Dark vapors

The day wasn't nearly as bad as this will make it sound (though I have had days that were). But I found that by the end of the day I was getting crabby and discontent and generally unpleasant to be around. I decided to beguile my irritability by trying to capture it in words, and this is what I got:

The damsel that I swore to love for all
Eternity, I cannot stand. The brats,
My gentle, manly sons just spit and squall,
And tenderness show only to the cats.

Perhaps I’ll go to work. I think I’ll pay
Our bills instead. I ought to cut the grass.
I need a snack – it’s just my third today! –
Or else a drink, until this fever pass.

It’s nothing true. Dark vapors cloud my sight,
And give each angel bright a demon face.
Though it be day, I stumble in dark night.
Where’er I light, I can’t abide this place

So hold me in your arms and let me grieve;
And stroke my hair until the darkness leave.

Follow-on to Counseling 31

I got a comment from Janeway on my account of our most recent counseling session, as follows:

If Wife's upbringing was anything like mine - in which being "wrong" always drew negative consequences - then being acknowledged to be "right" is just as important as actually being "right". It's not about you. It's about her need to feel safe from bad consequences, and her need to build back up the bits of her ego (for lack of a better word) after its having been assaulted by your accusations.

And, from your perspective, if the substance of the original argument is immaterial to you, then it follows that it would make no difference to you one way or the other to tell Wife that you were wrong to accuse her in the first place. So why not do it?

Perhaps because it's really not immaterial?

I was planning out in my mind how to answer this question, and I had pretty much settled on writing a long, careful analysis of exactly what goes on in my head during these arguments. My plan was to show that no, in this case it doesn't quite work out the way Janeway suggests, for the following subtle reasons. In other words, it was going to be a whiny self-justification, cleverly disguised as a careful, probing self-analysis. But some time before I wrote it, I happened to tell D about the feedback I had gotten from Janeway. The very next morning (today, in fact) I awoke to an e-mail from D that ran, in part, as follows:

My dearest darling,

You have a valuable friend, because she is willing to confront you when you need to corrected.

I don't need to appreciate Wife's childhood to understand that when she is right, she should receive that recognition. There is real and significant difference between the mode of transmission and the message itself. You were wrong in both aspects here, and honesty demands you recognize that fact....

Sometimes I think understanding someone's background just clouds the issue. If you had done this, for example, to my daughter, who had a decent childhood, you would be equally responsible for acknowledging the entire truth and for apologizing for both wrongs. You don't apologize [just] to make someone feel safe.... You apologize because you were wrong. What you should have demanded at Counselor's is the understanding that once an apology is made, that's the end of the matter....

There is a tissue of lies in your relationship with Wife -- hers about you on so many issues -- that makes it almost inconceivable for you to tell the truth and voluntarily give up some of your power and control. Better to apologize for yelling and not for making a mistake in content. But the issue will never be defused without a full apology. It's not that the issue is vital, but your unwillingness to admit your mistake is important. Essentially, you are making Wife wrong, which is a neat turn, but you won't be able to get away with it. You are saying, "I'd apologize to you, but if I do, you'll just bring the issue up again , so I won't say I'm sorry." All you can do is simply apologize. You have no control over what she does with your words. If she "build up her ego" with your apology, fine. If she ignores it and still treats you poorly, you have still done the right thing. and that's all you can do. That's all anyone can do, and it's enough, because it frees your spirit from wrongdoing.

I never said apology is easy. But apology must be thorough, which is why I tend to craft my apologies very carefully. They involve justice...(Counselor is wrong about this aspect being secondary; a moment's reflection will make that clear)...and they bring me face to face with God. For when I apologize to a person well, I have begun to cultivate the ground for a new beginning, for a more productive relationship with that person. I've owned my responsibility for the break in our understanding and commitmernt, and I've opened the door to forgiveness. Since Wife must learn to forgive if she is to be forgiven, why not help her learn how to do so?

