On power, reflecting Kyra

For two weeks I have wanted to respond adequately to Kyra's post "on women's liberation." For one week I have wanted to respond adequately to her post "on power." I knew they would require more or less the same post from me in reply, and that it would be a lot of typing. I'm still afraid it will be a lot of typing, and I'm not exactly sure where I want to go with it. Yes, I've heard many times that if you don't know where you want to go, you're likely to end up somewhere else. I think it is an occupational hazard in blogging.

The topic is the balance of power in our marriage; also, the balance of housework. In my mind -- at least in a perfect world -- these should have nothing to do with each other. In Wife's mind they have everything to do with each other! They also relate closely to her self-perception as a victim, and as a failure, and as useless to the world, and all that depressed stuff.

One caveat, before I get too far. Much of what I describe is how things have traditionally been, or how they were for years in the past. I'm not sure how true this is today. Wife has been going through a lot of changes recently, and I don't know where she is headed. So by the time you read this, everthing I say in the post may be out of date.

Where do I start?

Maybe with a quote. Kyra describes herself as follows:

I am known as one of the most influential people in my large department of my quite large company. I am known as completely competent. If I have a known weakness it is for my passionate perspectives and unwavering convictions. Oh and for being a bit of a bitch at times.

Even in my personal life I am known as a confident person. I have friends who have admitted to being intimidated by me. It's astonishing to me, but I get it. I am both smart and knowledgeable. I am an extremely effective communicator. I know a lot about politics and with friends I discuss it they are often afraid to disagree with me because I know of which I speak. It is that way with many things.

I have been referred to as unapproachable. And I cannot truly understand this. But the person who told this to me specifically referred to this confidence that I exude.

When I read this, my first thought was, "She's talking about Wife!" It was followed almost immediately by the thought, "No, she's talking about the woman Wife always wanted to be and never quite was." But she almost made it, in a number of respects:

• Wife has passionate perspectives and unwavering convictions.


• People have been calling Wife a bitch since ... high school? Grade school? I don't know really, but since long before I ever met her.


• Some of Wife's friends are intimidated by her. Also a significant number of her non-friends. "Unapproachable" describes how a lot of people have seen her over many years.


• Wife is very smart. "Knowledgeable" is a bit iffier ... she believes herself to be very knowledgeable, but every so often it turns out that she "knows" something which is obviously false. On the other hand she knows so much that is true that it is genuinely disturbing when this happens.

Notwithstanding all these strengths, Wife was never able to transmute them into the kind of profressional success that Kyra appears to enjoy. No doubt there have been many little reasons here and there which have contributed to the outcome, but I think the big reasons are three.

• Wife has poor health. This means she has never had the stamina to maintain a gruelling job for long enough to succeed at it. For all her competence and ambition, she could never have made it as a junior attorney, nor as a medical resident, nor -- her true love -- as a musician. (Training to become a doctor would have had the added liability that it would have put her around so many sick people.) Her illnesses stretched her Master's program from one year to two; when she went for a second Master's in a different subject, she got sick enough before her qualifying exams that she couldn't remember a word of what she had studied ... but she was nonetheless (to all appearances) well enough to take the test. She never got that second Master's degree.


• Wife's mental illness was never diagnosed before she was thirty. Result? She made a number of very important career decisions on the basis of a firm intuitional conviction that such-and-such was what she was meant to do ... "meant" by God or Providence or Fate or whom exactly, was never quite clear. Of course, strictly speaking I can't prove she was wrong. Guided by this firm intuition about her fate, she turned down -- at the very last minute -- a full scholarship to a prestigious graduate school to teach for one year at a second-rate high school near where she was living at the time. On the other hand, had she accepted the scholarship, she would have left town only one or two weeks before she and I met. For years she was convinced that this was because we were fated to marry. And I guess she could have been right.


• Wife has poor interpersonal skills. Specifically, she has a lot of trouble reading what other people mean when they say things [so it's not just me -- nya nya nyaah!], and she is significantly worse than average at figuring out the right thing to say back to them. She will respond to what she thinks people meant with what she thinks is an appropriate reply; but when she is wrong about what they meant, and also wrong about the right way to answer even a person who actually meant that, her conversations often seem to be a little off somehow. In the first place, this is obviously a liability in advancing in any career. In the second place, it means that she has always sought out small companies to work in, rather than large ones. After all in a large company, you have to be able to play the interpersonal games well to get hired and to get ahead; in a small company, there is a greater chance that you can get ahead because of native intelligence, and that you might get hired (and retained) regardless of any questionable personality quirks. I bet the University would have been more gracious about making allowances for her health conditions if she hadn't already alienated so many people by the time that she needed the rules bent over her Master's exam.

