Tenth date

Travelling two full days (a day each way) to spend two and a half days together sounds a little crazy, but it has been a magical weekend.

I had a trip to make for business. So I made a reservation for D at the same time, to come to the same city to meet me.

We're coming from different places, but we each had a really long flight. To make things more unsettled, we didn't really know until the day we left whether our planes would be flying or not. But at the last minute the day dawned clear and the skies were open and away we went.

We met in International City on Friday evening: got dinner, checked into the hotel. Saturday we strolled through museums and art galleries downtown, bought ice cream from a little shop on the street when the day got too hot, lingered in the late afternoon at an outdoor cafe over a couple of glasses of wine, stopped in at the big church downtown so D could attend Saturday evening Mass, ate a late dinner, and discovered a hole-in-the-wall jazz club where we sat until midnight sipping and savoring. Sunday we strolled all day through a huge park I had never before discovered in all the times I have visited International City, past families picnicking and children playing and lovers reclining on the lush lawns totally wrapped up in each other. We climbed to the top of a tall observation tower that swayed in the wind, ate lunch and drank wine at one of the little cafes that dot the inside of the park, and found a soft spot on the lawn where we could lie back with each other and whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears and drowse. Then Monday morning, D flew back home to her crazy job, and I went into the office to do the work that my company is paying me for.

And the sex was wonderful -- intense, passionate. We had so little time together, and (unlike some times) we did plenty of other things. And yet somehow we managed to make time for each other: Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday night, Monday morning.

(deep contented sigh)

And we talked.

We talked about the job D had applied for -- in our town teaching at the school where the boys now attend (and where Son 2 will still go next year). She was turned down for the job, and she told me that she sees a silver lining. Although her current job is lunatic on many levels, she realized that teaching so nearby would put a great strain on Son 2. After all, there's no way Wife could avoid knowing, and these days Wife has nothing good to say about D. So how would Son 2 withstand it, when D would be pleasant to him every day (even if she didn't teach him directly) and then Wife would fill his ears with poisonous lies about her every night? Son 2 is a kind, sensitive, caring boy; better not to put him in such a bind.

We talked about my someday divorce, and D acknowledged that -- for all the impatience and insecurity she has sometimes expressed, for all the immediacy we both felt for it -- the thing won't happen right away. It's going to be a couple of years in the future, at any rate, maybe once Son 2 enters high school. But it won't be tomorrow.

We talked about all the times D has told me she admires my kindness to Wife. I explained that I assume this is humbug -- that D often says this sort of thing when she is obviously depressed, and that it sounds to me for all the world like, "Sure, you're kind to her! Never mind that I'm the one who really loves you; just go right ahead and ignore me. I don't mind ...!" D admitted that she often says this when she is depressed, but added that she really does mean it. She explained that when she gets sad and morose and self-pitying, she has trained herself to look for something -- anything -- that she can describe as positive. (This may explain her thoughts about not getting that job, above.) So this is just a part of that.

And we talked about sex.

D reminded me -- joyfully -- that only 3% of the population has sex every single day. I have no idea where she gets her statistic, but she obviously relishes it when she can join that small elite.

D explained that every time she has ended a relationship, it has been over sex ... basically, because there wasn't enough of it for her. And yet, she went on, what she has always wanted out of the sex has been stimulation and union on every level: physical and orgasmic, but also intellectual and spiritual. She went on to say something kind of odd: that whenever she has had a relationship that was "just about the sex," then "the falseness showed up in other aspects of the relationship, outside of bed." I don't know what this means, and I may not be remembering it right. (We had both been drinking a fair bit of wine by then.) But I think I want to mull it for a while.

And D added that she finds sex profoundly revealing -- that the act of fucking has brought every one of her lovers to reveal exactly who he really is. I wanted to know what she meant, and of course I hoped she might tell me what she sees in me. But the example she gave built on things that we have earlier discussed about Wife: namely, that her lying immobile and unresponsive during sex is directly related to her passivity in the rest of life. When I pressed the question about myself, she smiled and said it seemed to her that my love had really changed in this date -- that I was a lot closer to her, that I was putting less distance between us, that I was not reserving my options the way she felt I had done before. Gosh, have I really changed? Maybe not, she admitted. Maybe it is just that only now is she willing to believe that I really do love her. Maybe it is just that only now is she willing to put down her fear of disappointment and trust in the love that I express to her.