I suppose I should be grateful to have friends who are so concerned with bringing out the best in me. Sometimes I think life would be a little easier if more of my friends were interested in seeing the worst of me instead, but I suppose after a while that would get old.

Doesn't make it easy, however ....

Can you see yourself in Marcão?

Long, long after I suggested she read them, Wife and I had an interesting discussion last night about the Ender books (mostly Speaker for the Dead).

I'm not sure we reached any profound conclusions, although she did say early on (in response to a question from me) that no, she would not like to have a Speaker for the Dead speak her death. Why not? Because she thought that "most people" would interpret her as "a monster" (her word, not mine). I tried to shift the discussion a bit by asking if the Speaking of Marcão's death had been a good thing or a bad thing for Novinha. Wife never really told me what she thought of that question, and we ended up talking around it for some time. I avoided giving my opinion till the very end, when I said that the Speaking of Marcão's death had been (my opinion) the single best half hour in Novinha's life ... because it freed her from the twisted life she had built for herself and gave her a chance to make it better. I admitted that she didn't do a perfect job of making it better, but hey -- we're all human beings, right? We all make mistakes.

Interesting discussion of Novinha and Marcão. Wife remarked with a bit of puzzlement on Novinha's statement that Ender was the first one to love her as an adult.

OK sure, I replied, but look how old she was when she met Libo -- you can't call that attachment simply an adult one.

What about her marriage to Marcão, Wife asked? He was alive into middle age; doesn't that count as loving her as an adult?

Not really, I answered. Ender is very clear about this in his speech: Marcão's love of Novinha is plainly adolescent worship.

But then why does he hurt her?

Huh? What do you mean?

If Marcão worships Novinha, why does he torment her so badly?

But this is easy. Everybody past the age of seven who has loved has experienced this. (I tried to tread carefully but continued ....) Have you never had the experience of badly hurting someone you love very much?

Wife was silent. I let her sit silently for a long time, and then restated the question. Finally, in a long, slow, quiet, drawn-out syllable, she answered, Well y - e - e - e - s - s - s ....

OK, then you can see yourself in Marcão. And if you can see yourself in his shoes, then you can understand why he acts the way he does. And then later on, with a different background, I made the same point about seeing herself in Novinha. Of course I palliated both remarks by saying that I meant *anybody* could see himself in both characters. But Wife was quiet and pensive for a very long time.

Counseling 31

We got a bit of a slow start today. Counselor asked, "What do you want to talk about?" and Wife said, "I don't know ... we haven't had any big fights in the past week."

Then she added, "Well, except that Hosea yelled at me about the banking Monday." Followed the story. Wife had to go to the bank to set up a couple extra accounts for, ... well, this and that. The details aren't very interesting. She pulled money out of the checking account to do it, and I completely failed to follow up with her to find out how much. So Monday evening, as I was paying bills, I checked our account balance and found out (to my surprise) that it was $1000 less than I thought it was. I was shocked, and proceeded to yell for several minutes about the situation. Why hadn't Wife told me she had pulled $1000 out of the checking account? Why hadn't she set up these accounts in a different (lower impact) way? And so on. Of course, none of what I said made much sense. Obviously I should have asked her for the details the day she set those other two accounts up, and she set them up in the only way the bank would allow. But really I was just blowing off steam because I was so startled to find out that the checks I was writing that night weren't backed by the money I thought we had there. And once I settled down it was an easy problem to fix (by moving some money from savings to checking to cover the difference).

Counselor asked Wife how it felt for me to yell at her. She said that for the parts where she felt she had done something wrong, of course she felt guilty; but for the rest of it, .... Counselor stopped her there. Guilty? Are you sure? Yes, Wife replied, guilty and sorry. Counselor wouldn't let it go. He said he understood feeling sorry, but where does "guilty" come from? After probing a little more, he suggested that "guilty" is the way a child might feel; but an adult would be more likely to realize that people make mistakes, and so making a mistake doesn't make you a bad person. In other words, the issue of guilt-vs-innocence really doesn't matter.

