On first seeing "Inside Out"

This afternoon I went to see "Inside Out". It has gotten great reviews, and Son 1 recommended it enthusiastically.

I loved it. And I think I want to write more about it ... about, for example, how important it was that Sadness got integrated in with the rest of the emotions, how in fact Sadness -- not Joy -- is the hero of the movie and the one who saves Riley from her impending nervous breakdown and Very Big Mistake.

But it's late, so all that will wait for another day. For now, all I want to point out is the brilliant coincidence that Sadness looks so very, very much like Wife did, back when I first met her. It's uncanny.

"Which would you choose ...?"

So I told you I'm in Sticksville for a week-long management confab. Yesterday we all went out together to do something fun ... as a "bonding activity", I guess.

And for the most part it really was fun. Probably more entertaining than I would have come up with on my own.

Anyway over dinner one of our party -- a Chinese woman I'll call Walerie -- asked me a question: "Suppose you had to choose to marry a 30-year-old woman who looks 40, or a 40-year-old woman who looks 30: which would you choose?"

Of course I muffed the question completely because I was put on the spot: I stammered and mumbled and did everything except answer the question. Naturally you would expect nothing less of me, and I'm glad to say I didn't disappoint your low expectations.

But I thought about the question later and realized a couple of reasons that it confused me.

In the first place, the ages are too close together. 30? 40? Hell, I'm 53 ... they more or less look the same to me. OK, maybe not quite but they both look young.

Suppose I recast it as a 40-year-old woman who looks 60 and a 60-year-old woman who looks 40. That's a comparison that is more meaningful to me. But it solves only part of the problem.

The other part is that I keep stumbling over the looks as an issue. Why not just ask about a 40-year-old woman or a 60-year-old woman and stop there? Let them look their real ages. Then I'd choose the 60-year-old woman (all other things being equal) because she'd be more mature and more interesting.

There might be a couple of arguments in favor of the 40-year-old woman who looks 60. She's likely to be healthier for longer. She's likely to be the one who has to bury me, instead of vice versa. She should still look plenty sexy -- my experience with D and Debbie convinces me that 60-year-old women can have adorable bodies and only really show their age in their faces and necks. Below the neckline, the body is as luscious as ever. But most other guys won't know this, and therefore she won't have a lot of offers: this means there's a greater likelihood -- as Ben Franklin famously observed -- that she'll be grateful for my attentions.

I think I'll go back and tell Walerie that I choose the older woman, regardless what she looks like.

Crime

This story starts years ago.

The boys were young. We all still lived at home in our house. And one day -- God knows why -- Wife started telling the boys about my academic achievements when I was young (grade school, high school, college).

Now I had made a point of never discussing any of this. It's all ancient history and I figured they didn't need to know. Besides, there is something really pathetic about anyone whose greatest achievements in life happened when he was sixteen. If I've got nothing better to say for myself than that I was valedictorian of my high school and that I had great SAT scores, ... that's pretty small and sad, isn't it? Better I should just skip all of that. How could they possibly care? And if I make a big deal about it when they don't care, won't I just come across as self-absorbed and clueless?

But suddenly there was Wife, telling them all about it. She probably exaggerated it; in the first place she wasn't there back then, and in the second place she really really cares about this stuff. She craves the kind of recognition that makes me run and hide. So it sounded to me like she was laying it on kind of thick.

I got mad. I yelled for her to stop. I demanded how could she do such a thing when she knew I didn't want her to talk about all that.

She didn't understand. Never mind that I had asked her not to discuss it ... she disregarded that request completely because to her mind she wasn't saying anything bad. In her mind, she was praising me; therefore she was saying good things; therefore the fact that I had expressly asked her not to somehow disappeared ... or didn't matter ... or never happened. Because it was OK by her lights, that made it OK simply. It's as if I couldn't really have meant what I said when I asked her to keep it a secret.

I tried and tried to get her to understand that tastes differ. Values differ. Just because it was OK with her didn't make it OK with me. She couldn't understand. She couldn't even understand that she didn't understand. It was as if I were a mime ... as if I were mouthing and gesturing but no sound came out. Her inability to get it was that total.

I felt that way a lot around Wife, and I kept looking for ways to break through so she could hear me. I kept looking for something I could say, something so bizarre that she would realize that she really didn't understand me ... something so bizarre that she would drop all her certainties, open her ears, and just listen.

