Anxiety, part 2: have a drink

Tonight was better than last night, because I realized there is a cure (well, let's call it a palliative) for anxiety: alcohol.  Not too long after I got home, Son 2 told me "You're starting to do it again" (which tells me he was indeed awake last night).  I thanked him, ... and poured myself a drink.  Much better.  Then the only trick during the rest of the evening was to drink just enough that I was relaxed and joking, while keeping it little enough that I didn't become an asshole.  Sometimes I worry about where I might go with too much to drink, but tonight (ahem, hrum) it was ... purely medicinal.

I wonder if I can just drink my way through the next week?  Probably not a good idea, huh?  Tempting, though.

"You can be a downer on anything!"

Weird evening last night.  When I got home from work, I tried hard not to be in a bad mood, after Son 2's claim that I'm never happy.  That was fine until Wife started talking compulsively about all the shopping she did today, or something like that, and I stepped out into the front yard "for some fresh air."  Son 2 followed me and said, "You're either tired or angry."

Hosea:  (smiles)  I think that diagnosis shows a very limited emotional vocabulary ... I mean, if those are the only two choices.

Son 2:  Well you're quiet and withdrawn.  If it's not tiredness or anger, what is it?

Hosea:  (thinks to self: It's that your mother talks compulsively and has the single bitchiest voice known to mankind, a voice I have become more or less allergic to. But I also know it is my job to avoid speaking ill of her to you.) (says out loud) Gosh, do I have to be all analytic right now and figure that out? I'd rather not, just at the moment ....

So we talked about something else for a couple minutes; then Son 2 went inside to collect the trash to take out, and I started making dinner.

Everyone liked dinner, which was a bit of a surprise.  Actually, Wife and Son 2 have been complimenting all my meals this week.  Either I'm having a lucky streak, or else ... well I guess the only other alternative is the paranoid one that they are trying to put me off my guard while setting me up to be abducted by terrorists. But I doubt it's that; who would pay my ransom?

During dinner, Wife nattered on incessantly about all the shopping she did today, while I stared at a spot on the wall and held perfectly still.  Or so I thought.

Son 2:  Mom, maybe you should stop now. Dad is saying "Stop, stop" to himself.

Hosea:  What?  Am I talking to myself?  I wasn't aware of it.

Son 2:  Yes, you were mouthing "Stop, stop, stop."

Hosea:  Gosh, I had no idea.

Wife:  And I wasn't looking towards you, so I couldn't see.

Well, Wife didn't exactly stop, but she slowed down and the meal went on.

Dinner ended; Wife went to bed, I cleaned up, and Son 2 settled into the computer to read online comics and listen to music.  After a while I came back to chat for a bit and he started talking about the music he was listening to.  He asked me what I used to listen to back when I was a kid, and the answer really was "Not much."  Or rather, I listened to what people around me listened to.  So my parents played a lot of Beatles when I was young; later on my brother played the Beatles, the Who, ... and lots of bands I had never heard of and whose names I don't remember.  But he kept asking, "Did you listen to this? ... to that?"  And he was logged into some website (don't remember the URL, sorry) from which he could download seemingly any song in existence.  So I decided to toss out a name that he hadn't mentioned and had probably never heard of: "How about Joan Baez?"  And of course he asked, "Who?"  Now admittedly we didn't own a whole lot of her stuff when I was growing up, but my parents bought it quite early; the story is that when I was a baby, if I got really upset over something, they would set me down next to the speakers and put on an album of Joan Baez or Judy Collins ... and I'd calm down.  So anyway, I decided to see what I could find and typed in "baez jesse".  And sure enough, they had "Jesse" off of "Diamonds and Rust".

Well, he didn't like it, and shut it off in the middle.  No big deal, but for some reason I was already feeling fragile and skittish, and so I just fell quiet.  Unfortunately this happens to be a behavior that Son 2 just hates, and so he blew up at me.

Son 2:  Oh my God, here we go again! Now you're going to get all quiet and withdrawn! You know ... forget it. Just forget it. I'm going to bed. Honestly, you can be a complete downer on anything! And if any little thing doesn't go your way, you just sulk about it and make everybody else miserable!

Hosea:  I don't think that's quite fair ....

Son 2:  It's completely fair.  Good night!

Lights off, discussion over.  Gosh, that sure motivated me to stop sulking ....

