Is it a panic attack?

Ever since graduating in December, Son 1 has been splitting his time between my apartment and Wife's duplex while he looked for a job. Now he's got a job, though I guess he won't start until mid-May. Anyway, some time late in the week before last Wife had some weird medical symptoms (including severe hypothermia) and went to the hospital. They think they found the trigger -- some new medication one of her doctors had prescribed -- and sent her home once she had stabilized. Son 1 went to stay with her for the first half of last week to make sure she was OK.

Now, "Wife had some weird medical symptoms" is one of those things that only happens on days ending in "Y". On any scale of the bizarre or unexpected, it sits only slightly to the left of "sun rose in the morning." But when he was back at my place this weekend, Son 1 said he's not convinced they found the real trigger for this particular attack. Because after she was home -- and they had taken her off the suspect medication -- it started to happen again. Wife was upset that Son 1 would be leaving her all alone to deal with it, and her temperature started to plummet. When he assured her, "Mom, I'm not going anywhere," ... she got better. So Son 1 thinks it's a panic attack, triggered in particular by his getting a job -- because she knows that once he is working, he won't be able to visit her nearly as often. He told her so and she said, "That's silly -- I have nothing to be afraid of." But self-knowledge has never been one of Wife's strong suits.

He's back there now, because she needs someone to drive her to a doctor's appointment three hours away tomorrow and his job hasn't started yet. But of course if Son 1 is right, what happens when he really does have to start work?
  

Shazam!

My life is simpler now that my father is dead, but I wish he could have seen the movie "SHAZAM!" that came out this spring.

It's an origin story that tells how the orphaned Billy Batson becomes the mighty superhero named ... well, that part's a problem, actually. The original superhero was called Captain Marvel; but after decades of lawsuits that name is now the property of a totally different character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So now it's not really clear what his name should be. But he changes into this hero by saying "Shazam!"

The thing is, Captain Marvel was my dad's favorite superhero, back when he was a kid in the 1940's. He always took it almost personally that the comic was driven out of circulation by legal action. So I think he would have been clad to see the character finally get a movie of his own.

There is another, more personal reason I think it would have resonated with him. Please pause while I give the obligatory ...

SPOILER ALERT! The rest of this post gives away critical details of the movie's plot.

My dad was adopted. And while he never made any efforts to find his birth family, he fantasized about them endlessly and very emotionally. So I think it would have struck him hard when, in this version of the story, we find that Billy Batson was not, in fact orphaned. He was abandoned by a teenaged single mom who was totally unprepared to care for him. In the movie's third act he finally meets her, and all the hopes he has nurtured for a tender reunion are smashed. She explains that she couldn't take care of him then, and she doesn't really want him in her life now. Her life now is hard enough, thank you very much, and adding an unexpected teenaged son would just complicate it in bad ways.

And how would my dad have reacted to this? He was pretty sure that his own birth mother was an unmarried teenager -- that's why she gave him up for adoption, right? And while he imagined what it would be like to meet up with her later, ... what if her reaction had been like Billy's mother's? What if she really didn't want to see him, because it would just be too hard?

I think he would still have enjoyed the movie, though doubtless he would have had a long list of things that they got "wrong" afterwards. But I can also imagine him sitting in the theater sobbing silently to himself.

And I'm sorry he didn't have the chance.

Gaslighting in a graphic

I found this on Twitter today.

And while I suppose I really no longer need to complain about my life with Wife any more -- I'm free of it now -- it's comforting to know that somebody else went through the same things. To know, in fact, that enough people went through these things that it was worth making a graphic and posting it. I'm not sure I experienced every single one of these over the years, but certainly I can remember ...

• I would apologize without knowing what I did wrong. Oh yes.
• She would never hear me explain how I felt. Not sure if she actually used the words "overreacting" or "too sensitive" but she would stare at me like I was speaking Chinese.
• She would insist that it didn't happen that way. In these cases I was always sure that it had happened that way, so she never made me doubt my own perceptions. But she did convince me that she saw the world through radically different lenses.
• I questioned my beliefs and opinions. In some cases I didn't go back the old ones, ever: for example, by opinions about infidelity and divorce are a lot more nuanced than they used to be. But I also questioned my belief about the importance of always telling the truth, and that one I have sure come back to!
• An imbalance of power? She always used to accuse me of having all the power in the relationship because I had a better income and paid all the bills. I think she had the emotional power, however. When D first came to help us clean up the house, she said she was amazed because Wife had always told her how tyrannically I ran the house and she saw with her own eyes that it was Wife who was the despot in real life.
• She assigned motives to my actions that were the opposite of my real intentions. All the time.
• Interactions left me feeling small or ashamed? Not "most". But many.
• I edited every word before speaking it, to make it impossible to misconstrue. Oh my God. Every waking minute of every day. And it was the same with D. One of the biggest gifts Debbie ever gave me, when I finally got together with her, was "the right to say it wrong" ... the assurance that, if I said something which upset her, I could take it back and try again and she would stop being upset. It should go without saying that I never got this from Wife.

So yeah. Gaslighting. Good to know.
   

Wife's premonition, 2

I'm traveling again. (I'm doing a lot of that this spring.) And I got an excited text message from Son 1 in the middle of the morning.

He got a "tentative job offer" from the place about an hour away. The place where Wife's premonition placed him working. The premonition I told you about here.

He has no other offers right now, so he's going to accept it. It's not everything he ever wanted, but he's a new college graduate without a lot of leverage in the job hunting world and it gets him in the right general field. Time to maneuver for more later.