In all my years with Wife, I never found it. But that particular day, while I was groping for something to say, I hit upon asking her, "Do you just hate your children? Why else would you tell them this stuff?" I wanted her to understand that I meant (in small part) "Don't lay a trip on them that they have to live up to such-and-such an image. Let them be who they are." I also wanted her to feel slapped in the face -- shocked enough that she would trouble to listen.

That part didn't work, but she did call D to complain about how bizarrely I was talking. (This was back when D was still Wife's best friend.) And D wrote me a letter demanding to know how I could possibly think Wife hated the boys just because she was praising me to them.

I said it was because I was startled. I was taken by surprise by her telling the boys about my victories in school a hundred years ago, so I overreacted. D wrote back to say that was crazy: there's no way that just being surprised or startled could make me say something so extreme, and in any event why should I be startled instead of pleased? (In her own way, D was just as chronically unable and unwilling to understand me as Wife ever was.)

So I tried to explain by telling a story. Think of it, I told her, like this ....

Suppose that you were a young woman in Germany in the 1930's, and you married a man with political ambitions who rose to be the Gauleiter of some important city.  In the last stages of the War, your husband is shot by partisans, and somehow you escape undetected to North Carolina.  You adopt a Southern accent, change your name, and take a job teaching ... and nobody knows about the life you used to lead.  By working very hard, by never letting up your guard for even a moment, you manage to erase your former life completely.  This means there are no embarrassing questions about war crimes; no difficult moments where you are asked how you personally feel about the Jews; no angry strangers lecturing you about how their Daddies were shot down in cold blood by your goddamned sonsabitching Kraut soldiers and what the hell do you have to say about it now ... none of that.  You have achieved one important part of the American Dream, by completely reinventing yourself.  Nobody has any idea that you didn't spring directly out of the red mud in the small rural town where you teach.  And then one day, as you are shopping for groceries, a stranger sidles his cart up next to your in the frozen food aisle, touches you on the sleeve, and whispers softly (in a voice that could not possibly have come out of the Carolinas), "Guten Abend, Frau Gauleiter.  Wie geht es Ihnen?  Was neues?  Erinnern Sie sich mir?"  Wouldn't your heart jump into your throat?  Wouldn't you feel like screaming?  Can you really judge me for overreacting?

That's the story I sent her, to explain how I felt at Wife explaining to the boys what an outrageous academic overachiever I was back when I was an immature little snot.

But what does the story mean? If that's how I felt, ... then how exactly is it that I did feel? Like my achievements were something shameful? that they were hateful? that they were crimes against humanity? What does this story really say?

I don't know -- consciously -- exactly what the story means. I told it because it felt right. But now that I look back on it years later, I have to say that it looks like I was trying to say I felt that my academic achievements were a crime. That they burdened me with a terrible guilt. That they had to be expiated. That I had to be punished for being so goddamned smart and so insufferably good at the games schools make you play. That there was something deeply wicked and immoral about being the best student in my selective private prep school every year but my first, and again the best student in my intensely academic liberal arts college every year but my first. 

The. Best. In. Two. Excellent. Schools.

When I spell it out like that I can still feel a little twinge of pride in the accomplishment. But at the same time I feel ashamed of the pride, as if it soils me ... the way a really degrading sexual fetish might. As if the very fact that I can feel these twinges of pride just proves how depraved I am, how low and petty. As if pride in that achievement is the same thing as wallowing in the gutter, or masturbating in public.

I still feel like it is a crime. I don't resent being punished for it. In fact, maybe this is where I get my flirtation with Sister Failure ... as a door to redemption. Because if I fail badly enough, maybe I can escape the curse of so much early success.

I just don't understand why I think these things.

"Who's afraid ...?"

I had a disquieting thought the other evening.

Way back in the first decade of our marriage, before we had kids, Wife and I used to joke that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was “our play” (or “our movie”) … in the sense in which some couples have “our song”. Of course that’s a terrible thing to say: it’s a destructive play in which husband and wife savage each other for hours. We joked about it because, … well, … we argued a lot too, sometimes savagely, and yet we were both (back then) totally dedicated to keeping the marriage intact. We also liked the sheer artistry of the vituperation, and hoped that we could be that sharp and that witty while tearing slices of flesh off each other’s skeletons.

What just occurred to me is that maybe it was “our play” for more reasons than that. Consider the characters.

