What do I want?

I tried to spend some time this evening addressing my marriage through prayer. Lately my prayer life has gotten fairly mechanical, or at any rate noisy. I know what I want -- I want this whole sordid business with Wife to vanish miraculously. But I know it doesn't work like that. And I haven't been able to reach a level of peace and quiet inside my own head that would even allow me to hear it, in case the Lord decided to whisper me some advice. (I know, I know ... it usually doesn't work like that, either. But I know that sometimes it can and I'd hate to rule something out ahead of time.)

So I spent some time this evening, outside in the quiet of a moonlit night, simply trying to articulate clearly what it is that I really want out of this situation. Here are some of the things I came up with.

I want a wife who loves me, not one who hates and fears me.

I want a wife who wants me, not one who avoids me.

I want a wife who thinks well of me, not one who mocks me to strangers.

I want a wife who is true to me -- not just sexually (although that too) but also emotionally -- not one who chronically betrays me.

I want a wife who is true to herself and others: who is honest with herself about herself, because she can look at herself in the mirror and not flinch; and who is secure enough to tell the truth to others, because she doesn't fear it.

I want a wife whom I can admire -- not necessarily at the level of "achievements" (although that would be OK too) but at the level of the ethical standards that she lives every day.

And I want this woman to be Wife -- the very same woman I am married to right now! I don't want it to be somebody else.

At this point, a little voice in the back of my head said, "What if you are asking for a contradiction? What if Wife is simply not that person? If she doesn't want to be that person? Then you are asking for a round square." I don't claim this was the voice of God, of course. It could have been just a voice of wry contrariness somewhere in my head.

But I decided to hope for the best, and answered, "Well you could make her be that person! You could make her want to be that person! Can't you do miracles?"

And I could swear that I almost heard the answer, "It doesn't work like that." So I went on.

It's not just about me. I also want a wife who is a good mother to my children.

I want a wife who loves them, and whom they love.

I want a wife who encourages them to be their best, who is herself worthy of their admiration and emulation, and whom they can admire and strive to emulate.

I want a wife who builds a safe and secure home for them to grow in, who gives them her time ungrudgingly (instead of holing herself up on the computer IM-ing to her boyfriend, for example), and who places strict but fair demands on them so that they grow into the best young men they can be.

And I want to spare them the betrayal of divorce. Take a walk through the playground of our children's school. Right away, you can pick out the ones whose parents have divorced: they are the kids -- about 50% in all -- whose eyes are ever dull and lifeless, who never feel joy in the games they play, who never engage with those around them. They are the walking dead, the children whose souls, whose very lives -- by which I mean their lives raised by two parents who love them and each other -- have been ripped out of their hearts and casually smashed by parents too selfish or self-absorbed to see the casualties inflicted by their anger at each other. I don't want my children's souls to die before their bodies even mature. I could never want to live another day if I did that. And for this reason it is not enough to say that I want a wife who is thus and thus, but the Wife to whom I am now married is not those things and never wants to be, so ergo I need a different wife instead. It is not enough, because that solution betrays my children at the most basic metaphysical level.

I didn't hear anything from the voice at this juncture, so I went on with the third thing I wanted.

I know that the things I have asked look contradictory at first blush.

I also know that sometimes the good Lord brings about a solution so elegant, but so unlikely, that it almost looks like he has achieved a contradiction by reaching two totally incompatible goals at the same time. He doesn't do it often, but it doesn't take often.

Therefore, I want guidance. I want to know how to get there from here. I don't really know where "There" is; maybe it is some mythical place where I get all the contradictory things I have asked for, or maybe it is a place where I stop being discontent. I don't know which. But please, Lord -- please, oh please -- guide my blind and faltering footsteps to reach the right goal, if only by mistake. Let us both get, somehow and some day soon, to the place where we ought to be. And tell me what to do.

After all this, I can't say that the heavens opened up in a dramatic way. More's the pity -- it would have made a great story for this blog. On the other hand, while it wasn't a voice as such, my mind did run unbidden to the thought, "Well I already suggested weeks ago that you look up your old marriage counselor. Did you need more advice than that right now?"

It's true, I have been dragging my feet on contacting our old marriage counselor. But I did it today, and got a sketch of when he has openings in his schedule. He might even have one tomorrow, which would be pretty cool. In any event, Wife has agreed to go see him, which I take to be a good sign. Every time in the past that we have gone for marriage counseling, it has been on her initiative because she wanted the counselor to make me stop being an asshole, in one way or another. (The specific issues have shifted over the years.) This time I really think I'm going to have to present the opening issue, by explaining that I think Wife is descending deeper and deeper into relationship addiction. I know she feels guilty about the relationship itself; I also know that she projects a lot of that guilt onto me and then interprets it as criticism. And she lies about the relationship (with Boyfriend 5) but feels compelled to keep it up anyway. This sounds like addictive behavior to me. It remains to be seen if there is something that can be done about it. And if she doesn't want to change, of course any attempts to change her will be non-starters. I think that's what the voice had in mind above, when he (it?) was talking about round squares.

Free will sure is a bitch, ain't it?