But as I stewed over it for a few minutes, I realized that this is exactly what D does to me when I cross some line I didn't know was there, and it makes me crazy.  So Son 2 is right to be upset with me over it, and yes I'm probably being self-centered and childish by just going sullen when I don't like something.  On the other hand, his flaring up like that doesn't help anything because it makes me feel even more helpless, like there is absolutely nothing I can do to fix it. 

So I opened his door and tiptoed into his room.  I deliberately left the lights off, so it was almost pitch black.  But I am nearly certain he wasn't asleep yet ... I think he wouldn't have been that quiet if he had been.  And I told him, ...

Hosea:  I'm sorry for getting all quiet and withdrawn. I know that makes you crazy, and actually now that I think about other people I know who do the same thing it makes me crazy too. So I will try really, really hard to stop doing it. But in turn I need something from you. It makes me just as crazy when you suddenly shift gears like that and write me off for the rest of the evening. So can you please be a little more tolerant? It would even be nice if you could give me a bit of a heads-up that I am starting to do this thing, so I can back up; but in any event please don't just suddenly shift to where you are totally fed up with me and there is nothing I can do about it.

He didn't say anything, and I tiptoed out closing the door behind me.  I hope he was awake and heard me.  And I pray I can get better at this.
__________

By the way, if you don't know the song "Jesse" here it is:

Anxiety

I bet I know why I have been so difficult at home lately.

I think I'm just anxious.  After all, a week from today -- on Friday -- we deliver Son 2 to Durmstrang.  Then on Saturday I'll tell Wife I want a divorce.  Then on Monday the two of us have an appointment with Lawyer to go over my proposed settlement. 

And somewhere in there I expect all Hell to break loose and never be caged again.

Yeah, ... anxious.  That's the word Son 2 was looking for last night.

"Dad's never happy"

We took Son 1 back to Hogwarts a week and a half ago.  We take Son 2 to Durmstrang in another week and a half.  After that, I talk to Wife and all Hell breaks loose.

In the meantime, I've been trying to keep life looking normal.  I go to work in the daytime, Son 2 stays at home with Wife (since he is still on summer vacation), and they have been working on getting together the things he needs for school: buying this, unearthing that from the garage, and so on.

Dinner was fairly normal, or so I thought.  Son 2 said silly things, Wife asked me how my day was at work, I told her it was fine but mostly didn't make eye contact with her ... but then I have been avoiding talking with her or making eye contact for some time now.  That's just all over for me.  With the boys, no problem of course ... but not her.

But then after dinner, when Son 2 had gone to check his Facebook account (or whatever), Wife started asking me if I am all right.  Is everything OK at work?  Am I ill?  Do I maybe need to see a psychiatrist and have my depression managed better?  Because she had noticed, she said, that I seemed more and more depressed these days.  What are "these days"?  Well she's not really sure, but certainly the last six months and probably it's been growing slowly for a couple years before that.

Of course three years ago is when we split our money and I became convinced that the marriage was unsalvageable.  And six months ago I looked at the calendar and realized it was time to get my ass in gear and finish writing a parenting plan and a financial plan so that we could proceed with the divorce as soon as both boys were out of the house.  So yes, I have probably been a little distracted.  And no, I really haven't wanted to spend any time talking with Wife.  The sound of her voice makes me flinch at this point.  And to keep myself from losing it when she starts nattering and I feel like I just can't listen a minute longer, I'll fix my attention on a spot on the far wall and just wait it out.  I don't want to have to look at her while she is talking because I don't want to have to engage.  If I don't make eye contact it is easier to let the sounds just wash over me, mumble a little, and then wrap up the conversation as soon as possible.

So Wife worries that my depression is out of control, and suggested I see a psychiatrist.  The one I used to see retired years ago, and my GP / internist has been renewing my prescription for anti-depressants ever since.  This got Wife started on a long and otherwise irrelevant litany of complaints about her own psychiatrist.  But after that she came back to saying she was worried about me. 

"Hosea, I know you don't trust me any more and you haven't confided in me in years. But I'm still concerned about you. And I still think I know you better than anybody else does, just because we have lived together for so long. Maybe the only exception is the boys, who are both very sensitive. And in fact what got me thinking about this was something Son 2 said just the other day. I was talking to him about how you hadn't seemed very happy at dinner the night before, and he said to me, 'But Mom, haven't you noticed? Dad's never happy.' Then I started thinking about it and that's when I realized he was right. You're never happy. And that worries me."

