Providence steps into Counseling 34

So he spoke. And the anger came on Peleus’ son, and within
his shaggy breast the heart was divided two ways, pondering
whether to draw from beside his thigh the sharp sword, driving
away all those who stood between and kill the son of Atreus,
or else to check the spleen within and keep down his anger.
Now as he weighed in his mind and spirit these two courses
and was drawing from its scabbard the great sword, Athene descended
from the sky ... [and] standing behind Peleus’ son caught him by the fair hair.
“I have come down to stay your anger – ....”

Iliad, Book I, ll. 188-195, 197, 207; tr. Richmond Lattimore

My prayer life has been feeling really disconnected lately. That sounds either meaningless or pretentious, but I don’t know how else to say what I am trying to get at. What I mean is that when I get away from all the noise in my life (say, out for a walk late at night) and spend time reflecting on what I am doing and where I am headed (maybe not too far wrong to call it a kind of prayer), I sometimes get a sense that I am where I ought to be, that I am somehow connected to a live circuit, even occasionally that I might hear something on the other end. But not lately. I have tried the experiment, going out for a late night walk and thinking about my upcoming plans for divorce, and all I have “heard” is dead, empty silence. I don’t claim to be intuitive enough to have some kind of right to anything else, but all the same I have noticed.

And then today I had a peculiar coincidence drop into my lap. Last week, Counselor had called me while Wife was in his office for her regular session, asking if I would be willing to join them today just to talk about where we are and where we are going. I agreed, even though I figured it was a waste of time. I already knew where I was going. I had already retained an attorney, I had asked her to draw up papers, ... things were moving forward. But I hadn’t told anybody about it yet, except for D and you. Nor did I want to say anything yet; I figured I would keep the service of papers a surprise.

Now for no particularly good reason, my attorney is in another city. (She was recommended by D’s brother, who is in the business; she seemed smart and capable when I met her; and I didn’t have the initiative to find somebody closer.) And when she drew up the initial papers – a petition to the Court for dissolution of marriage, a summons, and so on – she pointed out that they require an original signature. So her office mailed them to me ... at my work address, I hasten to add. The forms went out Monday. They probably should have arrived Tuesday or at the latest Wednesday, but in fact they didn’t show up till today (Thursday), about half an hour before I was scheduled to leave for Counselor’s office. The plan was for me to sign them and drop them immediately back in the mail; then when they arrive back at my attorney’s office, she will have them formally served on Wife. I was all set to do just that, and I was noting the irony that we would be discussing “where we want to go from here” just after I had dropped forms into the mailbox that would make the discussion moot and the choice of direction irrevocable ... when I noticed a couple of typographical errors on the forms. Obviously the legal boilerplate had been cut-and-pasted from somebody else’s petition, and there were simple errors as a result. (At one place the Petitioner – that’s me – was referred to as “her”.) I wasn’t sure if the Court would accept forms with mistakes on them, so I e-mailed my attorney’s office asking what to do, tucked the forms in my desk to be processed later, and then left to go see Wife and Counselor.

I got there before Wife – does this sound familiar? – and Counselor told me she seemed to him to be really lost, confused, and frightened. Then he asked me if there were anything that I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want her to know, relevant to the question where we are going next. I didn’t answer.

When Wife arrived, the discussion started a little slowly. Wife asked about my walking out of our session a couple of months ago and said it seemed to her that this meant I wanted a divorce. I hedged a bit and said that all it really meant was that I saw no future in marriage counseling for us. Wife said a few other things, to which I replied, “Yes, you’ve been saying those things for decades and for decades I have been telling you that’s not what I mean or how I feel. So this is why I see no hope for marriage counseling for us – that I can explain myself until I am blue in the face and you still fundamentally don’t understand what I am saying. Nor ever will.” And in short order thereafter, we got to the point of agreeing that there was nothing left for us to salvage.

What then? Well, I explained that we really haven’t been talking to each other, about that or anything. And Counselor asked us to look at the situation. He reminded us that he sees a lot of divorcing couples. Some of them can work out the post-divorce arrangements by talking to each other. Others do it all through lawyers. And he put considerable emphasis on the consequences of using lawyers to solve your problems: that you never reach an end until you are out of money (at which point you get the same half-assed compromise you could have gotten tens of thousands of dollars ago); it becomes ugly and vindictive as each party tries to destroy the other; each party goes behind the other’s back to get an advantage, which means that each is afraid of the other, which means (since frightened people are most likely to lash out in dangerous ways) that each reacts to things blindly and irrationally out of fear of betrayal; and it is devastating to the children. He said that children can weather some kinds of divorces pretty well – but not this kind. Get the lawyers involved, and it is nearly guaranteed to scar them for life.

