M:     Raised Voices Can Mean So Many Different Things. 

      The fact that a relationship between me, a 5’2” professional peacekeeper (aka mediator) and my 6’3” fiery-tempered husband even survived past our first fight was actually pretty amazing, considering the odds against that happening. 

      He was raised in a family where they expressed themselves loudly, spoke without filters, and where disagreements were an accepted part of the day. 

      I was raised in a large, loud family where you simply did not raise your voice in anger.  My parents went so far as to hire a babysitter so they could sit in the car, in a shopping center parking lot, to have any disagreements.  And no, I really am not making this up.  My mother’s Dad apparently had some “anger management issues,” and many nights my mother held and comforted her younger sister upstairs while he raged downstairs at my Grandmother.  She made my Dad promise when they married that they would not argue in front of us.  While great in theory, we were not fooled.  We clearly knew we were not The Brady Bunch.  And it wasn’t the best way to teach us how to express and manage anger or frustration, or even that those are normal emotions. My early forays into dating ended abruptly at the first signs of disagreement.  Having never really witnessed my parents get angry and then make-up,  to my terribly idealistic teenage mind any disagreement clearly meant it was not love.   

      Although I had figured out the whole, “to fight and then make-up is normal” dynamic by the time I met my husband, I was completely unprepared for the interactions between his family members.  So many times in our first few years together we would be visiting at one of his brothers’ homes when all of a sudden voices would rise and people would start interrupting each other, their hands flailing to emphasize points being made; all in a language I did not speak nor understand.  It seemed reasonable to me at the time to apply the, “If it sounds like fighting, and it looks like fighting, then it must be fighting” test.  So I would nervously grab his hand, sure that some horrible argument was underway, only to have him start translating a story they were telling or a memory that two of them remembered slightly differently.  Of course he would also tell his family that I thought they were arguing and angry because they had gotten so loud.  For some reason, every time, they all thought that was really funny.   

      Raised voices will always make me uncomfortable simply because I associate them with raised emotions, even after all these years.  But now, instead of nudging my husband with my elbow and nervously asking, “What are they fighting about?”  I know to ask, “What story are they telling this time?”