This evening I texted him a follow up question, "Is this the place where [your] Mom said she thought you'd end up working at?"

His answer: "I don't know where mom said she thought I'd end up." But just now I double checked what I wrote you back then and yes … that's the place.

So hey … we can give her credit for at least one premonition working out correctly over the long haul. And it's exciting that he's got a job.

Since you asked.
  

"You can only do what you can do"

Just got home from my volunteer work. Didn’t actually work that hard tonight, not in the normal sense. S--- had started dinner hours before, and set the table, though she let me cook the asparagus. Dished up food for one resident and ate with him, but I don’t think he speaks much English so there wasn’t a lot of conversation.

Then I went back, as usual, to say hi to Sue for a few minutes. She's one of the residents there. She has been incapacitated with a stroke, so she stays in bed all day. But before that (when she was merely sick and presumably dying) she had a wicked sense of humor so I got to be friends with her. Anyway, I usually check in on her whenever I visit.

We talked about the basketball game she had on, and about something else (because of her stroke it is often hard for me to tell what she is saying). And then ... I think she was saying that she will have to move out in a month and a half because she’s been here a year and seems stable. (The policies are that this place is for those who are actively dying.) And she’s not sure where to go or how to pay for it. And she started talking about insurance policies she has and how she wanted those to go to her family after she dies instead of raiding them for her support. And she started crying. “Everyone tells me to be brave and I try so hard, but I can’t be brave all the time.”

Well of course not. You can only do what you can do, and that has to be good enough.

So I kissed her forehead and held her hand and talked with her for a while. And our talk ranged over this and that. At one point she said that her older brother was disappointed in her choice of husband ... I think she said because her husband wasn’t rich or high-earning or something like that. I told her that it was none of her brother’s business, but only hers. (Also this must be ancient history by now, mustn't it?) And then she talked about how somebody’s kids ... I think this was still her older brother ... had made complete messes of their lives. So of course I explained that, in the first place, if your kid wins the Nobel Prize you’re not going to claim it’s all because of you; so likewise if they mess up their lives why is that suddenly your fault? And in the second place, you could write the biography of every single person on earth as a story of repeated failure by cherry picking your data, because every one of us fails more often than we succeed. Failure isn’t the big deal ... the point is to dust yourself off and come back again tomorrow.

I didn’t use these words for any of it, but that was the gist. Or what I remember.

We went on like that for a bit, and she cried a few more times. And then finally she shooed me out to go do dishes while she watched her basketball game. Of course by that time S--- and J--- had done all the dishes. So I dried and put away, and now I’m headed home.

My neighbors are holding a party tonight. I guess I’ll be there for a while ....
  

1000th post

Another milestone. Wow. (The last milestone post was my 500th post, here.)

A thousand seems like a very big number. Of course it has also taken me over ten years to get here. 

Some concrete numbers. 

• Between my first post and my 500th post there were 1705 days, or four years and eight months.
• Between my 500th post and this one were an additional 2408 days, or six years and seven months.
• That means that the total life of this blog (to date) is 4113 days. That's eleven years, three months, and five days. During that time my sons have grown from little kids to college students (Son 1 is a college graduate). During that time, my marriage fell from what might have been our best year together ever -- 2007 -- into chaos, ruin, and separation.

It's been a long time. 

I've tried to keep posting regularly, but like everything there are ups and downs. Getting back in touch with Marie put a huge dent in my writing because I was writing her instead. For a while I thought, "Well I'll just post the letters," but that never turned out to be very practical. So I just let my posting dwindle.

At my 500th post, I was able to say that -- once I picked up the blog again after a three-month hiatus at the beginning of 2008 -- I had never gone an entire month without posting. That's no longer true: April 2016, January 2018, and October 2018 all went by with no updates. That's six months out of 135.

My average number of posts per month ... well, the word "average" can mean three different things. My mean number of posts per month (to date) has been 7.29. (How do you write .29 of a post?) My median (same number of entries above and below) has been 6 posts per month. My mode (the greatest number of entries) has been 3 posts per month.

My topics have shifted around over time. But I hope -- no, I intend -- to keep at it. I like the character of Hosea, and don't want to lose him.

Here, like last time, is a chart of my total number of posts per month since I started. And yes, that is indeed a colossally geeky thing to do!

Here's to the next thousand.

This again? How interesting...!

It's late so I'm going to try to keep it short. But I've got an argument going on with someone at work. (This is related to the last two trips I've made. He's in a different office) I've been saying "You've got a gap here and should fix it." He's replying with everything but — which means he's spending way more effort to prove he doesn't have to do anything than it would take just to deal with it. That doesn't apply in this case! Show me chapter and verse in the company directives that proves we have to do this. And so on. 

Dude, just fix it. It would be way easier.

But this evening as I drove home I suddenly saw two things. First, the reason he is stonewalling me so crazily is that he's afraid ... of what, I don't know, but that has to be it. And second, this is exactly the dynamic I used to have with Wife, where she was so outrageously terrified all the time that I could say one thing and she'd hear something totally different. And I could never persuade her to put down her guard long enough to see that I wasn't attacking her. And so she could never actually hear anything I said.

It's fascinating to me that this is the exact same phenomenon. And so I wonder, ... did I learn anything back then? Did I learn anything I can use today to help make this better? Or am I doomed to repeat the same pointless, stupid cycle because I never learned how to break out of it?

Sent from my iPhone