Well, I wrapped up the conversation with Wife by saying that I'd have to think about it.  And of course in truth I know that I really have been preoccupied, and why.

But I'm worried that Son 2 thinks I'm never happy.  Of course he only sees me when I am also around Wife, so I understand where he gets the idea.  But I hope I can mend it.  Once Wife and I are split, I hope he sees that I can be happy again, which I expect to be ....  On the other hand by then he'll be away at boarding school.  And I don't want to talk to him about it too early.

Something else to fret over, I guess.

500th post

Gosh, a milestone.  What am I supposed to say?

I had no idea what to expect when I started blogging.  Part of me figured this would be like so many other projects that I would start and then abandon.  And it was very nearly so -- after a mere eight posts in December 2007 and January 2008, I let the thing sit untouched for four months.  I even remember in that time thinking, "Oooh, there's an interesting idea. I should write that up for my blog."  But I didn't, and now of course I have no idea what I was thinking about.  If not for Boyfriend 5, I might never have come back to it.

But come back I did; and while my posting has ebbed and flowed since then, I have never since let a month go by without at least one post.  Not that they give out prizes for this sort of thing, but it's something that I felt I wanted to check.  I even went and made a chart of number of posts per month ....  (Why yes, that is indeed a colossally geeky thing to do!)

Also in that time I saw a whole community of infidelity bloggers coalesce, flourish, and then dissipate.  I've heard the statistic that a typical sex blog lasts about a year and a half, so I guess that community did pretty well against those odds.  And we sheltered a few truly gifted writers ... none of whom are writing any more (so far as I know), and the Internet is poorer for it. 

Thank you all for the feedback you've given me.  It is always a thrill to see that anybody has replied to anything I have written, even when the reply is a much-needed slap upside the head because I'm being a self-centered moron.  Valuable too, in those cases.  So, again, thanks.

I have no idea what to expect in the future.  I figure I'll keep plugging away at least until my divorce is resolved.  After that, will I have anything to write about?  The original purpose of the blog -- to help me understand my marriage -- will have evaporated.  Maybe at that point I'll find something else to write about, or maybe I'll pack it in.  But I think you are stuck with me for at least a little while yet ... if I can keep up with remembering to update at least once a month ....

Thanks, and again thanks.

“When God Talks Back” … and thoughts on prayer

The other day D sent me a link to an article about otherwise sane, normal people who hear God speak to them, and I knew just what the author was talking about.  Not that I’ve heard God speak to me personally (or, well, not exactly) but … ummm … maybe I should back up.

The article is a review of a new book by Tanya Luhrmann called When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.  Luhrmann made her name with her first book, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, where she reported on two years she had spent with a number of British covens studying the question, “Why do otherwise sane, intelligent people believe in witchcraft and magic when the magic obviously doesn’t work?”  (This way of posing the question seriously frosted the covens who had welcomed her and shown her hospitality during her research.)  Her conclusion was that by participating in the practice of witchcraft itself, adherents actually changed the way they perceived the events around them so that they came to believe their magic really had worked after all.  (She also conceded in a fotnote that she too would have come to believe in witchcraft during her two years of close association with these people, except that she had a strong prior commitment to remaining an anthropologist and anthropologists aren’t allowed to Go Native. So she refused to let herself believe.)

That was years ago, but with her latest book Luhrmann does exactly the same thing for the evangelical Christian community.  These are people who pray to God for guidance in the trials and questions of their lives, and who expect God to give them an answer.  Luhrmann starts with the understanding that this may sound bizarre to outsiders, but then explains that the practice of living like an evangelical Christian – particularly the habit of talking to God as if you expected an answer – actually predisposes you to hear the answers come.  Maybe not right away, but after a while.

The thing is, I know this is true: partly from what I read, partly from friends I’ve talked to, and partly by actual test.  In the first column, I could list a number of books; but the easiest one to use (since I have already talked about it in this blog) is John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, which I have referenced here, among other places.  In the second column, … gosh, I have had any number of friends over the years who talked to God in a pretty casual and friendly way.  My best friend all through high school was one of these.  So was one of my best friends at my last job (before this one) … and again at the job a decade before that.  And of course D is deeply religious; while she may not converse with God in quite the chatty way some of my other friends did, she would certainly allow for the possibility.  Somehow I attract these people into my life.

The third column may take a little explaining, and it is something I generally don’t talk about.  But what the hell: this is all anonymous, right?