Maybe that's it.

In any event, it was a magical weekend. We'll have to do that again some tme.

Two conversations with Wife

Very briefly, a couple of conversations from last week.

Last Saturday:

The dicussion started when Wife changed into her nightgown without asking Son2 to leave the room first, and I expressed a measure of shock (after he had left for bed) that she didn't see the need for tighter boundaries around the possibility of exposing her body to her adolescent sons. For a while we went around in fairly conventional circles, with her arguing (in a way that totally missed the point) that her casualness about bodily exposure was somehow a body-friendly and body-accepting attitude. I argued the contrary, that the failure to care when or whether she exposed herself was in fact a sign of disrespecting the body, ... of disdaining it as not worthy to be protected by basic boundaries of decency.

The interesting part is that I think I finally got her to see that her attitudes are profoundly anti-corporeal at a very deep level. Oh, she will say that she affirms the physical, because she thinks that's what good liberals do. But in fact her stock line when I suggest she should cover up a little more is "It's only a body."

Only. A. Body.

I parsed this for her and showed her that a remark like that can only mean that she regards the Body as an "It", an object, a thing, ... something that can be dismissed with the word "only." In other words, at a deep level she does not respect or affirm the physical, let alone nurture or love it. Not at all.

Once I broke the ice by showing her this, she admitted it pretty readily and added that she has been at war with her body most of her life. For a long time the issue was weight. Now her complaint is all the baggy excess skin that makes her look so wrinkled. And another issue is the pain she is in for as long as she is awake. So yes, her beliefs about the body portray it as a kind of car or bicycle that you are assigned but that really has nothing to do with you in your inmost being. I pointed out that this is exactly the message she does not want either boy to imitate, so perhaps it would help if she pretended to believe something else and covered up more often. I also pointed out that this attitude has caused her a lot of heartache over the years.
__________

The following Tuesday:

Somehow I got tangled in a long, winding conversation with Wife that seemed to have no discernable pattern. It started off hurt and accusatory, went through a long middle period that was more or less neutral and kind of informative, took a sharp unexpected turn into bitter threats (from her) of financial ruin or violence, and finally ended up with her slumping to the ground in sulking and tears.

The most informative part was this. In a discussion of watching Son 1 play sports, Wife said that she makes herself do it because she wants to support Son 1 but of course it's not like she enjoys it herself. I asked her if she never found emotions to be contagious ... so that even if sports didn't interest her as such, she could actually feel joy -- true joy -- in watching him play because of the joy he feels in the game. She considered this for a moment, and then said No. She added that it was strange, but all her life she has heard people talk about emotions being contagious -- such as excitement, for example -- and it has always genuinely confused her. She has never understood why she would get excited just because someone else is excited. And I stopped in my tracks and thought ... wow. This is huge. This may explain it all right there ... I mean, all the horrible social skills, all the emotional miscues, all the self-centeredness, the whole banana. If she doesn't "catch" other people's emotions from them, if she doesn't even understand what that means or how it is possible, then that explains so much. I'm going to have to ponder this a while before I can grok in fullness.

Does conversation matter? part 3

Again from Palinurus, op. cit.:

The particular charm of marriage, which may grow irresistible to those who once have tasted it, is the duologue, the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone till death breaks the record. It is this back-chat which, in the long run, makes a reciprocal equality more intoxicating than any form of servitude or domination.

Shoulda read this before getting married ....

Another passage from Palinurus, in The Unquiet Grave:

A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless: as Baudelaire wrote, "tout homme qui n'accepte pas les conditions de la vie vend son âme." ["Every man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul."]

Not that I would have paid any attention of course, being young and stupid at the time .... (sigh)

Palinurus on obesity

A month or more ago, when D and I were visiting on our Ninth date, I picked up a lovely book in a second-hand bookstore. The author is Cyril Connolly, writing under the name "Palinurus" and the book is called The Unquiet Grave. It is a commonplace book, of sorts: or at any rate, while most of the scattered thoughts are Connolly's, they are nonetheless interleaved with quotes from a variety of other authors. (In some ways, actually, it resembles a blog! This is a theme that could be teased out into a full post on its own, I think.) But I thought it remarkable that, while D and I have been discussing issues of eating and drinking (and over-eating and over-drinking) -- most recently when we started discussing this night here -- I sat down one night to read a couple of pages of Palinurus before falling asleep and ran across this following:

New-year resolution: lose a stone [14 lbs.], then all the rest will follow. Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment; greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

Thus a good writer must be in training: if he is a stone too heavy then that fourteen pounds represents for him so much extra indulgence, so much clogging laziness; in fact a coarsening of sensibility. There are but two ways to be a good writer: like Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe, to accept life completely,or like Pascal, Proust, Leopardi, Baudelaire, to refuse ever to lose sight of its horror.