We would come back to this question of guilt-vs-innocence, but first we talked for a while about how Wife feels about the yelling itself, when I yell. The answer is that it scares her.

Then Counselor asked me how these situations feel for me, and I explained that when I yell it usually isn't even directed specifically at Wife. But if something happens to alarm me or make me upset, I do this to blow off the steam that builds up inside me so I can think about it more clearly.

So Counselor asked Wife, Now that you know that this is just something Hosea does which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with you, is there something he could do to make you feel better when this happens? She wasn't sure. Maybe apologize.

Hosea, could you do that?

Yeah, sure. But. Sometimes I try to apologize, and I get the clear sense from Wife that the damage is already irreparable. This just makes me feel trapped, and so my internal tension gets worse and the drama escalates. When that happens, it makes me not want to apologize the next time.

Is there something Wife could say that would help de-escalate instead?

Maybe. It might help if, when I apologize for yelling, she said "OK, I understand." But I can tell you for sure what she has to avoid saying.

What's that?

She has to avoid bringing up the original subject. She has to avoid saying, "OK, thank you for the apology. But you know, I really was innocent of that thing you were yelling about ...," because if she does that I feel like she is just starting the fight all over and I'll get mad again. And I'll start yelling again.

At this point Wife objected, "But I have to clear my name. If you are willing to apologize for yelling at me, why can't you also apologize for accusing me unjustly? Why can't you admit that you were wrong to accuse me?"

I am telescoping the discussion a bit for clarity, and there are a lot of answers to this question. One answer is that I might not even know yet whether she is "guilty" or "innocent" of the original issue, whatever it was -- nor does it even matter! The important part is that I shouldn't yell at her. I know that, and I can apologize for that. Re-opening the original argument just rubs in salt, and it is immaterial anyway.

But Counselor pointed out that for Wife it is not immaterial. For Wife, this is fundamental, it is life-or-death. And he asked her to think about what it would take to be able to live with "being guilty" and not care ... to be able to value the dynamic of the relationship over who can be proven judicially right or wrong in this or that petty argument. Because, he added, most of the issues you two "go to court" over in this way are really pretty trivial and not worth it.

He's right. I know he's right. But somehow Wife didn't seem to have any idea what he was talking about.

On lying, part 5

Several readers have pointed out that D is really in an impossible position, maintaining a friendship with Wife at the same time that she is involved in an affair with me. She has realized this, of course, but some days it is driven home to her just a little more powerfully than others.

Two days ago, I got a letter from D after she had gotten off the phone after a long conversation with Wife. She was pretty concerned about a number of things, and her letter began, ...

Dear Hosea,
After listening to Wife talk about your recent behavior, I can't help but wonder about your stress level and well-being. Below are some of the points she made, both about herself and about you. I'm concerned, and I question how transparent you are being with me.
Wife says you are drinking -- a lot -- and that this has been an on-going concern for years. If you are drinking anywhere near as much as she insists you are drinking, it seems reasonable to question your consumption. She says your snoring is directly related to your drinking. Yes, we split a bottle of wine, several times; you did not manifest any hostility and you did not snore. But an entire bottle, night after night? Scotch, three or four glasses? ... I don't understand.

The rest of the letter was in the same vein, and the accusations which Wife had made about me were just as dreary and just as implausible.

Wife reports that you are increasingly hostile and angry; ....
Wife says you told her last night about more job cuts, and you may be at risk....
Wife says that you are overwhelmed with financial concerns and are likely to incur more debt....

And on and on. Finally she ended with:

In short, I am worried. Perhaps you can reassure me, perhaps not. Let's just work towards honesty, our earliest promise to one another, and still sacred.