How far back do I go?  Suppose I start after college, when I met Wife.  At that point I had no religious affiliation at all, and she was Wiccan.  We fell in love and I started accompanying her to moons and festivals.  I never sought to join her group myself – I’m not much of a joiner – but I watched closely what went on as I hung around, and I can attest to what Tanya Luhrmann says: if you hang out with the people and attend the rituals, you start seeing things that you didn’t see at first.  I could tell that something real was going on there, though I’d be hard-pressed to say exactly what.

Time passed; we moved away; Wife lost touch with her old group and was never able to make lasting contact with a new group, so after a while she gave up practising at all.  Then years and years later, she felt called to start attending a Christian church, and settled on a Baptist congregation nearby.  At first I simply told her, “Have a nice time,” but she pleaded over and over for me – and, at that point, the boys – to join her.  By this time the marriage was already very difficult, but I tried to negotiate with her and agreed to go in exchange for … shit, I don’t remember what any more.  And we went for a couple of years.  She was baptized in this church, and I wasn’t.  (Once again, I’m not much of a joiner.)  Then she had a falling out with the church leadership (long story) and left in a dramatic sulk.  She never went anywhere else after that.

I never had any respect for her abandoning her Wiccan practice, nor for her abandoning church: I figured that if she actually meant the things she said either time, then she should have stuck it out even when things didn’t go her way.  Isn’t that what dedication to God or the gods is all about?  But at the same time it was also true that both times I got a sense that there was something real hiding behind the show.  I didn’t feel like signing up for anything, whether initiation or baptism, but just out of shyness or diffidence. It’s not that I thought either of them was totally off-base.  (I won’t pretend to know how to reconcile the fact that Wicca and Christianity teach flatly different things from a doctrinal point of view. I’m speaking here only of sensed intimations of things unseen.)

And so whenever I would have a really difficult time with Wife – whenever I would want to knock my head against a brick wall with frustration at her deceit, her betrayal, her blindness, or her thoughtless cruelty – I would go outside to get away from it all, take a long walk, and shout at God for a while.  This woman is crazy!  This woman is cruel!  This woman will never understand anything!  What am I supposed to do with her?  How am I supposed to deal with what she has done this time?  What the hell do You think You’re doing to allow this, and what exactly are You asking of me?

For the most part, I guess, I was just blowing off steam.  But you know?  After I had done this a few times, I got to where I thought I heard an echo somewhere softly in the back of my head.  Oh, I don’t mean that literally … exactly.  I’m not sure how to describe it literally.  But I do know that it got to where I regularly “heard” an answer to all those questions.  And the answer, time and again, to the question how I was supposed to deal with the latest crazy, destructive thing Wife had done, was simply: Love her.

That was all, and it was frustrating advice.  But it’s what I heard.  OK, Boss. Got that. I’ll try harder.

And for years I did.

Once in a great while I got a little bit more, although the intellectual part of me kept second-guessing myself.  A couple of those times I’ve already described here, here, and here.  But there was another I never wrote about.  This was once when Wife had really gone far past any known limits.  (I no longer remember what she had done, but it was way worse than usual.)  I went out walking around, stomping up and down the sidewalks of our neighborhood, and this time my questions were a lot fiercer.  What is this about? I do everything for her. I have given up, for her sake, everything else that I might have been or done. And she doesn’t see it. She doesn’t care. There’s not a shred of thanks. And what’s more, after I knock myself out doing everything for her, she turns around and flatly betrays me! She might as well be killing me in slow and painful ways, cutting out my heart or driving spikes into me or something. Are You even listening?? What am I supposed to do about that?  Well, I didn’t exactly get a reply in words.  What I got was a feeling that might have been an arched eyebrow or a curl of the lip … I mean, if God had eyebrows or lips.  But the meaning was clear enough.  If I had to translate it into words, it would have come out something like, You’re telling me you love her, and do everything for her, and she doesn’t see or appreciate any of it, and then she betrays you – cuts your heart out – drives nails into your flesh? Sucks, doesn’t it? Trust me, I know exactly how you feel. Been there. Done that.

Yeah, right.  Thanks a lot.  What a lot of help that was.  I did have to smile though, … just a bit.

I’ve never told that story before … because to whom, exactly, could I tell it?