Eating while drinking

Picking up the thread of posts like this one, I had one more depressing meal last week and then seem to have banished them for several days. A little background: like last year, I stopped drinking this spring the same time D did, for Lent. (As noted before, D is Catholic and I am not; but I figure this is a way to keep her company.) The exercise hasn't been 100% successful -- nor was it for her -- but I found myself thinking about it a couple of days before Easter.

What I realized is that the hardest part about giving up alcohol for several weeks is, for me, dealing with dinner-time. But this is not because of the traditional association of wine with dinner. No, rather it is because I find myself feeling rather too much anxiety around dinners here, and the wine helps dispel that.

I need to be more exact, because (Heaven knows!) this is nothing like a "food issue." When I dine with D, on one of our dates, I hardly notice whether we have wine or not. I feel no anxiety about those meals. But I find I feel anxiety -- about? stemming from? -- no, no, let me say "in the vicinity of" -- where was I? Oh yes. I find I feel anxiety in the vicinity of dinner with the family in our house. And so for the last several weeks, when I have had sparkling water on the table instead of wine, dinners have been a lot harder. There have been a lot more of them where I have slumped forward with my head in my hands, or where I have had to excuse myself to go back to the bedroom as a refuge. Sometimes I explain this in terms of the levels of ambient noise when the boys get excited about something (such as in this post here). Sometimes I just chalk it up to depression. But neither of those is quite right.

I mean, noise can do that to me, don't get me wrong. But sometimes the noise level isn't anything all that unusual. And so I think there are other things that have nothing to do with objective decibel levels, but which show up for me as if they were noise. And I don't know what they are. I don't know if I'm reacting to the boys fidgeting with their silverware, or to the chronic clutter of paper on the far end of the table, or to the permanently untidy sewing machines on the wall past the table, or to the overall chaos and disorganization and dirt in the house ... or if I'm reacting to the mere fact of sharing a meal with Wife, or if ... well, I don't really know what. Any of those could be a contributing factor, I am quite sure. But which ones are serious enough to make me unable to cope with dinner? That I cannot tell you.

I think I am on to something, however.

Is Food the New Sex?

So much for all the heavy drama at home, at least for a while. Here is something altogether different: it's a link that D sent me a while ago to an article with the intriguing title, "Is Food the New Sex?"

I have no idea how to summarize, or where to go with it except to offer you the link. For your amusement and edification ....

D is applying for a new job ... here

I have mentioned recently that D's job situation has been crazy. Just the other day she wrote me apologizing for the fact that she has been so impossible lately, but explaining that the school where she teaches has been consuming her entire life. And there is no support from the administration, no back-up, and no sign that anything is ever getting better -- not for the teachers, not for the students, not for anybody. It's a mess. (I should add that she is still working the same place she thought she had been fired from way back here -- a week later they changed their minds. Brilliant people-skills these folks have.)

The same day she wrote me that rather despondent apology, not long after I got home for dinner that evening, Son 2 mentioned casually that his teacher won't be coming back next year. Her husband is going to graduate school somewhere far away.

The timing seemed remarkable, so I mentioned it to D. She is going to apply. I don't know what to expect: on the one hand, she is very good at what she does; on the other hand, they are bound to ask why she wants to move thousands of miles away. And somehow the two obvious answers -- "My current bosses are vampiric psychopaths" and "I want to live nearer my boyfriend and farther from my husband" -- well, neither one sounds quite right for an interview situation. So for that reason alone, she may not be an obvious choice for the job.

Nor do I know whether it will really be a good idea for her to live so nearby. I can see advantages, but I also wonder. On the other hand, at present I am content to leave it in the hands of whatever Providence organized the coincidence in the first place; if she actually gets the job, despite her geographical implausibility, I'll take that as a sign that it is the right way to go. Or at any rate, I'm not sure what else to do. We'll see.