Now at one level I was fairly irritated at this; I mean, this was the kind of e-mail I was getting from D last fall (see here, et seq.) and I thought we were past it. But at another level, I know that Wife can be remarkably persuasive even when she is lying through her teeth -- persuasive enough even to make you doubt things you saw with your own eyes. So it didn't surprise me too much that she could make D doubt her own knowledge of who I am and what must be the truth. So I did reply to everything she said, item by item, although I fear that some of my pique showed through the surface:

Dearest D,
Oh good heavens, this is ridiculous. I don't drink anything like those quantities. One glass of brandy last night, period. I think two the night before. I haven't kept a list, but the quantities on days before that are comparable.... An entire bottle [of wine] a night, night after night? I would be far too ill to go to work -- the thing is absolutely impossible.
I am not aware of being increasingly hostile and angry, but Wife has been known to say I am "hostile and angry" when I am merely distracted....
I said *nothing* last night about more job cuts ... Holy cow, where did this come from?...

And so on. Item by item. I ended by saying something like what I said just above:

I am a little vexed that whenever you have one of these conversations with Wife, you write me asking about *my* honesty and *my* transparency, when your practical experience should suggest to you that the trouble does not often lie there. But I guess it is difficult to be really at ease when you are thousands of miles away from the situation, and that this is one of the tensions inherent in our relationship as it stands today.... [Then there followed a paragraph that was a lot more romantic, before I signed off.]

So far, there wasn't much in this exchange to warrant talking about it, except by way of random griping. But then the next morning, D sent me a letter that pondered the whole situation as follows:

I'm not sure what to think about my relationship with Wife. After writing you and receiving your letter back, I know I have wronged you and I don't know quite what to think about her. I have never had a 'friend' who literally lies about everything. You write about [a social event we went to recently that I haven't bothered to describe here], and it's clear that you know this woman [someone we met there], and enjoy her company. For Wife, she was a new acquaintance, who was a hairdresser, not a shop owner, and you weren't around for any of the conversation (I specifically asked). I don't mind disagreements over education; I've engaged in a few of those myself. But why lie about the small particulars? ... More disturbingly, she tells endless lies about you; everything from the way you speak to her, to your lovemaking, to your behavior with the boys, to your drinking...none of it has any basis in fact. She cheats on you like a tom cat. She doesn't discuss books, or music, or theater, or philosophy or religion. Our conversations center around the minutia of her life.

As a mother, Wife has no real regard for the boys. Her discipline, or lack of effective consequences bothers me, but many first year teachers [for example] have many of the same problems and I'm tolerant because they are dedicated to the kids; they can be taught how to manage a classroom. Wife is different; she just doesn't deeply care about her children. She has mapped out Son 1's future with a chilling casualness; [she thinks] he's beneath serious consideration because [she thinks] he's just not smart enough to be a real intellectual. Not only is that a completely unwarranted conclusion to draw about Son 1, but the idea that only 'intellectuals' are worthy people is offensive, extremely offensive. I feel she uses Son 2 for low level sexual satisfaction and she works to keep him dependent on her, refusing to either model or teach the social skills an adolescent boy needs in our society. I see no effort on her part to engage the boys or to learn about the challenges ahead as they enter manhood.

So exactly why do I spend any time with her? Most sensible people are more particular about their relationships. If I introduced you to my brothers and sisters, or to my colleagues, you would be impressed and you'd admire all of them. But neither of us admires Wife, and while I may not be as pessimistic as you are about the possibility of real change, the evidence is on your side of the discussion. I find myself questioning you unfairly and without foundation, and feeling unclean, dragged down to a level that is at once sad and yet also frightening and miserable. I realize why you stay with her, although it's not easy for me, and has certain drawbacks for you as well, but above all, I'm not sure how to befriend this woman. I feel pity for her, I remember what she used to be like and I mourn the loss of that person, and I'm sobered by the realization that Jesus' words about the choices we make having consequences we cannot undo are remarkably clear-eyed.

D took the discussion in another direction for a paragraph or so, and then said something that had never occurred to me: ...