Somewhere along in this time I started blogging.  And you may remember that my earlier posts – the first year or so – sounded a lot more conventionally pious than anything I have written since.  That was on purpose.  I was trying to find a voice for the character Hosea, and I figured that maybe I could use him to express some of the spiritual intuitions I have written about here.  God knows that nobody would ever associate any of that with my real-life persona.  So I thought that the anonymity of blogging might let me discuss it more openly.  But then things took a different turn, I began the affair with D, and for a long time the Voice seemed to fall silent.  When I decided for sure on the divorce, I tried to listen for it again, to ask if I was doing the right thing, and I heard nothing at all.  That didn’t make me feel any more secure about the decision, but I finally decided that I had to go forward, Voice or no Voice.  And I had kind of given up on hearing it again any time soon.

Well, I still haven’t heard it, but a couple of days ago I began to wonder: that article D sent me … was it maybe, just maybe, the Voice’s way of reminding me, I’m still here?

Lonesome Traveler

Son 1 had some summer reading to do before he went back to school last weekend, and in classic fashion he put it all off till the last minute.  But finally I really had to ask, What are you supposed to be reading? Because it is high time to get your ass in gear.

Turns out he was supposed to read On the Road.  We went to the library and found a Library of America volume containing five novels and selections from Jack Kerouac’s journals.  Son 1’s reading was desultory, as he didn’t much care for On the Road.  But I picked up the book in a few spare hours and began to thumb through it.

Somehow I’m fifty years old and I had never read any Kerouac before this month.  But it’s great stuff.  I didn’t feel ambitious enough to start one of the novels, but I have been poking around in the sketches that make up Lonesome Traveler, and I find them captivating for the same reason that I love Bruce Chatwin’s very different book The Songlines.  They both speak, in concrete and profound ways, of the urge to get up and GO! … to travel … to leave the dull, daily round behind and go somewhere that you can see the world afresh.

I understand the urge.  When I was little, we moved every single year up until I was seven, and it still feels strange to me that I have now lived in the very same house – a house that I own, for God’s sake! – for eighteen years.  I love to travel, not that I have ever admitted as much to Wife.  And I am looking forward, hoping against hope, to the time when my divorce is final and I can start exploring whether my company could transfer me to an office in Samarkand or Timbuktu.

The fantasy is nothing new for me, and you’ve had to put up with it more and more often lately (including quite recently, for example).  In a sense I suppose it is of a piece with my feeling chronically an outsider, and so I haven’t thought about it a lot even as I have wallowed contentedly in the daydream. 

On the other hand, if travel and movement and permanent strangerhood are things I enjoy, what the hell am I doing here?  Why am I married, with children, owning a house in the suburbs and working in a highly stationary career?  How did this happen?  Often when I ask myself that I’ll blame my shyness – or, if I’m feeling especially bitter at the time, my lassitude and cowardice.  And doubtless that’s part of it.  Another part is that it can take me shockingly long to come to understand what I really want, and until then I just kind of drift along with what people expect of me.  But can that be all?  Maybe so, but sometimes it seems to me that I am forcing a couple of small facts to shoulder an awful lot of the burden of explanation.  Is there really nothing more?

And then a couple of days ago it hit me.  I realized exactly why I chose to come to this place in my life.

I’m here as a tourist.

OK, I realize it sounds crazy, but suddenly all sorts of little things began to fall into place.

• When I first began to meet Wife’s family – Poor White Trash all of them, with all the virtues and faults (mostly faults) that that implies – it never bothered me that these people were about to become my in-laws.  I never really thought that they had anything to do with me, and so I could be courteous to them in a way that Wife (who felt their connection viscerally) never could. 
• When Wife’s mother would do things that were crazy or dishonest or destructive, of course I was sorry for how her actions hurt Wife; but I never felt personally engaged, I never felt that she reflected on me or on the kind of people I came from or associated with.  Instead, I observed her as if I were a tourist or an anthropologist – or perhaps an entomologist – and she were a particularly colorful and remarkable specimen. 
• And I can’t count the times I have been mowing our lawn over the years, when I have smiled to myself and reflected, Now I am carrying out my time-honored cultural duties as a male head-of-household. What an interesting role I am playing! And what quaint, curious customs this tribe has! It’s really quite exotic if you look at it right … 

Even when I was convinced that the marriage had to be permanent, even when I believed that divorce was unthinkable, I never really believed that the marriage had made the two of us into One in any kind of permanent way, or that – on a metaphysical level – I was doing anything here more than just visiting.  Now, I don’t suppose I put this explicitly into words for myself, or at least not usually.  The only logical way to make room simultaneously for the belief that our marriage was indissoluble and also the belief that in some sense it was not truly permanent would be to accept a clear doctrine about life after death, whether through reincarnation or bodily resurrection or something like that.  And for all such doctrines I have to return a verdict of Not Proven, at any rate if I approach the question sober and in daylight.  But at an emotional level I remained somehow persuaded that whatever happened in my marriage or among my in-laws didn’t really relate to me.  Because all along I have been here just as a tourist.