There was more. Wife was crying at the prospect that it was really all over. Counselor asked if we could promise not to take any drastic action – or any action – for a period of time, until we could talk things through. I would not promise anything. I didn’t say why I wouldn’t promise, although I bet Counselor figured it out: he is pretty shrewd, and his question before Wife arrived makes me think that he suspects I am already pursuing the legal route. All I said was that I really didn’t know. And in the end our hour was up. We agreed that Wife and I should try to talk over the weekend.

But I was left with a lot to think about. I had come within inches of taking the last step to make a legal process irrevocable: was that what I wanted to do? Really? And I have kept the whole thing a secret all along: was that how I wanted to do it?

As I mulled this session, I saw some things a little more clearly.

• I saw that I have been approaching this whole process in a spirit of hatred and anger; that I have wanted not just to separate from Wife but to destroy her, in revenge for all the pain I have felt over the years. That’s not the right way to make a decision like this.


• I saw that I have chosen to move forward along the legal track for the same reason that I hired this particular attorney – that I really haven’t known what else to do, so the whole thing has seemed pretty inevitable. That’s not the right reason to make a decision like this.

I also saw that both of these tendencies have been exacerbated by the advice I get from D. When I talk to D, the legal route looks natural, it looks like the only safe way to go, and it looks like a slam-dunk. But that doesn’t mean that D’s advice is simply true. I see several factors that could affect it.

• One is that her brother is a successful lawyer, and she gets advice from him; so naturally that advice is going to take the legal path for granted.


• Another is that she spent several years as a guardian ad litem in high-conflict divorce cases; so again, the environment seems like a natural one to her.


• A third is that Wife has done several things which have really angered D, so she is probably not able to be objective about this: Wife does something annoying and D thinks “Good luck behaving that way when you are on your own” ... and all of a sudden she starts feeling (at some not-very-conscious level) that the divorce is a punishment for how awful Wife is. So why would she want it to be easier? (I don’t say that she thinks this consciously.)


• And a fourth – you thought I’d never get to this one, huh? – is that D is in love with me and resents the hell out of Wife for living with me while D herself is far, far away. So again, at some emotional level she probably wants to punish Wife. Besides, if I make a flamboyant exit, I’ll probably be bruised and bloody from the experience, and need someone gentle and loving to bind up my wounds. Who better than D? And if her gentle ministrations convinced me that I was wrong about delaying remarriage, if I somehow decided that I wanted to marry her right away, ... well that could hardly be an outcome she would want to discourage, could it? (Again, I don’t say that she thinks this consciously. But I would be a fool not to allow for it.)

So I have been doing this all wrong. And I need to slow down and think. I need to remember some things that I know, but that I have failed to keep in mind:

• from Socrates, that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it;


• from Julian of Norwich, that “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well”;


• from B, that “Everything will be all right in the end; if it's not all right, it's not the end.” She’s right, you know.

Once long ago, I hired a man who turned out to have lied on his job application by inventing a degree he didn’t really have. When our HR department found out, they told me and asked what I wanted to do; they also reminded me that the application is a legal document, so that lying on it is perjury. In other words, if I wanted to fire him, I had every legal right to do it. I spent a couple of days thinking it over ... and over ... and finally came to a decision. I called him into my office and told him that I knew. I asked him if he had ever even set foot on the campus of the school from which he claimed the degree, and he said Yes but he just didn’t graduate. So I added, “You don’t actually need a degree for the job you applied for, but integrity is nonnegotiable. Therefore I’m going to extend your probationary period, and I want you to bring me some solid evidence that the story you are telling me now is true ... in other words, that you did attend the place once. A transcript, a student body card ... something.” He did it. And he was a good employee. Sometimes the legal route, the one you have every right in the world to take, isn’t the most productive.

I had forgotten that story until just tonight. It happened years ago. But maybe I need to remember it a little more often. It can be really hard to negotiate with Wife, because often she insists on things that make no sense. But I have to try harder.