P.S.: This does not mean she would be teaching Son 2. He'll be in the next grade next year.

Wife's bad dream, 2

Wife woke up unusually early this morning, while I was typing out a quick e-mail to D, before the boys got up. She said she had had a bad dream, where a gunman had been firing randomly into a crowd and hit her smack in the chest. I pulled her into a cave right near where it happened (it was a dream), got a doctor, and then sat by her for several weeks until she got better.

Just before writing this, I looked back at the last time I reported a bad dream of hers. Again, I showed up in the dream in some kind of a caretaking role. It's strange -- not only because of our dynamics the last couple of years, but because we have been drifting so much farther apart lately. She says she still loves me, although I have trouble mapping that to anything I would call "love". And honestly a lot of it is probably me, because I know that I don't respond the way I once would have. I don't pick up on openings for even the occasional hug or caress, that I once would have jumped on.

But maybe, at some level that comes out in her dreams -- maybe at the least she still needs me.

Son 2, Wife, and the math homework

The day after that last exchange of letters – this is still all happening in late February, for anyone who is keeping track – was a long and difficult day on many fronts. Thank heavens it was Friday, but what a Friday!

It started with craziness at work, ... needless, pointless, but exhausting craziness, that left me convinced for the day that nothing I do there will ever make the slightest impact or difference. Really depressing. If I ever bothered to write about work, I could make a whole post out of that day alone. Maybe three posts.

But be all that as it may..

As I left the office to take Son 1 to sports practice, I got a phone call from Son 2's math teacher. He was very worried about Son 2's performance. Specifically, he thought Son 2 really wasn't putting in any time into his work, and his learning was suffering as a result. Concretely, there had been a test not long before. Son 2 did OK on the first half and completely bombed the second half. The teacher handed the graded tests back to the students to study from, but Son 2 showed no evidence of doing so. Son 2 didn't turn in that Friday's homework; when the teacher asked for it, Son 2 stared him straight in the eye and said, "I left it at home." No fumbling in the bag, no anxiety, no confusion -- nothing. There was going to be another test on Monday. I told him I would work with Son 2 on all of the chapter that weekend.

Later on, I asked Son 2 about the homework, and he said the same thing: "I left it at home." I asked, "Where at home?" and he was silent. I asked, "Did you really do it at all?" and he said "No." Turns out he hadn't done it because he had a lot of English homework that night. So I urged him, next time he hasn't done his homework, to own up to it. I said it can be embarrassing at first, but you do yourself more harm in the long run by getting into a habit of lying -- if for no other reason than that you erode other people's trust in you and then you can't get it back. Then I asked him about math, and he began to get pretty upset. He said that in his opinion he was doing all the homework, but he still got D's and F's on the tests. He said he didn't want me to work with him over the weekend because "You always tell me to do the problem a totally different way from what the teacher teaches us to do, and I can never understand how you want me to do the problem!" I said I would be happy to stick to what the teacher tells them. Then I asked if he understands why he does poorly on his tests, and he says No. He is baffled by it ... and, again, pretty upset. So I asked, has he ever gone in to ask the teacher to explain to him why he got a bad grade on this or that test? No. OK, I said, here is something else I am going to ask of you: not only do I want you to tell the truth to your teacher when you don't do the homework, but I want you to go ask him to explain when you don't understand why you did badly. I added that the teacher's whole job is to make sure students understand the material, but that he can't help Son 2 if he doesn't know there is a problem. Finally, the teacher had said that often Son 2 will not show any of his work but only the answers. So I told Son 2 we will have to implement the same rule we have implemented for Son 1: show us every assignment; if it is not neat, or if he fails to show all his work, we rip it up and he has to start over. He was pretty unhappy at this too.

We were sitting in the car discussing this. Once it sounded to him like we were done, he got out of the car and went off to play by himself in some other corner of the complex where Son 1 was still practising. Later on he seemed in good spirits and we talked about other things quite amiably.