Martha is borderline crazy. She has a violent temper and is totally self-centered. She appraises other people entirely by how they serve her. She has high ambitions for her status in the community, and is deeply disappointed in how poorly her husband has achieved the script she wrote for him. She sleeps around casually, almost callously. Every other word out of her mouth expresses hatred and contempt for her husband. And yet she is deeply wounded, deeply scared, and depends on him totally for what little security she feels in life.

George has achieved modest things in life, no more, but he puts up with Martha. He doesn’t enjoy it, but he accepts it as a kind of duty. He absorbs all the shit she hurls at him, and still – by the end of the play – can hold her hand and comfort her.

The question is, why does he endure all this craziness? Once, when he is fighting bitterly with Martha, he complains about the abuse she heaps on him and she shoots back, “You married me for it!” That’s interesting … why? Did he think he deserved it? Was it punishment – self-inflicted – for some kind of crime that couldn’t be punished any other way?

One evening after we had seen the movie, Wife asked me whether I thought George had killed his family. At least twice he tells a story of a boy driving his family in the family car, swerving to avoid a porcupine in the road, and causing a crash from which he was the only survivor. Interesting story – why does it come back twice? Clearly it occupies a good bit of real estate in his mind. And it’s the kind of accident that no court would ever prosecute, but that could leave a boy with a lot of free-floating guilt … guilt that he might feel a need to expiate by marrying a harridan like Martha.

In many ways, Martha looks a lot like Wife, or like Wife way back then. (I emphatically do not mean that Wife was as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor, however!) And George has something in common with me, or with the man I was back then. But then did I marry her for it? Was I hoping to expiate some awful sin by punishing myself with Wife? And, if yes, … what was the crime?

It was only then that I remembered a conversation I had had years before with D, in which I had alluded to my culpability in a terrible crime ….

That story comes next.
               

"Please change your hotel"

I'm sitting in a hotel in Sticksville. It's late at night. I'll go to bed soon.

I'm here for a week-long management confab for my department, worldwide. We are working four days, but they wrap around a weekend. Strictly speaking it is a "leadership meeting" meaning that the [other] invitees all outrank me. But the Big Boss of this global department said, "You should come too, Hosea, because you are somehow an honorary member of the leadership team in North America." Flattering, I guess.

Anyway, it turns out that everybody else got rooms at the Holiday Inn, four miles out of town. I got a room at the same place I've stayed the last two or three times I've come to town, the hotel I first found because Hil was staying here when we were working on a project together a few years ago. Why not? It seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do.

Only then the Big Boss suggested, "Wouldn't it be better if you changed your hotel so you were in the Holiday Inn with the rest of us?"

Ulp.

I haven't done it yet. I guess if it's really important to him I can do it tomorrow. I can always claim I was too busy to get around to it before I left home.

But I really don't want to.

Why not?

The first reason I think of is that at the end of the work day I want to be done with work. I don't want to bump into my new boss -- or the Big Boss -- while I'm strolling down the hall in my swim suit and towel looking for the pool. I don't want my weekend hijacked by invitations from hearty, cheerful, outgoing colleagues, all of whom outrank me but want to get along as "just friends" for the weekend doing something [God knows what] that I find crashingly dull but that I have to go along with so that I don't offend anyone ... because we all have to work together later and I can't really afford to blow them off. I don't trust that I will find any real common interests with any of these people besides work, and I don't want to have to be on my guard every minute that I'm out of my room. The whole idea of having to change my hotel so I can be in the same building with these guys makes me clench up inside.

But wait a minute. Whenever I go somewhere to work on a project with Hil we share a hotel. (Not a room, to be sure!!) She and I don't have a lot of common interests: she's a big fan of recreational shopping, for example, which I find just painfully dull. We usually don't have a lot to talk about besides work ... occasionally our children, and (maybe once in a blue moon) our divorces. But I don't clench up inside at the prospect. What's the difference?

I see two differences. One difference is that we are clearly peers: what's more, we share a common approach to the work we do, and I am as good at it as she is. So I don't feel insecure on that front. The other difference is that she's a woman, and I always feel more comfortable around women than men when other factors are equal.

Both differences matter. If I were sharing the hotel with male peers I would feel less anxious than I feel at the invitation from the Big Boss; ditto if I were sharing it with female superiors. But in neither case -- I think -- would I clench up as much inside as I did when I read Big Boss's e-mail.