There are people who live happy lives without advancing up a career ladder, but Wife was never going to be one of these. When she was a little girl, her family was very poor. They went without a lot. There were years in which Wife was proud that she was small enough and limber enough to contribute to her family's larder by jumping into the dumpster behind the local grocery store and fishing out perfectly good food which the store had discarded: bread that was stale but not yet moldy, celery that was kind of wilted but fine in soup, ... that sort of thing. Unsurprisingly, they also lived in a shitty neighborhood with a high crime rate. So Wife vowed to herself early on that somehow -- come hell or high water -- she was going to have a better life as an adult. Since she learned very young that she was always the smartest kid in school, she decided she would use her brains to get her out of that crappy neighborhood and into the upper middle class. Then, as she saw her older sisters marry losers one after another -- losers who beat them and impregnated them and then lost their jobs and ran away -- she vowed further that she would never, never, never let herself be dependent on anybody. She would pull herself up out of the gutter under her own strength, she would triumph over all the obstacles Fate had thrown in her way, and she would owe nuthin' to nobody.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. When we first married, Wife's earning power was higher than mine. By the time our second son was born, she was making maybe half what I was ... in other words, about a third of our household income. (I think that's close to right -- I don't remember the exact numbers.) Then eight years ago she had to go out on permanent Disability. Today she collects some money each month from Social Security, but nothing else. She never worked at any place big enough to offer pensions; for the most part she never worked at places big enough to offer 401K plans. When she did, she never quite took advantage of the plan before something happened and she had to move on to the next job.

Leaving work to go out on Disability was hugely traumatic for Wife. The day she told her boss, she asked me to go in with her and she wept uncontrollably through the entire five-minute interview. Her entire self-image was shattered. It may indeed have been the biggest single blow I have seen her endure. She has had isolated moments of greater anguish, to be sure; but it is hard for me to think of events that have meant so much to her in the long run. Leaving graduate school for good, losing her mother to cancer -- these might almost compete. But the multiple surgeries, the screaming fits when she has trashed the bedroom or the kitchen, even her psychiatric hospitalization or her arrest -- none of these seem to have caused the same kind of tectonic shift in her world that she underwent by leaving work.

We have all heard of men who identified so strongly with their jobs -- with their roles as productive wage earners -- that when they finally have to retire they are left with no purpose in life and die after a couple of months. In many ways, Wife as just like one of those men. She couldn't quite lie down and die, because we had two small children who needed her -- at that time, they were both still in diapers and the younger one had only recently stopped nursing. But it did me no good to try to encourage her by suggesting that she could build new purposes for herself -- and after all, it's not as if her life would be useless because I still needed her and the boys certainly needed a Mommy.

"You don't need me!" she would shriek back. "If I died you could go marry some other woman, who could do things, and who could be productive and contribute to the world, and who was pretty, and whom you could be proud of ... instead of the useless old wreck you are saddled with now!"

And while I tried to collect my bearings from this blast she would fire the other barrel.

"And as for being a Mommy -- sure, I can stay at home and be a Mommy! No problem! But why did I bother working so hard and spending all those years in college and graduate school, if all I was ever going to accomplish in life was to become a Mommy? Why did I go to the trouble to claw my way out of the slums, if all I was ever going to amount to was to become a Mommy? Think of all the trouble I could have saved! Any girl with a cunt and a uterus can do that. There were girls in my high school who were already mommies before graduation -- so it's not like that's any special achievement. They couldn't read, they couldn't do basic math, but by God they could spread their legs and become mommies! And now I'm no better than they are! Go on, Hosea, make me feel good about this. You're telling me that I have fallen back into a pit I swore I would leave forever -- that I am no better than girls who were hateful to me, and whom I swore I would leave in my dust -- that I am just the same as those illiterate sluts that I worked so hard to get away from! Thanks a lot, Hosea! Thanks for making me even more miserable about this! Thanks for showing me that I am totally trapped -- that I have nowhere to turn -- that everything I have strived for in my entire life has failed! That's just great!"

I never knew what to say when she got like this. The vitriol, the hatred, the raw loathing were all so intense that anything I tried to say was wrong and all I could do was hold on until she ran out of steam and fell asleep. And then I would hope that tomorrow she'd feel better. And of course ultimately her joblessness became the new status quo. But it took a while.

Of course at another level she understood perfectly well that she was sick, and that there was no way she could stand up to the rigors of the workplace any longer. Indeed, for a long time before she finally quit working, she lamented that she felt she was really too sick to work, and that she felt trapped into having to work (!) because we needed the money. This was another rant where I could never say anything right.

• If I tried to tell her that she shouldn't work if she was so sick, and that some how we would find a way to get by without her income, then I was being unrealistic.


• If I tried to spell out a few calculations to suggest how we might be able to swing it, that proved that her contribution to the family was negligible and irrelevant (because we could live without it), and therefore she herself was useless and a waste and a failure.


• If I turned around and said that no, of course she was important to the family because her income was (after all) a respectable fraction of our household income, that proved that she couldn't afford to quit working even though she was really too sick to work -- and didn't I have any idea how sick she was?

