It’s that time of year! Football season is here!

I’m already dizzy from the head-to-head combat – of course I’m talking about my husband and me.   

The minute pre-season games start, I bristle. My husband loses all sense of time and priorities when his precious Patriots are on the screen. Need to have a family discussion? Not happening. Chores to be done?Only if they can happen in front of a television.

And so I get myself all worked into a frenzy over the gall my husband has to carve out three hours for himself each week. The soundtrack in my head goes something like this:

“Well it would be lovely for me to just plop down in front of the television for three hours… it must be nice for SOME people to just do whatever they like even though the house looks like a tornado hit it…. Oh I’d love to say a short good night to the kids when my favorite show is on…”  on and on it goes.  

Sometimes I even hiss at him as he watches the games.

This lasts a week or two until the inevitable happens…

I listen to myself.

And I remember I do have the choice to take three hours off in the middle of the weekend.

The problem isn’t that my husband carves out some much-needed me-time for himself. The problem is I don’t. Or at least I don’t during that crazed back-to-school time when it seems there is absolutely not enough hours in the day to fill out all the forms the school sends home.

And of course my husband doesn’t complete the forms properly so I do them. There are lots of things I do that “my-husband-can’t-do-properly-so-I-do-it.” And pretty soon when all those things-he-can’t-do start to pile up and I haven’t had a moment to myself the world comes crashing in because (gasp) my husband has the gall to watch football.

So here I am in week three. My sanity has returned thanks to a couple of weekend movies, a night out with a girlfriend and a few yoga classes. My me-time has returned and so my husband doesn’t look like a selfish beast for grabbing his.

I’d like to say next year I’ll know better but I won’t. I’ve come a long way in this area but this has happened four years in a row so I’m not holding out hope my back-to-school amnesia won’t kick in.

The good news is that it used to take me until Halloween to realize why I felt my husband was the lowest form of humanity simply because he watched football. Now I can usually figure out that my hissing is in direct proportion to how well I’m taking care of myself in just a few short weeks.

What about you? Any chance one of your husband’s irritating self-indulgences has more to do with you than it does with him?  Yeah I know, that question hits where it hurts but if you get to the other side of the answer there may be a little piece of bliss waiting for you. What do you think?