Let's see what he says when we get started tomorrow. I really better go to bed.

Lawrence, again

I've told you how I love the movie "Lawrence of Arabia". Well I saw it again last night with Son 1, and I was struck by a clear resemblance between Lawrence and me.

No, it's not the brilliance, nor the ambition. It's certainly not the courage, God knows, nor the resistance to pain, nor the fluency in Arabic, nor the good looks. None of that.

But Lawrence suffered from bouts of "Mood 2".

Every time he is dealt a serious setback, he crumples; then he flees back to Cairo and asks to be relieved of duty. He's fragile and he wants to go hide.

That's exactly how it works for me too. It might be a serious setback, or a loud noise, or ... any of a number of triggers. And I crumple and want to go hide. Whatever strength or courage I had an hour ago has evaporated and I just have to flee.

Then after a while it goes away and I'm better again. Allenby gets Lawrence back in the fight by re-inflating his megalomania, his half-sensed notion that he's a demigod. That's poor fare to feed on because it's not nourishing; but in the short run, like coffee or some drugs, it's incredibly stimulating. I know that too, even though I've never had nearly as much grounds for megalomania as Lawrence ever did. But I understand how it feels.

The cat and the hamburgers

I got home late Tuesday night, just as the woman renting the little house in front on my apartment was rescuing her cat – who had escaped out the back door but was now sitting petrified in the driveway having no idea what to do with the Great Big Outdoors. We exchanged a couple of polite pleasantries about cats and suddenly she said, “Do you want a hamburger? I made too many so come in and have one.” Let me clarify that we had never exchanged so much as a complete sentence before, although we had waved once or twice while passing in the driveway. So this invitation was a little out of the blue, and it took me somewhat aback. On the other hand I didn’t want to appear impolite or churlish. So I mentioned that my 18-year old son was sitting up in the apartment alone and she insisted “Well he can come have one too.” I texted Son 1 “Do you want a hamburger?” and in a couple minutes he toddled down to see what it was about. So we came in and spent a few minutes chatting with her while she [Kirsten] pressed hamburgers on us and poured herself some more wine (from a bottle which had clearly been a lot fuller earlier that evening). She offered me some wine too (I accepted), and offered it to Son 1 two or three times before she finally accepted his polite refusals and poured him iced tea instead.


Oh, a friend of hers [Holly] was there too … then Holly drove off for a few minutes … and came back with a little boy (I think maybe her son) and another bottle of wine. Son 1 and I talked with them for a little longer and then made polite excuses about having to get up early in the morning and retreated to our own apartment. It was kind of an odd event. They were both certainly pleasant enough, cheerful and outgoing (and rather tipsy). On the other hand it was also really obvious that we had the advantage of them in education and class.


I told Son 1, “To all intents and purposes, you have now met about half of Mom’s [Wife’s] relatives.” That is to say, he has met almost none of Wife’s relatives in real life: some of them live too far away, and others of them have cut her off (or she them) because of some pointless fight twenty years ago. Wife’s family are all really good at holding grudges; that’s where she learned it. But my point was that several of Wife’s nieces, back when I met them, were a lot like Kirsten and Holly: friendly, outgoing, well-meaning, but none-too-smart, none-too-educated, and very proletarian. Using Paul Fussell’s typology, I would guess them at low-to-middle prole. Not that that’s a bad thing …! But it limits the kinds of things we can find to talk about.


On the other hand, the hamburgers were good and the wine wasn’t bad. The cat ran and hid.

Thich Nhat Hanh and infidelity?

For the past few weeks, my UU Sangha has been slowly reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s For a Future to be Possible, in which he explicates the Five Precepts at some length. Strictly speaking he talks about the Five Mindfulness Trainings, but those are really just his expanded version of the Buddha’s Five Precepts:

• Not to kill
• Not to steal
• Not to commit sexual impropriety
• Not to lie
• Not to consume alcohol or other intoxicating substances

Tuesday we were reading the chapter on sexual responsibility. Unsurprisingly, Thich Nhat Hanh comes out against casual sex, impersonal sex, or any form of sex that doesn’t express deep, long-term, committed love.

But then he writes a paragraph that started me wondering. On the surface it is utterly unexceptional, because it condemns the kind of love that becomes a deranging, obsessive madness. Nobody expects a Buddhist to write in favor of obsessive madness: clinging, anger, and confusion are three things to be concretely avoided, and obsessive madness includes them all. But I was struck by the words he chose. Here is the paragraph in full. All italics are mine, not his.