I need to understand a great deal more if I'm to deal with her habitual lying, [but] it's clearly clinical in degree. It has occurred to me that she and Friend are actually enmeshed, rather than Wife being duped by this elaborate fantasy about Boyfriend 5 and his family. Rather, she has helped to create the fantasy; I realize she may be making up the stories she tells so often about the various members of this clan. Victim/perpetrator; the line is very blurred.

Maybe I should have thought of that, but I never did.

Anyway, then D wound up her long letter:

I owe you a deep and heartfelt apology for doubting you on any of the issues she raised yesterday, although I was glad to hear that the financial picture is workable, and that you are not awake at night worried about your job. I'm sorry, Hosea. It won't happen again.

Wow.

I'm really not sure how to summarize this. I know I have said that sometimes Wife seems more and more disconnected from reality, and this is part of it. But she is so convincing when she lies like this! So I have to wonder ... does she even know she is lying? (And if so, what could possibly be her motive for lying about irrelevant details?) Or does the truth simply get rewritten before it is written to her memory? Or what exactly is going on?

Most of the time I try not to think about this, and most of the time I can succeed. But some days it just mystifies me.

Counseling 30

Yes, actually I do remember that I left off at Counseling 24. Sessions 25, 26, and 27 weren't very interesting or productive; they came along in the wake of my efforts to be more friendly to Wife, and she appreciated it, and we didn't end up with a lot to discuss. Session 28 was more interesting, but requires some back-story; with luck I may still get to it. Session 29 ...? I don't remember at the moment. Maybe if I check my old e-mails.

But yesterday, Wife and I met at Counselor's office, and she wanted to discuss my concerns about her medications. I wasn't sure she would want to discuss it, but she leapt immediately into the topic. She steered clear of discussing any of the actual events that had caused me to worry, but expressed a fair bit of outrage that I had "basically accused [her] of narcotics addiction."

Counselor tried to de-escalate the discussion by asking a couple of questions, after which he said, "You know, I don't hear Hosea using words like narcotics or addiction. And those are pretty powerful words. What I hear him asking is a straightforward question about balancing your medications -- and it's no secret that you have a lot of medications, more than anybody else I know. So I think maybe we want to be a little careful about handling this on a less intense level, rather than escalating it right away. I mean, when you talk about narcotics addiction, you get all these images in your head of criminality, and shooting people in alleyways. It turns into a discussion about bad character, rather than a much lower-key, more impersonal discussion about medicine."

We talked around this point for a little while, but Wife's basic response was, "Yes, but all this was in the context of Hosea complaining about my character, and about how I'm no longer the woman he married, and how he has no respect for me. So I think that is exactly the topic."

I demurred a little bit that the conversation she had in mind had gone the other way round. We weren't discussing her medication "in the context of" discussing her character or personality, ... in other words, we didn't start with talk about character and end up using medicine as an example. I had started by expressing my concerns over her prescriptions -- and notwithstanding some of the discussions I had earlier had with D, I phrased those concerns as impersonally as possible: "Could it be that the strengths which were prescribed for you when you were a lot heavier are no longer applicable now that you have lost so much weight ...?" It was only when she denied stoutly that she had any of the symptoms of someone abusing her medication that I tried to suggest, "Well something has changed in the last two years because you don't seem to take pleasure in any of the things you used to enjoy, and it is almost as if you are a different woman ...."

I also tried to make a distinction that had occurred to me long ago, but that I am not sure Wife sees or gets. (In retrospect, I see that I discussed it here last August.) I said there are concrete things she does that I don't respect, but that has nothing to do with who she is. A good person can sometimes do bad things; a bad person can sometimes do good things. If anything, the fact that I call her attention to things that bug me is a sign of respect, that I believe she has the power to change them. (And as I remarked to D in a phone call later yesterday afternoon, the fact that I criticize Wife a lot less than I used to may be a sign that I am giving up hope of her ever changing. But be that as it may.)

