

We were both emotionally exhausted when they left. Josh wanted to deal with it with time by himself. I wanted to deal with it with time together, particularly when so much of my exhaustion was stemming from him--It is exhausting to have negative emotions toward him and I wanted to replace them with positive emotions. Josh was the one who got his way and his time alone. I understand that we function in very different ways, but I was still extremely hurt by this, on top of the negative emotions I had from earlier. Now that he's ready to spend time together, I hardly even want to, I'm so angry at him. I don't know how to express to him why I am upset, since he doesn't ever seem to understand how I can still be upset a whole week and a half later... but of course, I didn't want to talk with him about it at the time since he was really busy fighting over the stupidest things with everyone else who was around, and I didn't have the energy to deal with fighting with him when he was clearly not being capable of behaving rationally. I had hoped that continuing to be nice would give me the opportunity to figure out what was wrong to cause him to behave so horribly and help correct it constructively... but since what he wanted was to be left alone, that didn't really work very well. Instead, I just got to feel even more neglected.

Yeah, we have spent some quality time together since Thanksgiving doing things I wanted to do, but he has been so unenthusiastic about it. It's just not fun when it feels like he doesn't want to be there... when it feels like he'd rather be else where or doing something else, I just do not feel loved.

I was also very deeply hurt by the apology Josh made to his parents about not coming home for Christmas this year. It made it sound, to me, like if Josh had had his way, we would have spent Thanksgiving with my parents and Christmas with his. The thing is, Josh did have his way--it was *his* choice and *his* desire to have Thanksgiving with his parents and Christmas with mine (okay, he might have prefered to spend both with his parents, but he very much had his choice of which major holiday to spend with his parents this year). If he was a single person acting on his own, this would have been a totally reasonable and totally forgivable white lie... but as a married man, it naturally makes me out as the bad guy... as having drawn him away against his will. If it was true, it would still be infuriating to me, but as a purposely (or at least carelessly) given false impression, it is worse. Especially given right there in front of me, without any prior warning.

It also continues to make me angry the way coming home for every other Christmas is something he feels the need to apologize about. I think they should be greatful for our company one Christmas out of two. I don't think I will ever get over hating the way he sees visiting his parents on Christmas day as some sort of obligation... some sort of obligation that he doesn't even begin to meet by visiting them for December 17 - 23rd.