Love can be a kind of sickness. In the West and in Asia, we have the word “lovesick”. What makes us sick is attachment. Although it is a sweet internal formation, this kind of love with attachment is like a drug. It makes us feel wonderful; but once we are addicted, we cannot have peace. We cannot study, do our daily work, or sleep. We only think of the object of our love. This kind of love is linked to our willingness to possess and monopolize. We want the object of our love to be entirely ours and only for us. It is totalitarian. We do not want anyone to prevent us from being with him [her]. This kind of love can be described as a prison, where we lock up our beloved and create only suffering for her [him]. The one who is loved is deprived of freedom – of the right to be herself and enjoy life. This kind of love cannot be described as maitri or karuna. It is only the willingness to make use of the other person in order to satisfy our own needs.

It sounds awful, of course. But read slowly with me for a minute. Don’t most people assume that a “committed, long-term relationship made known to friends and family” (the only kind in which he says sex is acceptable) implies sexual exclusivity? And can’t we describe sexual exclusivity precisely by using all those phrases I italicized above?

Suppose I had been a Buddhist back when Wife started sleeping around. Suppose I had been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh and had objected to her multiple infidelities. Couldn’t she have plausibly answered that I was trying to monopolize her affection -- that I was depriving her of the right to be herself, express herself, and enjoy life? And how could I have answered?

It is not clear to me whether Thich Nhat Hanh ever contemplated such a reading of his words, but I think I see the outlines of an answer to these questions.

In the first place, his description is pretty general; and there are many different kinds of relationships. If it just so happens that you are involved in a ployamorous relationship where there are long-term commitments on all sides, I see nothing in this chapter to condemn you.

On the other hand, he also says that husband and wife must respect each other like guests. So if you and your partner have given each other vows of exclusivity, then presumably he would call infidelity disrespectful.

Most importantly, though, I think he would insist that infidelity is a poor choice because it harms the unfaithful partner. He gives a lot of reasons why casual, uncommitted sex increases your overall levels of suffering. So surely the conclusion is that it is the unfaithful partner who gets the short end of this trade, by creating more suffering for him/herself.

By the same token, I think he would advise against anger on the part of the betrayed partner. I think the sense of the advice would be something like:

Just because your wife [for example] is sleeping with the milkman and the gardner, what does that have to do with you? It’s her problem, and she’s creating plenty of trouble for herself by doing it. But it doesn’t have to have anything to do with you. Yes, you might feel difficult at first. But you don’t have to. Breathe mindfully. Walk mindfully. And reflect that she’s not hurting anybody but herself. On the other hand she sure is hurting herself … quite a lot! So in the end, maybe you can even have compassion for how much pain she is causing herself through misunderstanding what truly brings happiness.

I think that’s how it would go. But I think it would be a hard sell. I’m not sure I ever quite got to the point of having pure compassion for Wife’s sleeping around, but I did figure out that it wasn’t really about me and that I could disengage emotionally from it. Took me a long time, though.

Maybe if I had been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh’s back then I would have learned it faster. Or maybe not.

E-mail to Suzie about her plan to take out loans

Hi Suzie,

 

I’ve been thinking about your plan to take out loans to pay your rent after you move. Here’s my two cents’ worth.

 

I think if you do that it will bite you in the ass. Very hard. I really, strongly urge you not to do it.

 

Unpaid loans give the lender the legal right to harrass you … probably a lot worse than your current boss does right now.

 

Also, if you are talking about “educational loans” you can never get rid of them: they stay on your back even if you declare bankruptcy.

 

You talked about taking out the loans and then getting rid of them by joining the Peace Corps. But think a minute: if you take out a loan with the INTENTION of not paying it back, that’s not a loan. That’s a gift. For somebody who wants to be independent, it’s the same as getting bailed out by your parents. Only getting bailed out by your parents is more honest, because the banker doesn’t KNOW he’s not going to get his money back when you take it from him.

 

What can you do instead? I have one idea.

 

Right now – today – you work Saturday and Sunday, and for that you get food and housing.

 

That means if you get a second job Monday to Friday, whatever it pays you is PURE PROFIT. You don’t have to spend a dime. You can save it ALL.