Wife didn't say much to this, but Counselor picked it up. He suggested that there were probably things in Wife's past that made it so easy and so natural for her to interpret any criticism of deeds as a rejection of her inner self, as a judgement that she is fundamentally unlovable ... and that this is something we could work on in his office. Maybe if we did, she would see things get better.

"Maybe. But I don't see why we should bother. Hosea fundamentally doesn't care about me any more. He said as much, in just those words, over the weekend."

"In every relationship, people say a lot of things in the moment that they don't mean deep down. What I have to say standing outside is that I have worked with the two of you -- you and Hosea -- for many years now. And in all that time I have never seen any evidence -- none at all -- that Hosea doesn't care for you. Quite the opposite."

And we were out of time.

How can you tell this?

Wife continues to have trouble keeping awake in the afternoons. I haven’t taken any concrete action because I don’t know what to do or if, indeed, there is anything I can do. But it continues to trouble me.

The other day, Wife called me maybe an hour before I left work. She had collected both boys from school earlier in the day, and had dropped Son 1 at an appointment before going home. She called to ask me to pick up Son 1 on my way and to get a couple of things at the store. OK, no big deal. At that point, she sounded fine.

While at the store, I suddenly wondered if we had enough pet food. Since Son 2 is responsible for feeding the pets, I called home to ask him if I needed to buy more. (This is now 90 minutes since she called me.) The conversation went like this.


Wife: Hullo?

Hosea: Hi, it's Hosea. Can you please put Son 2 on the phone?

Wife: Son 2's not here.

Hosea: What?? Where is he?

Wife: I don't know.

Hosea: What do you mean you don't know? You brought him home from school didn't you?

Wife: No. Maybe he's still at school. I never brought him home.

Hosea: What???? Why not??

Wife: I don't know.

Hosea: Look, this is not possible. Can you just put him on the phone?

Wife: He's not here. I don't know where he is. I don't know why he didn't come home from school.

I whisper to Son 1, who is standing next to me, "Was Son 2 in the car when Mom picked you up?" He said, "Yeah, of course."

Hosea: Look, can you just call out his name loudly?

Wife: Huh?

Hosea: Call "Son 2" loudly.

Wife: S - O - N - 2! [pause] OK, he's coming. He's on his way. [pause] Here he is.

Son 2: Yeah dad?

Needless to add, I lost no time paying for the stuff I had bought, and getting home. I also asked Son 1 what kind of shape Wife was in while driving. He said she was nodding, and at one stop light the boys had to announce to her that it had turned green. When I got home, she was sound asleep, and when I called her for dinner (another 90 minutes after that) she was still pretty unsteady on her feet.

The week before there was another event just like it. One of the boys had a birthday party. Wife had made a cake and bought pizza for him and his friends; after dinner they were going to sit around watching movies till all hours. The boys are at that great age where you no longer have to worry about them breaking stuff (out of not knowing any better) and you don’t yet have to worry about them breaking stuff (out of drunkenness). Besides, at this age they still think there is something intrinsically fun about staying up late at somebody else’s house. (And no, I don’t mean like that!)

Anyway, Wife called me at work to ask me to pick up a couple of odds and ends on my way home. Again, no problem. But by the time I got home she was more or less totally incoherent: she couldn't articulate words, she couldn't walk without help. She looked just like Boyfriend 4 used to look when he was totally drunk off his ass. So as I started heating up the pizzas, I asked the other boy to check her out as well; he and I agreed that we should let Wife sleep, and that she shouldn't come out to socialize. Partway through dinner, she woke up; I went back into the bedroom to tell her to stay there. Nor was I terribly kind about it. Later, after the boys had eaten and were outside playing, I brought her back a couple of pieces of pizza but still told her to stay in the bedroom, ... because honestly, it would just have been embarrassing. I mean, she's been like this a bunch of times over dinner when it is just us; we all understand and we adjust around her. What is more, the boys love her enough that they would be sure to defend her in case anybody said anything. But they shouldn't *have* to defend her, not at a birthday party! She should be willing to stay in the back of the house, if she is in the kind of shape that a normal person would feel ashamed of being seen in.