We came home. The boys did their chores. I started dinner. Once dinner was in the oven, I sat down to tell Wife about my conversation with the math teacher. Her first question was, "Why did he call you instead of me? Why do all the boys' teachers seem to believe that they have only one parent, and none of them ever contacts me for anything?" I told her I have no idea why the teachers don't contact her, because I can't read minds. (Of course in reality I know exactly why. Wife does nothing on her own part to interact with the school. She doesn't contact the teachers on her own, she doesn't know how to use the school's websites, and she never reads her e-mail which means that she never replies to any mail the school send out either. However I don't want to tell her any of this, because it is true that I think her disengagement is a change for the better, compared to how she used to fight with their teachers, and I don't want to give her ideas about how to engage more.) Anyway, there followed a long and unpleasant conversation in which I tried to urge her that it's not about her but about Son 2 ... that for me to take anything she says seriously, she needs to stop complaining about being slighted or neglected and start focussing on Son 2. Her answer was just that she expected me to say that because I had an idée fixe on the subject, so even though it wasn't true and she really was very concerned about him I would accuse her of the other. And so on. She also touched again on how shamelessly I had cut her out of Son 1's applications to high school. When she first got off the subject of how slighted she felt, and how neglected, ... and of how I have tried to separate her from "her" children starting from when each one first enrolled in middle school so that now she hardly ever sees them (even though she comes to get Son 2 after school every single day now instead of letting him come to my office) ... as I say, when she first got off of that subject, her next remarks were in effect that Son 2's poor performance in math wasn't her fault because she always asks him how he is doing in math and he always says Fine plus he has No Homework. So how was she to know?

When I succeeded in pulling her off of this second self-centered topic, she finally got around to expressing at least one genuine concern about Son 2 -- viz., that he simply doesn't (appear to) care how he does in school. He doesn't mind going, but he doesn't care what his grades are. She said she doesn't understand that, because he is curious about everything and loves to learn. But schoolwork? Not a priority. (And of course I said the same thing in this blog, a couple of posts ago.) And she doesn't know how to change it.

She did ask why Son 2 would tell her he had no Math homework when he had? I said I didn't know, but there are a variety of reasons why children lie about such things. They include fear of being punished, fear of disappointing their parents, perhaps fear of burdening them, ... maybe others.

Her second concern is that Son 1 says Son 2 is friendless. Son 2 says he is fine and happy. Wife frets and thinks we should intervene. I checked with her whether she was trying to say she thought there was the slightest risk of bullying or other physical harm, although I can't for a minute believe such a thing would happen at their school. To my relief, Wife agreed. But he sits alone so much! Yes, I said, borrowing a page from my conversations with D; but if there is no bullying or physical harm, and if he appears happy, there is no reason for us to interfere. Besides, how would we? But, she pursued, what if he is lying to us when he says he is happy? Well, I answered, if he says he is happy and he isn't happy, that can only mean that he doesn't want us to butt in. And in that case I think we have to give him that.

Once I was done she walked into the study where the boys were playing a computer game: and sure enough, she started asking Son 2 why he wouldn't tell her if he had Math homework, and also why his teachers always contacted me and not her .... I sprang into the study to interrupt, and to remind her that if I don't read minds then probably Son 2 doesn't either so it's no fair asking him that. And about then, dinner was ready.

By the time I served dinner, I was really wiped out. I have to assume that it was just the result of spending so much of the day in the shadow of either failure or uselessness. (Or both.) And all the discussions about Son 2 -- with the math teacher, with Son 2 himself, and with Wife -- left me exhausted. So I was not at my most energetic when it came to keeping some kind of order at the table. I ate, and I conversed a bit. But by the time Son 2 wanted a ruling on whether he could have more or whether we were saving it for another night, and Son 1 wanted one on whether he had to finish his main course at all because he hated it, I was too tired to think. I had been sitting slouched at the table with my head in my hands for some minutes, and at that point I excused myself and went into the bedroom to lie down. Shortly after, I heard Son 1 get up from the table. And then I heard Wife and Son 2 whispering to each other.

It went on for a minute or so. I pried myself up out of bed and walked out to the dining area. Son 2 got up from the table stared intently at me for a few seconds, and went to join Son 1 in the study. Wife continued to sit there. I asked her what they were whispering about, and she said they weren't whispering. I insisted that I had heard them whispering, and she said that Son 2 had asked what was wrong with me and she had answered that she didn't know. I was silent for a minute or two and then pointed out to her that nobody would whisper to convey that kind of message. In reply, she turned around and accused me of another idée fixe: since I have this fixed notion that nothing she says is true, it doesn't matter what she says nor how true it might be, because I will always accuse her of lying. I more or less asked her with some sarcasm, "Gosh, I wonder why I would do that?" And then I went back to bed. She was saying something to me but I don't know what. A few minutes later, I asked Son 2 what they had been whispering about and he said, "You eat too fast." I figured that had to be no truer than the other, and I dropped it.