It’s an interesting perspective.

It also tells me – once again, as if I didn’t already know – that divorce was probably always inevitable.

"What my friends think" meme

I guess I am a little late to the party by only now discovering this meme; Son 1 scoffed when he found out that I didn't know it already and more or less told me I had to get to know the Internet a lot better.  But gosh, be that as it may I only ran across it yesterday.  It is kind of fun.  Already today -- this afternoon at the office, when I was supposed to be working -- I devised one for my real-life job.  (Sorry, I won't be posting that here.)  And now that it is evening, I have been hiding out and trying to work up one for my identity as Hosea.  Let me know what you think.

The Consummate Outsider

Friday afternoon (a couple weeks ago) I went to a memorial for Barry, a friend I used to work with in years long past who died two months ago of colon cancer.  It wasn’t a religious service, although there were certainly those there who expressed religious sentiments.  Rather, Barry had expressed the wish that his friends and family get together to have a really fun party.  So there was food and music and an open bar.  There was a sentimental slide show of photos from his life.  People reminisced about Barry and caught up with old friends they hadn’t seen in a long time.  And to the extent that you can say this about what was still (in effect) a funeral, it really was a lot of fun.

What made this possible, of course, is that Barry was such a great guy.  He was full of energy, had an indomitable laugh, and warmed to people quickly.  Barry was the kind of guy who was always at the center of his social circle, just  because if he liked you he accepted you as family straightaway.  Friends were regularly over to his house, whether for a few beers or for golf or to help him put in a retaining wall so the hill behind his house wouldn’t collapse in the rain.  His kids grew up with the kids of his friends and neighbors, just because he – and his wife, to be sure – were so welcoming.  The stories went on and on.

I guess it is only natural, when you go to one of these things, to wonder what it will be like when it’s your turn?  I have long since said that I have no intention of expressing an opinion about what my family should do for me, on the grounds that “funerals are for the living anyway, so you guys have to decide what you want to do.”  But also I don’t want to get sucked into planning something big that feeds my ego and then have nobody show up.

It’s a real possibility.  We heard short talks from Barry’s brother and sister, and also from three or four of his old college buddies … with whom he had remained close ever since.  Where are my old college buddies?  I haven’t the slightest idea.  I haven’t kept up with them.  There’s one friend from eighth grade with whom I am still vestigially in touch, although we don’t write each other a lot; ironically my boys hear from him more often than I do because they and he are all on Facebook, which I am not.  Who else, since then?  Work friends, mostly, but even there I haven’t really kept up with most of them.  Half a dozen of us (from the company where we and Barry all worked together) still get together three or four times a year for lunch.  And of course if I dropped dead now, when I’m fifty, there would be people from my current company or people who remembered working with me at my previous company who would stop by because it’s the nice thing to do.  But there is no way that I have ever kept – or will ever keep – in touch with a galaxy of good friends the way Barry did.

I thought about this for a while, and I realized it’s not just accidental, and its not just laziness.  (Well, part of it is laziness but not all of it.)  The fact is that I compartmentalize my life almost instinctively, to the extent that I never really drop all the boundaries with anybody.  Of course for years I haven’t wanted to bring anybody from work home to meet Wife, because her social skills are so bad and she can be so offensive or embarrassing.  (Also our house is a sty, and the boys have picked up on this. In elementary school they used to have their little friends over un-self-consciously for play dates; but once they entered middle school the visits stopped like they had been cut off with a knife.)  Even in the early years of our marriage, when she was a little less embarrassing and I loved her a lot more, I was really careful about the people I invited home … ever since the disastrous night in graduate school when I invited a number of friends from my department over and she went into a racist monologue against Mexicans that left all of us – me included – stunned and speechless.  But there is more to it than that, because I compartmentalized my life well before I even met her.

When did it start?  How far back does it go?  I’m really not sure.  Gosh, could I blame it all on my father telling me not to tell my friends at school that he and my mother used to smoke dope?  Tempting, but unlikely because it’s too specific and too superficial.  More plausible, I think, is that it may have grown out of my chronic experience of being not understood.