Along about midnight, Wife finally came toddling out to taste the cake she had made. After she got a slice (the boys, guests included, were all long since asleep) I shepherded her back to our room and explained some of this. (She was lucid for the first time this evening.) Wife wanted to talk a lot about how it wasn't her fault; I kept replying that "fault" doesn't matter ... the important part is that it would have been embarrassing for her to come out.

Long-term readers have seen stories like this before. It is very much like what happened here, for example. Also here and here. But what causes it? What makes her so exhausted that she regularly checks out by mid-afternoon?

Traditionally, Wife has always said this is caused by her illnesses, but lately she has been getting better. At any rate, her rheumatologist says that her tests look better than they have for a long time. So if it’s not her lupus, what then? Her depression? She suffered from depression for decades without these symptoms. What has knocked the stuffing out of her? What turned her from Bette Davis into Allison Janney?


D proposed a theory recently. D thinks Wife might be abusing – and addicted to – her pain medication.

But how can I tell for sure?

Arguing against this theory, Wife never seems to run out of pain medication before it can be refilled. But I should add (in the interests of full disclosure) that she has at least two different doctors prescribing pain medication, and she built up a stockpile over several years.

And the theory would account for a lot of data.

• Wife is frequently unconscious, staggering, or drooling, at hours of the day when she used to be awake and alert. [But see the Postscript below.]


• Wife talks about her pain a lot more than she used to, but in a very business-like way. “Well, I’m in pain again, so I’m going to lie down and take something for it.” You would never know from the conversational tone of voice that we were talking about something that hurts.


• Wife never leaves the house without making sure she has a bottle of pain medication with her.


• Wife seeks out the company of addicts – in this case, Boyfriend 4, Boyfriend 5 [also here], and probably B5’s Friend.


• Wife chronically thinks I am her enemy, that I am plotting against her somehow. When D was here over New Year’s, she thought I was plotting with D to throw away her stuff. (And I suppose she wasn’t far wrong, honestly. See here and here, for example.) Other times, I am plotting to keep her chained to the housework, to trap her at home somehow. (See for example here and here and here and here.)


• Wife has a progressively weaker and weaker grasp of reality. Appointments, schedules, responsibilities ... she used to be fanatical about these things, and now she can hardly remember them from morning to afternoon. At the same time she is willing to invest totally in the ever more preposterous fantasies spun by Boyfriend 5 and Friend.


• Wife no longer seems to get pleasure from the things she used to enjoy.
  

But there might be a lot of other ways to explain this too. So how do I tell for sure?


Postscript: In the time since I started to write this post, Wife and I have actually talked about this somewhat. She was really, really offended at the suggestion that there might be any hint of addiction or abuse going on here. I tried to put it in the least accusatory possible light, urging that I am really concerned for her because she has changed so much in just the last two years. And it is true that the bulk of the change has been pretty recent. Two years ago she had been weakened by her diseases; she didn’t have the energy she had had twenty years before that. But she was still recognizably a Bette Davis-type. Not today.

So I told her I was concerned, and she told me she was insulted. But in the next few days, from then till now, I have noticed something. On the one hand, she has been pretty pushy about telling me “Just so you know, I haven’t had any painkillers today; so if I’m sluggish, it is just tiredness.” On the other hand, she has been awake and clear-headed at 8:30, when a couple weeks ago she regularly caved in at 7:00. So what does this mean? Could it be that our conversation cued her to look inside for danger signs, and that she is trying to correct course without ever admitting it? Maybe so ... and if that is true, then it is a good thing. If she can pull herself back to a more clear-headed state, then maybe it is OK for her to insist that there never was a problem.

Or maybe there never was a problem – I mean, not a problem with addiction or substance abuse – and D and I have just been mis-reading the signs. I really, really don’t know which it is.