In some ways the whispering gets to me more than any of the rest of it, anything else in the whole bleak and depressing day. This is a continual feature of Wife's relationship with Son 2; the two of them will sit off together somewhere and whisper to each other. I have no idea what they are saying, but obviously whatever it is at least one of them thinks it is better not to be overheard. So it is something that is bad in some way. Also, it encourages the formation of a little alliance inside the family -- an alliance where Son 1 and I are on the Outside and therefore are implicitly Them, the enemy. Or maybe it is just me and not Son 1. But I fear that it is deeply destructive. And it makes me feel completely helpless, not only over Wife's behavior but over Son 2's future. Honestly the whispering makes me fear that I have lost him. Oh, not yet, not technically -- but the whispering, which has been going on for years, makes me believe deep in my heart that losing him is inevitable. Wife will hold onto him and twist him; she will fill his head and heart with the vilest and emptiest lies about me; and I won't know what she has said so there is nothing I can do to counteract them. By the time I can say anything, Son 2 will have been conditioned to disbelieve everything he hears from me, so he will reject it out of hand. And since Wife will never understand Son 2 -- because he is more like me than anybody -- she will have no idea what she is doing to him. But I fear that she will warp his native goodness; that she will corrupt him morally before he ever had a chance to acquire much integrity of his own; that she will misshape his communication skills so that he can communicate just fine with her but so that he will be unable to communicate at any deep or meaningful level with anybody else -- and that all this is inevitable. And it will ruin his life. And he will reject any overtures on my part to help, because he will have been trained by her to distrust me. And if he ever -- ever -- reconsiders, if he ever stops to look at all the data to realize that she is the liar and she is the twisted and tortured and chronically malicious soul, hateful and hating and destructive on every level ... as I say, if he ever stops to see these things, I fear deeply that it will be only when he is in his thirties or forties and his life has been ruined by her influence and I will be already dead. It's like I said earlier, about Tartuffe and his family, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto generations and generations. And it makes me so profoundly depressed to think these things that it just about shuts me down completely.

And what can I do about it? I can't reason her out of it -- she thinks she understands Son 2 better than I do, so my advice doesn't count. I can't forbid it -- Wife acknowledges no authority higher than her own desires, so the most a prohibition would accomplish would be to make her hide better. Nor would the fact that she was having to hide something I had forbidden give her any pause; she would rationalize it to herself so there was nothing wrong at her end. Suppose we divorced tomorrow: the household would be torn in half, and Son 2 would figure that this proves Mom was right -- Dad really is a selfish asshole who cares nothing for her suffering or how this now puts her out on the street with hundreds of antiques and no medical insurance. So Dad cannot be trusted. So the whole inevitable process continues to unroll, except faster. I feel like my hands are completely tied. I don't know what to do.
__________

I wrote all that to D, who had some advice to pull me out of the depths of self-pity into which I had allowed myself to sink.

Let's focus on Son 2 first. And let's do so by comparing him to my son. There are several reasons; My son has every bit of Son 2's sensitivity and he is also very intelligent. Relevant too is his experience with Wife. [At one point, one summer, D’s son flew out to stay with us so that Wife could teach him Latin. That was back when D and Wife were still friends.] She used to talk to him the same way she now talks to Son 2; they whispered together, and she spent hours alone with him. Much of the time, Wife talked about you, and my son broke down; he remembers the time spent at your house as the most miserable period of his life. I recognized the emergency and pulled him out, at considerable financial cost, and he never resumed his Latin lessons with her. But here's the most interesting part of the story; he has nothing unkind to say about you. He completely realizes, without any discussion with me, that your situation was quite untenable at that time and that she was mentally unbalanced and manipulative. He left the situation and never looked back.

Lessons for you? Son 2 is far more resilient than you think. If you provide some boundaries and structure, he will be fine. First, divorce is imperative. Read the NY Times editorial on divorce, February 18, 2010. The author is absolutely correct when she asserts that children are not forever damaged by parents who separate. They are injured by the constant conflict in the home to a far greater extent. My God, Hosea, your words about Wife at the end of your letter "... the twisted and tortured and chronically malicious soul, hateful and hating and destructive on every level..." should tell you to run, leave, start over and live again.

