Blast from the past -- Back in 1987

Posting stories from the past got me thinking about one that's really old, but that may date from the first time I ever wrote down any account of my troubled marriage with Wife.  So I rummaged around a bit and dug out the journal that I started keeping back then ... and kept up for three weeks before abandoning it.  (sigh)  Still, there's a lot in there reflecting about me and my marriage, about how things went and why I reacted in a certain way.  I don't know how much of this I'll end up posting, but at any rate some of it ....
__________

Hosea's log, star date October 23, 1987.
Location: a city we haven't lived in for a quarter century now.  The time is a full twenty years before I started this blog.  Dear God but that's a long stretch of time ....
What follows is what I wrote then, with minor edits for readability, etc.  Every so often I intrude editorial comments in a different type face, between square brackets. 

I tried to hit Wife last night.  We tussled for a minute and then I broke off and went back into the bedroom.  The issue was seemingly immaterial, but managed to be more frustrating than I could handle ... apparently.  Wife's friend Laguna was working late, at a company a few blocks away from here; and Wife was going to take her some of our leftovers to microwave for dinner.  A simple question: should she take some of this or some of that?  I didn't much care which, but she kept pursuing the question; worse, each time she said or asked something, I thought she was suggesting the other option from the one she had suggested a minute before.  I suppose I was involved at all because I was in the kitchen at the time and she wanted me to put something on a plastic plate and wrap it up.  But I got frustrated enough with her rapid-fire changes of tack that I left the kitchen, went to sit down, kibbitzed briefly, and let her do it.  A lot of our decisions seem to go like this.  I don't even remember -- after she had that mostly taken care of -- what she said that made me so mad.  I think she said something about not understanding why I was making such a big deal over something so tiny.  My impression was precisely the opposite -- that she was the one making it difficult by constantly sending mixed signals about what she wanted to do.  [Let me break in from today to point out what should be obvious -- viz., that another problem is I was trying to read her mind instead of just asking her, "I dunno Babe, what do you want?"]  As usual the real problem was that we weren't understanding each other; but this particular accusation -- that the problem was my doing -- infuriated me.  It's similar to the last time I tried to hit her, when we were trying to go somewhere and I kept waiting for her before we could, and she later bitched about our late start and about her having to wait for me.  Of course we were waiting for each other.  I wouldn't have gotten so angry that time either, except that (a) this is another longstanding problem, and (b) I was accused of being -- all by myself -- the party at fault.  This feeling, compounded with the sense that this was part of an endless cycle (since it has happened so many times between us) resulted in a combination of pain and despair that distilled briefly into murderous fury.  I say this with only minimal exaggeration: for a brief moment -- both times -- I really wanted to kill her.

[It goes on for several more paragraphs, as I talk about my depression, about my fanatical need to be clearly understood (I hope I've eased up a little on that in the interim), and so on.  Several days later I pick up the story, after Wife and I made time to "talk about the incident."  I relate that she said I must have a lot of repressed, pent-up anger in me towards her, to be able to explode like that. Mulling this, I write ...]

It is true that I can get awfully angry at her, and that in many ways she is quite a burden.  The simple fact that my time at home is not my own is painful enough for someone like me who cherishes privacy and solitude.  I would happily do less housework and fix less elaborate and less regular meals, and so forth, to have time to read or think or write or enjoy the silence.  But if Wife is home too there is none of that -- I feel that I should be busy doing something domestic, or else I will hear later about the problems when it is not done.

Then there are the ways in which she is dependent on me.  Weekdays I fix three meals a day.  She says that she prefers homemade lunches to school lunches [in those days, Wife was a schoolteacher], but if I don't have time to make her a lunch she certainly won't do it.  In fact she lies abed late enough that if I didn't make breakfast and iron her clothes I doubt she would ever get to work on time -- or at any rate fed and pressed.  If she needs to go somewhere new, I have to write out directions for her and go over them as with a child -- she found her way around well enough when job hunting the last time we were apart, but if she can palm the job off on me so much the better.  [The invention of the GPS was one of the high points of our marriage. No joke.]  Ditto with finding her keys when they get lost.  Ditto with balancing the bank statement.  I see why her mother drags her feet about sewing for Wife -- she wants Wife to learn to do it herself.  But she won't learn while her mother is alive, if ever: this I can guarantee.

Then there are the things she does that are irritating in themselves, like leaving her clothes and shoes strewn about the house.  Like preaching doom to herself so convincingly that she concludes nothing can improve her situation ... and then telling me at great length all about how hopeless everything is, in tones that suggest she wants my advice on how -- miraculously -- to make everything all better.  Like the sheer complexity and busy-ness that attends life with Wife: the constant scheduling around doctor's appointments, the train of friends calling or showing up, the fact that into every block of free time she schedules three or four mutually conflicting projects and then gets upset when she is perpetually behind....  It's all very draining, which is why it would be such a relief if she did leave me.  [Wife always said she would leave me if I ever struck her, so part of the "talk" a couple days before was about whether my almost striking her "counted" or not.] 

[Then the next day I picked it up again right where I left off, with ...]

On the other hand, I would also be crushed by it.  First of course would be the recurrence of all the loneliness and depression that I felt as a bachelor, the sense of permanent exclusion from the world of social relationships....  The cold, abandoned loneliness that I used to feel so often is not something I have felt since meeting Wife and it would surely return.  Plus there is enormous comfort in living with someone.  I need solitude too, but to be totally cut off from others is vertiginous and disorienting, and life too easily loses its beauty or meaning....  In a real sense, Wife is my hearth.  It is her presence that makes my dwelling a Home, ... that gives the place warmth and light.  Then there is sex .... [And so it goes, on and on, at very great length.]