It happens in big things and little, but in some ways it is the story of my life.  It seems like whenever I have argued with D – whether over some pointless political topic or a serious emotional one – somewhere near the core of the argument she has misunderstood something I said and taken strong exception to it.  (Isn’t it great how I can make all our arguments Not My Fault that way? But in retrospect that’s how I remember them.)  My whole marriage to Wife has been one long dreary sequence of occasions where she has not had the slightest clue what I was trying to say … and in fact one of the very earliest posts in this blog, back in December 2007, complained about exactly that.  Whenever I have to ask somebody a question at work, I always ask it two or three times in two or three very different ways, because I have learned (and now take it for granted) that nobody will have the slightest idea on the first pass what I am talking about or why I should want to know that, of all things.  My favorite English teacher in high school once commented that I had a “strong inner life” but shit, of course I did … because most of the time there was no-one I could talk to about the things I was thinking.  I can even trace this thread as far back as third grade ….

I had a great third-grade teacher.  She was a little short lady (though I didn’t recognize that at the time because she was taller than I was) who clearly loved her job and took a real interest in teaching us.  Besides the usual round of spelling and arithmetic and scissors-and-paste, she would read us stories and sometimes she would give us things to think about.  One of the ways she would do this last was to gather us all around sitting in a circle on the floor, in the corner where she would read to us, and then giving us a saying or famous quote and asking what we thought about it.  Was it true?  False?  Could we think of anything in our lives that would make us think of this quote one way or the other?  And then we’d discuss it.  Great stuff.

So one afternoon she called us around, and she proposed the topic, “We would be very unhappy if all of our wishes came true.”  Now this very topic was one I had already thought about a lot, so I knew I had something to say.  I put up my hand eagerly.

Hosea:  Oh – oh – I know!

Teacher:  Yes, Hosea, what do you think about this?

Hosea:  Well I know this is true, because sometimes if I’m sad or upset about something I wish that I had never been born – but I know in reality that wouldn’t make me happy because actually I really like being alive.

Dead silence. 

Dead, awkward, embarrassed silence.

Dead, awkward, embarrassed silence during which Hosea came to the sudden, awful realization that nobody else in his third grade class had any experience at all of the rare but recurrent, soul-shaking suicidal ideations that he had already (at the age of eight) long-since accepted as a familiar fact of life.

Ooops.

And then some other student spoke in a small mumble about something he had wanted for Christmas that broke the next day, or about his pet bunny, or something.  I don’t quite remember what it was.  And the whole discussion picked up from there as if I had never spoken a single word. 

And over time I guess I learned not to.  Over time I learned to be very good at keeping people on the outside.  At being the most polite, charming, helpful, friendly outsider I knew how to be.

It has kept me from stumbling into the same kinds of awkward embarrassing silences any more – and I think the wellbutrin has helped too – but it also means there won’t be many people at my funeral.

I don’t expect it any time soon, of course, or I’d invite all of you.  Well, and I suppose I would have to leave instructions and a password to my executor to log into this blog and post the date / time / place.  Hmmm … is that something I really want to do?  I think that right now my will still names Wife as my executor, so maybe not ….

How about if I think about it another time?

Am Pragfriedhof

Pragfriedhof is a large, old cemetery in Stuttgart, Germany.


So many souls, to tiny homesteads bound,
Some born two hundred years and more ago
In days of princely Baden-Württemberg.
Far more did flourish in those happy days,
After Bonapartist blood had ebbed
Before young Princip blew apart the world.
Their houses reach down to the present day,
The earth fresh-turned, the stone fresh carved-upon,
The surnames all (or most) the same through years.
So many titles show: here's "Freiherr von"
And "Freiin", "Doktor", "Brigade-general".
Professions: "Optiker", "Mechaniker".
How can there be so many generations?
Did no-one in this city ever leave?
That cannot be -- but after all the stones
List even those who fell in foreign lands.
And all the while the litany repeats
"Geboren" and "gestorben" on and on.
So many memories that families hold
To root themselves in this, a century
Beset by earthquakes on a scale unmatched
Perhaps in all the history of the world.
These little plots aspire to permanence,
To spite the churning changes of our day.

Thus long ago did godly Plato write,
That man desires immortality.
And so we see here -- here, amid the dead --
The graven stones live on, a testament
To so much longing for eternity.

