A grumbler or a grumble

This morning I took Son 2 to an athletics class he has attended for years. He was sour and grumbling about it before we left, but often that's just a sign of waking up slowly on the weekends. Only he persisted in being sour and grumbling about it afterwards, which is not so common.

As I write this, I realize that maybe there is just something else wrong right now, something outside the class. Maybe, as D has suggested, Son 2 has picked up on the very shut-down dynamic between Wife and me, and is responding emotionally to what must be a very threatening situation.

But what worries me is that Son 2 may be learning Wife's habit of complaining about everything.

There are plenty of times he is still chipper and happy. He's bright and has a delightful and zany sense of humor. And there are times that he reminds me so forcibly of myself at that age that the resemblance is uncanny. His voice even sounds like mine did; and the long, drawn-out bizarre ideas are familiar too.

But when he starts his long tired whinings he sounds just exactly like Wife.

Less viscerally, it is just that I think I see the possibilities for depression (not surprising since both of his parents suffer from it), and I think he sometimes assists the growth of a depressive outlook by focussing on what he hates about a situation instead of what he likes about it. And this focus is in some ways a choice. Yes, of course depression has a biological and chemical aspect as well. There is no doubt about that. But it is also true that you can choose to talk yourself into a depressive state when you weren't feeling bad before, just by what you choose to focus on. I've done it myself, and I've watched Wife do it, so I know it is a risk. And I bring it up now, not by way of criticizing Son 2, but because I wish I knew some way to teach him how to find the nuggets of joy in even very bleak situations; or more practically (since "bleak" may be a little extreme to describe our lives most of the time), how to find a way to get through even situations that he doesn't much care for, and how to see the things in them that can be pleasant.

This is a survival skill. I honestly believe that one of the reasons Wife has decayed into the merest shell of a woman these days is that she has chosen so resolutely to focus on what makes her miserable. She may not have been able to help being born with a depressive genetic pattern, but she has also done nothing to struggle against it -- nothing to prepare her to see unexpected grace when it flits by, nor even to strengthen a kind of stoical doggedness. The story that she tells herself about her life is a story of passive victimization by one bad thing after another, to the point that she can't see anything else. It is a hell of a way to live. And I don't want it for Son 2.

The whole direction where this kind of life leads is captured nicely in a scene from C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, and I think one does not need any kind of religious faith whatever to play along with the story and see where it goes. The spirit of a grumpy old woman -- for the time being assigned to Hell -- is visiting Heaven on a vacation (it's a story) and can't leave off griping. The narrator (himself only a visitor) and one of the denizens of Heaven are discussing her:

"I am troubled, Sir, because that unhappy creature doesn't seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn't wicked: she's only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling ...."

"That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she will certainly be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler."

"I should have thought there was no doubt about that!"

"Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman - even the least trace of one - still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there's one wee spark under all those ashes, we'll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there's nothing but ashes we'll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up."

"But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?"

"The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences ... it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, may embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, not even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine...."

As I say, it's a hell of a way to live.