We’ve got two weeks to get out of the house. Progress is dismal. I have started taking half days off work to help pack. But Wife’s focus is taken up with little things.
Last night she asked me, “Can I have the bunk beds?” [She means the bunk beds that the boys used to sleep in, that I amd my brother slept in a generation ago, that we have had on long-term loan from my parents all this time.]
I told her, “No.” She has invoked the sacred principle of heirloom-inheritance so many times to justify why she has to keep so much worthless antique crap that I’m a little surprised to hear her ask. Surely she recognizes that by the same criteria she invokes so often, I would be breaking some kind of sacred bond to let her have them? But of course this counts without her other sacred principle, viz., that she should always be allowed to have whatever she wants for free.
She tried quite a few variations to get me to change my mind, starting with “Well you’re not using them,” which is true enough but the only way to get them back again (assuming she didn’t trash them in the meantime) would be to wheedle her for them and I want as little to do with her after the separation as humanly possible. (I haven’t mentioned that part yet.) Then she moved on to, “I didn’t realize that you had already decided to be so mean to me!” This was probably supposed to sting, because time was when she could get me to do backflips by saying that, as I would fall all over myself to prove that I didn’t want her to think me mean. But that was long ago. And finally she ended up with, “Well if you won’t give me the bunk beds then that just means that MY children won’t have any place to sleep when they come stay with me!” I’ve come to be amused that she always uses the singular pronoun when talking about the boys. They are never “our” children to her, but always “my” [i.e., Wife’s] children … all by herself, presumably, by parthenogenesis. Well, I tried to point out, she could go buy them beds. She bought herself a bed a few months ago. There followed a long list of reasons why she couldn’t – why, in fact, she was completely helpless in this area and so anything that was less than perfect in the outcome was my fault. I spent a few minutes discussing, but not many.
We sorted some more books. I took another box of them; she took another … what was it? Four? Six? Eight? I lost count. A lot. And this was on top of the boxes and boxes she has already claimed. Babe, I know you’re leasing a house but where you gonna put all them books? When you gonna read ‘em? One thing I have noticed is that an awful lot of the time we will uncover something she likes and she will immediately say it was an inheritance from some family member (meaning that it is her property separately and I have no claim on it). Every time we have found any china or silver, for example, it came from Aunt Betty or Uncle Herman. Well I haven’t recognized any of the china or silver, so she might even be right. Also, I don’t a lot care about it one way or the other so long as I have dishes to eat off of. But I had to smile when we opened one of the boxes of books that had been sequestered in our garage for years, and found a complete set of Sherlock Holmes: the stories, the novels … everything. Immediately she said, “That was my father’s. I recognize it from his apartment.”
Oh really? I opened the flyleaf and pointed out that the publication date was sixteen years after her father died, and a good ten years after she and I were married.
“Oh. Well you don’t want them, do you?”
I don’t know. I’d enjoy them. And I haven’t taken that many books so far this evening ….
“Well if you really want them THAT MUCH then I suppose I won’t FIGHT over them …!” [Here she heaved the deep sigh of the chronically oppressed.]
I took the books.
And so it goes.
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