It never rains but it pours ....

I just got a call at work from Boyfriend 4, who was leaving his oncologist's office. His oncologist wants to put him on another round of chemotherapy, and also gave him a prognosis:

18-24 months.

That's with the chemo ... more like 6 months without. And his question to me was, "Do we tell Wife?" (It was in order to ask that question that he called me first and not her.)

I said obviously she will have to know some time; but the question is when. (Jokingly, I told him "She should be told some time in the next 5 years." And he laughed.) I added that I'm not really sure of the answer; but I'll think about it and he and I should talk some more.

He also bought an RV, so he can drive around visiting people -- his family, us, other friends -- and stop paying for his apartment.

So the plot of our little soap opera has another wrinkle to it, I guess ....
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A sonnet for D

I don't do this often, but I figure somebody has to offer Apollo a little competition in the Bad Poetry category. It's an attempt to capture in meter and rhyme some of what I think about a conundrum that has always hovered somewhere in D's peripheral vision. The conundrum is this: How can she hold together, simultaneously, her very deep Christian faith and her overpowering sexuality?

At a very theoretical level this should be no problem: anyone who believes that God created the world must also believe that God created sex. And, after all, "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." (Genesis 1:31) On the other hand, too many Christian clergymen turn pink and make strangling noises at any serious discussion of sex; you don't hear many sermons compare the Beatific Vision to the ecstasy of orgasm; and D's sexuality is so intense and so ever-present that it can seem a bit incongruous coming from a grey-haired, Catholic professional woman. It looks even more incongruous that she is now totally committed to an extra-marital affair (with me), without making the slightest attempt to justify it in any terms outside the affair itself.

So how is she to make sense of all this? What's a girl to do?

Honestly, I think the incongruity is more apparent than real. I think God's perspective on things is so different from our own that it is a bit presumptuous for us to think He cares a whole lot about legal formalities of one kind or another. And my own religious sense is nebulous enough that I don't have to be very consistent about these opinions. It's convenient.

Anyway, as I say, I tried to take a few of my thoughts on the subject and distill them for her. I'll send this to her soon, and I hope she likes it.

Is this a Christian? Watch her through the door,
Conducting class with tender, tireless care,
Who gave up all she knew to teach the poor,
Whose love her students breathe in with the air.

“But are not Christians chaste?” So asks the scold.
“Where comes this passion, burning like wildfire?
“She should be meek and timid, never bold.
“Do not such driving lusts provoke God’s ire?”

But nay! The God who rolled back Timeless Night
With boundless pow’r, from flesh won’t hide His face.
In energy He takes His keen delight,
And casts on lovers gladness as His grace.

And so I think I’m not far wrong to say,
Amica sancta, ora nunc pro me.

D is losing her job

This isn't really infidelity-type news, and it is only tangentially a relationship issue; but D found out today that she will lose her job at the end of the month. Nobody denies she has been doing an excellent job, but she costs her employers a lot and she has some fundamental philosophical differences with them. In any event, she has been afraid for a while that this would happen, and now it has.

She has also been told that she can't let any of her colleagues know about it, or her employers will withhold her last paycheck. (sigh)

I talked with her on the phone and tried to reassure her. (Although I don't know how reassuring she found it for me to tell her that my last period of unemployment lasted way longer than I ever thought it would.) Intellectually she knows that this has nothing to do with her ability or performance, but emotionally it feels like a major failure to her. Nor is she really sure where to turn next. In the short run, she is likely to move back in with her husband, just to have a roof over her head.

By coincidence, she was going to be attending a prayer retreat in a couple of weeks; and she now thinks the timing looks almost (excuse the term) providential. Not that she has any idea what to pray, really, except to ask, "Where am I going now?"

Of course, it's not like it's just her. Stuff like this is happening all over. But that doesn't make it any easier. I did remind her that I love her, and she said that helped.
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