Second, Wife has no business picking Son 2 up from school every day. Split the time; half the afternoons, he needs to come to your office. Do not ask Son 2 whether he has homework; keep tabs on that by using the website the school provides parents or call and ask for the assignments. I never made homework into a character issue; it is simply that Son 2 has not internalized the need to do all his assignments yet, so provide the structure he needs to complete them. I used to make the children do all their work in front of me.

The idea that Son 2 doesn't care about doing well at school is appallingly off the mark; he cares way too much and is literally frozen at the idea of disappointing you both. After all, if he is as smart as you both have loudly proclaimed, how can he ever struggle or ever admit he doesn't understand something? God in heaven. Slow down this process, experiment with time and place to figure out when he is most productive. If he wants to read and play video games while at your office, fine, as long as he understands that he must produce all his assignments for you to look over at home or in the morning...with enough time to make adjustments. He will learn to internalize the need to do his work without supervision; both my children did by high school, but middle school is the time when those skills are developed in high-performing children. For now, manage, lightly and impersonally, Son 2's homework time. It means having a certain peacefulness about it.

Look around the corner; if he is likely to suffer from depression or mood swings, you have to capture bits of time when he is productive. You often push yourself beyond the breaking point (last night, sitting at the table with your head in your hands in a perfect example; I have learned that your face is differently blocked every time you become depressed. It's a dead giveaway; look in the mirror if you don't know what it looks like and you'll be able to recognize it from now on). If you push Son 2 beyond his breaking point, he will either dissolve or lash out at you. You'll make some mistakes, but don't take it personally. Concentrate on re-building the relationship and try again.

Son 2 was telling the truth when he said that Wife was talking about how fast you eat. I've heard that complaint a score of times. It is part of her conversation about your boorish manners. You do not eat exceptionally fast; I have watched you carefully after all the stories I've heard, and it's like your snoring; it's a non-issue. What is extremely clear to me is her constant desire to make you out as a monster of some sort; rude, uncultured, temperamental and unreasonable. Wife will continue to do this for as long as she lives; she has no other narrative. All you can do is what my son did; walk away. Your kindness coupled with despair makes that very difficult to do, but it is absolutely necessary. "All creative activity requires boundaries"...this must be my favorite piece of guiding wisdom. Son 2 will have many conflicting emotions and viewpoints about his parents, but both of your children know, in their bones, that your relationship with Wife has been a train-wreck for years. Get out. Free your children from an atmosphere of venom and hate. That's really what boarding school represents, isn't it? Both Son 1 and Son 2 need to see that you, an adult man and their father, can be happy, that you can be at peace and restful. Why not be that person you were meant to be?
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The next day was Saturday. I took Son 2 and his math book back to my office, where we could work undisturbed, and we went systematically through every problem on the relevant assignments plus the old tests.

D was right about one thing – Son 2 proved himself far more resilient than I had feared. After a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast, he was happy and chipper throughout the morning. Halfway through the day, we broke for lunch and dropped into downtown. We stopped at a little cafe off the main street, a place which looks like a burger joint except that it actually serves upscale salads and grilled halibut, and has a wine list as long as the menu. Son 2 really enjoyed it. (And truly, I picked it partly because Son 2 was along; Son 1 would have preferred a real burger joint.) He had a lunch involving grilled swordfish; I had the small Greek salad. And after lunch he returned to his task with renewed energy and focus, so it was clearly the right time to go eat.

One odd thing was how Son 2 described the day after we got back home. I should clarify that my contribution was only to organize his work -- do this problem now and those ones next -- and to urge him to slow down and be more cautious when he was starting to speed up and ignore critical details. But he solved all the problems. So when we got back home, Son 2 was talking with Son 1 while Wife listened on, and Son 1 asked: "So, how do you think you'll do on the test Monday?"

Son 2: I'll bomb it.

Son 1: Dude, how is that possible? You just spent all day with Dad at his office studying.

Son 2: Aha, but you are assuming that I was listening.

Son 1 laughed but Wife came to me concerned that maybe I had been lecturing all day, and Son 2 had been tuning me out and playing me for a fool. I paid no attention to the fear, because I knew better. But I thought it was interesting that Son 2 would spin a story like that. I guess it isn’t cool to admit to studying, plus he made his brother laugh. He talked about lunch, though.

So maybe I need to lighten up, just a bit.