I.O.U.

I think that everything I have written in this blog till now has given a more or less one-sided account of my marriage, because on the whole I have been most prolix when I have been angry or upset. While I have tried to offer a little balance by indicating reasons Wife has for being upset with me, that just adds to the mistaken impression that our life is one of unending conflict. I have not written much about what is good in our home.

I suspect I am too tired to do the subject justice right now, and it should be thought out to be done right. Therefore this post is an IOU for other posts, to be written soon. One of them, in the spirit of recent posts by Melted Candy and Coquette [I'm sure I've seen others but can't find them at the moment], will be a post describing the good things about Wife: the things that made me fall in love with her in the first place, the things that have kept me loving her all these years, the things on whose account I have always found her to be the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Even when I longed to deck her out of frustration.

Another will be a post that characterizes somehow what life is like around here day by day. I get comments to my posts saying that I "put up with a lot" -- but you know, it's really not a war zone. We're a home and a family. We have our problems, but who doesn't? So I think I should give a picture of the day-by-day, as a corrective to the other stuff I have said.

I might write a third post, too, but I don't really know what I would say in it or where it would go. In the last year or so, Wife has gone through a lot of changes. She has lost a lot of weight fairly quickly; she sleeps 12 hours a day; she moves slower; she talks slower. Her voice has changed: for years she had, as she herself put it, "the world's bitchiest voice" [too true!]; now it is low and husky. Her balance is no longer good; nor is her short-term memory. The weight loss has left so much loose skin that, at age 46, she looks 66; she looks frail, for God's sake -- frail for the first time in the quarter century we've been together, frail for the first time since bloody Fifth Grade! (I've seen pictures of her girlhood.) I don't know what this means. It seems like she is changing into somebody else, somebody different from the woman I have always known, right before my eyes. And I don't understand it. So this third post, if I write it, will describe the before-and-after as exactly as I can, and maybe try to come to some kind of understanding about it. I hope I can.

Meanwhile all I can give you is an IOU.