Like a lump of clay

I've been carrying on a number of different conversational threads with D, lately.

One has been about her asking her husband for a divorce; this thread has mostly been an unsatisfying failure for both of us, and I won't try to post about it until I can see it in some kind of clarity.

A second has been about when we can see each other again. Now it just so happens that a couple days ago I was asked when I would be available for a business trip abroad next spring; and the week which would be most convenient for Wife turns out to be the only time that D can get away from work for an entire week without being conspicuous. There are a lot of other people's schedules to coordinate as well, so nothing is certain ... but it was a pleasant coincidence.

That's not till spring, however -- months away. So apparently, while D was on the phone with Wife today, she suggested -- with a breathtaking audacity that I cannot help but admire -- that she fly out to visit us some time between Christmas and New Year's, in order to help Wife with all of the household projects that hang around unfinished and make Wife feel so powerless all the time. Wife told her, "Oh, Hosea would never put up with that. He's so controlling that he'd insist on micromanaging every little thing you did. Besides, he hates having anybody stay over at our house." D tells me it's a good thing Wife couldn't see her face. But she replied, "Well surely if I'm helping clean the house, Hosea couldn't mind too much. And as for staying over, I'll have to stay at a motel anyway, because ... well, because I'm allergic to your cats. I can be there for a few hours at a time, but you know I could never sleep there."

Now all I have to do is to be so irrationally controlling that I won't let her borrow our car for the week -- and D tells me if I ever saw her drive, I might say that anyway -- because then I would simply have to drive her back to her motel in the evening, once the day's work is done, Wife has fallen asleep, and the boys are on their ways to bed.

Unbelievable.

But in and around these more mundane topics, D has been trying to explore Wife's odd passivity, her unwillingness to take responsibility for changing the things in her surroundings that she doesn't like. And in an e-mail today she captured it remarkably well:

"I want Wife to feel less helpless and make you less wrong about these projects. There's a certain passivity that she seems to revel in; she's honest about wanting to be the submissive with Boyfriend 5, and it clearly goes beyond sexual submissiveness. I'm a bit puzzled because you have so admired her strength, but sometimes I think that true strong willed people can put the past in perspective and work hard at forgiveness. Still hurt and angry at her father for not taking her to Disneyland when she was nine? There's a deep sadness that story evokes in me that goes far beyond his action and my compassion goes to the young girl, now middle aged woman who feels that the fantasy of a "magic kingdom" was forever denied her. Shadows...of a world, far away, always green, where idealism and family devotion fight injustice."

In response, I wrote:

"I am intrigued by what you say about Wife's passivity. Of course you are right, just as you are right that it is linked somehow to her inability to give up the past. In this respect, it is as if she sits like a lump of clay, and whatever hits the clay leaves a mark on it. But think about it -- once a rock has made a deep mark in a lump of clay, you can never get it out again ... not without reshaping the whole ball of clay. That's one thing that I have always found deeply frustrating ... that when I do something inadvertently to hurt Wife, there is absolutely no way to undo it. Five years later, in the midst of a fight about something else, I will be reminded of the time when .... And I know this the second after I've done whatever thoughtless deed it was and seen the hurt register on her face. It's terrible -- it makes me feel helpless and trapped, like a character in some Greek tragedy who has just set in motion (by chance) the blind fate that will now unwind relentlessly until it undoes him. In past years, this accounted for a lot of my shouting ... because it was the cry of a trapped animal who just now realizes he is trapped. (Then of course Wife would follow up the original hurt with, "Besides, you're always shouting at me." Sigh.)

"Wow. Where did that come from? Sorry, I was trying to go down a different path. What I think is so interesting is that I have known this all along, ... and yet if you had asked me to describe Wife in words, I would never have included "passivity" as part of the picture. And I wonder why not? Because I didn't want it to be true? Because I had persuaded myself that it wasn't part of the "real Wife"? I think it must be something like that, because I am pretty sure that I have felt for years, somewhere under the surface, "Can you stop playing this passivity game and get back to being YOU? Get back to being the woman I married?" And yet, I think now that if I were to ponder long enough I would be able to find the same passivity even back then in the woman I married."

Is there ever a point where we stop learning new things about the people who have been central to our lives for over half our lives? And how is it possible that I always knew something like this and yet never knew that I knew it? There is something very mysterious about knowing other people ....

Or maybe it's just me. Or her. I bet not, though.
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