 

So I suggest you do that for a while. Not forever, but long enough that you can build up savings. (This means putting your classes on hold for a little while … probably a few months.)

 

Then when you have enough savings, you can move … plus pay first and last month’s rent in the new place … plus cover your new rent out of savings while you go back to school.

 

Or whatever. Maybe you’ll have a better plan by then. But once you have money in the bank, you are way stronger. For anything you want to do.

 

Think about it.

 

 

All the best,

Hosea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snug hypocrisy, part 2

Of course it's not really that simple, either. It would be closer to say that I have two different settings, or modes: outward-facing and inward-facing. When I face outward, it is easy (or easier) for me to do new things, take on new tasks, meet new people. I have more energy and I seek out variety. When I face inward, it is easy for me to do the same things over and over: to eat the same foods, to go through the same routines, and not to reach out to others. Unusual tasks -- whether cold-calling doctor's offices or solving somebody else's problem at work (the kind that will never be addressed if I don't do it) -- these seem vaguely unpleasant, or even a little scary, and really tomorrow is just as good as today. One day won't make that much difference. And maybe I'll go through the same reasoning again tomorrow ... how much difference can a day make?

 

They are two different ways of operating, and both are natural to me. When I first moved into my apartment back on mid-2013, and for up to a year afterwards, I was running on the first setting. I was in a new place, I was in a new relationship, and I had the energy to match. I sought out things I hadn't done through the long years of my marriage: art exhibits, live theater, concerts, events about town. Every day -- or at any rate every week -- it was something new.

 

But more recently, I've noticed the pattern beginning to shift and close in. Somehow it seems like more trouble than it used to be, to find these events and get myself to them. It takes more effort to feel enthusiastic about them. For some time, I replaced those other events with movies ... and so I was going to a lot of movies. Of course, movies are passive entertainment, the way television is. They show in dark theaters. There is a lot less need to engage. And even so, just in the past few months I'm noticing my movie going drop off. I'll see any number of films coming to town that look like they should be pretty good. But then, when it comes right down to it, would I rather go to a movie or do my laundry? ... go to a movie or go to bed early? More and more these days, the movie loses out.

 

Seeing this means that I now evaluate differently my urge to relocate or change jobs. It's not for any reason so simple as "I like change". Rather, I think that these plans are a ploy to force myself back into the outward setting instead of the inward one. If everything in my life suddenly changes, after all, I'll have no choice. Simple survival will mean I'll have to face outward -- to make new friends, to do new things, and to be effective at tasks I don't like to do. A move would force me out of a rut.

 

Not that anybody is actually offering me a move right now. But I wanted to capture the insight before it wafts out the other ear and disappears ....

 

 

 

Snug hypocrisy

You've heard me say I like to travel. You've heard me talk about relocating to another job in another state or another country, ... all because I want to avoid getting static and calcified and mentally arthritic, because I want to keep flexible, because I love what's different.

What rubbish.

If any of that were true I wouldn't be so shy. And if any of that were true, I wouldn't put off unpleasant or unfamiliar tasks. I wouldn't put off for months something as simple as making a doctor's appointment, ... because I could just tell myself that this unfamiliar activity is part of what they do in this unfamiliar country called the Real World. I wouldn't avoid other unfamiliar things, ... not if I liked the unfamiliar.

No, in reality I talk about liking the strange and new; but in fact I'm very comfortable settling into a snug, stable routine. I don't mind having the same thing for breakfast five days in a row, so long as I can putter along on my familiar little track: going to work, going home, going to the movies, reading my books. All in comfort and security.

Hypocrite.

What's a "soul mate"?

Last night I picked up, almost at random, a book I’d never heard of (Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story) by an author I’d never heard of (Sera Beak). In chapter four she says the following: 

Spiritual teacher Caroline Myss defines a soul mate not as some sort of perfect Prince (or Princess) Charming who chariots your personal fairy tale into the happily ever after, but as the person or people who annoy you the most, push all your buttons, make you face your shit, and even seemingly “hurt” you (or your ideas of who you are) or screw up your life (or your previously set plans for your life), thereby forcing you to grow in new directions, developing and realizing new aspects of your self (positive and negative) that you probably would not have done without their, er, “help”.

Dear God in Heaven, don’t tell me this means Wife!

Several reasons?