So what is wrong with me? For here I stand,
With fifty years now, give or take a bit --
A solid age, not in my headstrong youth,
An age when men like me should start to think
About the legacy they'll leave behind,
About their sons, their wives, their kith and kin,
And all the rootedness that makes a house,
That graves on stone to save the memory
Of this our time against the tide of years.

But all my thought is bent on breaking free: --
On pushing o'er the stones,
And pulling up the roots,
And tearing down the house,
And striking out from here,
Straight on unto the ending of the world.

Why sure! I'll park my sons in boarding schools,
Divorce my wife and liquidate the house --
Or else abandon it and let them come
And find me if it puts them in a snit!
I'll take my leave from here and go to work
In foreign lands where men speak foreign tongues,
Eat meals spiked with strange spices, drink strange wines,
And talk to everyone that I shall meet;
To be a man of many turnings-round,
Who many cities sees -- men meets -- and knows their minds,
And who gives not a fig for coming home!

Or maybe not. Remember who I am,
A staid and quiet, timid, fearful man,
too shy for such Odysseosity.
And can I care so little for my boys?
To leave them nothing: fatherless, no home,
No name, no house, abandoned, all alone --
Those boys I claim to love most in the world?

And will I not regret it, after all,
If all men strive for immortality,
And I with my own hands uproot and shred
The marriage - family - home that shelter me
From all the anonymity of death
And the grinding, crushing weight of years on years?
When it's too late for turning back, what then?
Will I not miss the very things I fled?
Look at the honest burghers dead and gone
And buried in the Friedhof, how they strove
To document for all ensuing years
How deeply rooted in their soil they were --
They and their kin, unto the last degree.

So why not me?

I cannot say. Perhaps it's a mistake,
A tragic flaw to bring me bitter tears,
Through bitter years of unrelieved regret.

It may be so.
All that I know
Is I must go.

And may the gods have mercy when I die,
Unknown, unmourned, unburied, homeless ... free.

Plans, first draft

I finished the first draft of my Parenting Plan and Financial Plan yesterday and sent them to Lawyer.  She had lots going on yesterday but will review them today and then get back to me.  For all I know she may consider parts of it crazy, so we'll see.

On the one hand are money and property.  I offer Wife nearly all the furniture, all the antique rubbish (I mean, "knick-knacks"), and most of the bank accounts and investments.  I have two 401K plans from working for two different employers over the years, and they are currently worth about the same thing: I offer her one of them.  And I offer that if she can somehow cobble together the funding to take out a mortgage in her own name, I won't fight her for the house: all I want out of it is the ability to walk away.  (Well, ... that and pay off a note we gave my parents eighteen years ago when we bought the place, for a loan they gave us back then.)  Admittedly I think the odds of her being able to get a mortgage in her own name are pretty slim, because she doesn't have much income; but it is by far my most preferred outcome -- less trouble than fixing the place up for sale, and better than having to take it over myself.  One thing I have learned from owning a house is that I never, ever want to own property again.  I don't enjoy keeping track of maintenance, and so I am really bad at it.  When something breaks, I want to be able to call the landlord and have him fix it.  And Wife, who grew up poor, really really wants to be able to say she is a homeowner.  Except for the financial implausibility it would be a great solution, far and away the best.

As regards spousal and child support, our state uses a formula based on income and percentage custody.  I have asked Lawyer to plug in the numbers and figure it out.  As a starting point I will offer whatever the formula says.  (In the back of my head I figure that I might be willing to trade a more generous support level for some other concessions.)

On the other hand is custody, where I am a lot stingier.  Both boys will be away at boarding schools for most of the year, so we don't either of us have all that much time to divide up.  But of the time that remains, I offer her 23% and keep 77% for myself.  I propose a calendar that will allow us to divide up the holidays so that if she gets them for Thanksgiving one year then I'll get the next year, but I'm willing to discuss the details.  I am not very willing to discuss the overall percentages.  I hope we can avoid taking the whole thing to Court, but I will go to Court over that point if I can't buy her off with some tolerable financial concessions.

Finally I added, as a sweetener to induce Wife to settle for what she can get out of Court, that if we avoid going to Court I am willing to file for separation and not divorce so long as we live apart and I am free of the consequences of any of her future hare-brained financial decisions.  This would let her keep my company-paid medical insurance.  Given her long list of health issues, this is likely to be a big deal for her.  I hope it is enough to sell the proposal, with maybe only minor symbolic amendments.

I'll have to see what Lawyer says.