Yes, actually, it had crossed my mind once or twice.

I should add that Wife isn't this irrational about everything. My point is, rather, that this particular topic hits very, very close to home for her.

Time goes on. And today, Wife no longer rails against being deprived of the working world -- she looks back on it nostalgically, but she knows she is never going back. Wife no longer rails against being a Mommy -- she understands not only that the boys need a Mommy, but that this is the one job still open to her, so she may as well do the best she can with it. She helps out on PTA committees, she makes cupcakes for bake sales, she drives the boys to their endless after-school commitments. In her heart I think she still resents the role, but -- for all her other neuroses -- she does love the boys unconditionally, boundlessly, and (so far as it is possible) selflessly. There may be no-one else on earth that she loves this way, but she loves them. And she even realizes (at least intellectually) that it will do the boys no favors if she lets her own demons interfere with her ability to help out on Outdoor School Day or the Community Relations Committee. So she shakes her head, mutters under her breath sarcastic (if not spiteful) things about her fellow parents, ... but does the work and smiles when she delivers the cupcakes.

Her motivation at home, where the rest of the PTA can't see, is correspondingly less. She doesn't like doing housework -- it brings back too many memories of helping her mother clean other women's houses for a pittance. And she cannot (as one of my former coworkers put it) "get into the zen of it." So for the most part she does as little as she possibly can. She makes our bed, because she can't stand to see it a mess. She does the laundry every week. She makes dinner more often than I do these days (although for a couple decades it was the other way around); this also means she often has to clean up the dishes before she can start. But I do the mopping; Son 2 does the vacuuming; and nobody dusts.

For the most part, this is fine with me. In the abstract it would be nicer to live in a cleaner house, where more of the clutter was put away more regularly. But it is not important enough to me to trade away Wife's fragile and hard-won equanimity about her lot. Wife, on the other hand, thinks I am chronically nagging her to do more housework. For a long time, this accusation baffled me. I am always urging her to take it easy and do what she wants (hoping it will make her happier) -- so where does this come from?

But recently, I think I figured it out. From time to time, Wife will tell me how depressing she finds it living in this house: she is here all day without a break, the carpet is worn through in spots, the wallpaper is old and needs to be replaced, the kitchen is small and dingy ... and the place is cluttered and dirty. When she starts this litany, I try to persuade her that she is not a victim -- in other words, there are active things that she can do to make the situation better, if indeed it really bugs her. For example, she could always decide to do more housework, if that is really high on her list of priorities. When I say this, I mean it as encouragement -- "There are things you can do personally to improve your situation, so be not faint of heart." But I think it sounds to her like I am saying, "Get off your butt and do some more housework, you lazy woman!"

More generally, it is hard for me to make suggestions without her perceiving them as orders. This gets to the question where the power lies in our family; and, not surprisingly, we see it in different places. I think the power is shared; I make a point of consulting her on decisions, and I will frequently do something her way even if it's not my first choice in order to be gracious. Or because I am afraid of her temper ... take your pick. Wife, on the other hand, is convinced that I have all the power because I am the one with the income; so if I muse idly "Gee, wouldn't it be nice some day if we ...," she takes that to mean "Do it today. That's an order. And if it's not done by the time I come home, I'm going to scream at you." The miscommunications can be frustrating.

They are all the more frustrating because they feed on each other; each one sets up the next one. I have told you that Wife thinks I bully her. For my part, I can't see it at all. Do I ask her to do things? Sure, why not? Everybody asks people to do things, as favors. And because I assume that we share power, it never occurs to me that she'll take it any other way. But since she thinks I have all the power, those requests sound like orders. When she finally tells me that I'm always bossing her around and I respond with bewilderment, she'll cite a dozen or two of these instances as proof that I have always ordered her around in the past, so it is only logical for her to assume that I am ordering her around now. Trying to tell her that I wasn't ordering her around back then doesn't do me a lot of good, because from an emotional point of view the damage is done. Maybe that wasn't what I thought I meant, but it is how she remembered the event -- and that has colored how she will understand the next one.

I think this is more or less what Kyra was talking about when she wrote:

But here's the thing about power of this kind - no one can give you power. There is only the power you take for yourself and the power you give away to others. But there is no way of reasoning with someone in this state of mind. This logic will not reach them because their responses are completely illogical. And they are based on fear.

Wife says I was a lot nicer to her back when she had a job. Her interpretation is that I had more respect back when she was productive and working, and therefore was more likely to treat her as an equal. My perception is that I have not changed how I treat her (except insofar as she has become progressively more neurotic), but that the big difference is that she had more self-respect back then and was therefore more willing to treat my casual requests as casual requests. As she lost most or all of her own self-respect, her whole attitude became more and more servile; and she started seeing the same casual requests as tyrannical mandates.

It's a bad cycle, but I don't know how to break it.