I was standing in a bookstore this evening, killing time that I'm sure I could have used more productively, and I stumbled across a fascinating piece of advice. The book was Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile, and the advice ran something like this: 

If you are trying to decide whether to do something and you have several different reasons to do it, just don't. The only time you come up with multiple reasons is when you are trying to talk yourself into something. If it's something you really want to do, you'll have one reason.

I have a feeling I've talked myself into things in writing, in front of you, in this very blog; though I can't quite remember when or where. But I want to watch for this. Maybe it's true and maybe it ain't, but either way it's very interesting.

"Drinking like a fish"

I asked Son 1 if he has heard anything from the job he’s supposed to start this week. He said he talked to them and got very ambiguous answers, but it’s clear he won’t start for a couple of days. So next I asked if he’d prefer to stay with Wife until that changes – or until Friday, whichever comes first? (If there were no job, Friday is when he would normally come back to my apartment.)

 

Son 1: I think so.

 

Hosea: OK. How is she doing? [I was remembering his remarks that Friday she was in a bad spiral.]

 

Son 1: She’s been great the last few days. Saturday she was great. Sunday she was good, Today she went to physical therapy on time and without me getting her going. Friday was the issue because she was drinking like a fish.

 

Hosea: Oh. Yeah, both of you [Sons 1 and 2] have pointed out that makes the depression way worse. (In retrospect I realize I saw the same thing but I didn’t frame it as clearly.)

 

Son 1: I’ve been working with her to only drink in the evening. I’m not going to say it’s verboten because that’s not going to work.

 

Hosea: Right. Well technically you could ask her not to drink when you guys are around – she once asked Grandpa [i.e. Father, my dad] not to drink when she was around – but maybe that’s less likely to work. And getting some progress is always better than none, so you work with what’s possible.

 

Son 1: Bingo.

 

Hosea: OK. Good luck and keep me posted about the job thing.

 

Son 1: Roger that.

 

 

 

Just like old times, part 2

After they were at my place for a few days, I was to drive the boys back to Wife’s. Well, Son 2 left to help my folks on Thursday morning. Then Thursday afternoon, Son 1 suggested I take him to Wife’s place a day early. I don’t know if it’s because he finds it too boring here without his brother, but maybe.

 

Friday, Son 1 texted me from Wife’s house and we had the following conversation.

 

Son 1: So apparently she only checks her email once a week, then she totally flipped the fuck out and started shouting about how much she hates you. Then I actually had to shout back. It was a fucking mess. Then she just yelled “I still believe Dad [i.e. me, Hosea] bought you.”^{SEE NOTE 1}

 

Hosea: WTF?? What does she hate me about this time? Did I send something inflammatory that I don’t remember? Not trying to get sucked into the tempest – just curious.

 

Son 1: Not including her in the college selection process for Son 2^{SEE NOTE 2} and me^{SEE NOTE 3}, and not inviting her to college trips, regardless of the fact she couldn’t make them physically.

 

Hosea: Right. She couldn’t make the drive to B—^{SEE NOTE 4} even as a passenger. It’s a long fucking way.

 

Son 1: What I said. Didn’t help any though. Tried to explain even you weren’t that involved.^{SEE NOTE 5} It was just a clusterfuck. She also tried to say I loved you more.^{SEE NOTE 6}

 

Hosea: Oh Jesus. OK this is not veering back to sense any time soon. I was going to write … “More important is that visiting the college isn’t the important part. Thinking and talking it over afterwards is. Nothing prevents her being a part of that.”

 

Son 1: Well, hopefully she’ll take a nap, calm the fuck down, and I can talk to her sensibly.

 

Hosea: Yes. Try to assure her that she can be valuable by giving wise advice even if she doesn’t do the running around. Like Yoda. OK, bad analogy but you get the idea.

 

Son 1: Ya, I’ll try.

 

Hosea: Sorry dude.

 

Son 1: Now she’s bitching about you to C— or something. Fuck it, I’m not even going to try for the next few hours.

 

Hosea: OK. C--? Weird. No idea why she’d call C--.^{SEE NOTE 7} Whatever.

 

Son 1: Not your uncle. This is C— S--. Some guy who she met on a dating site and who became infatuated with her. He worked at [a military base near where Wife lives] but is now retired in [a state on the other side of the country].

 

Hosea: Infatuated? Good to know that life goes on ….^{SEE NOTE 8}

 

Son 1: He’ll call a couple times a day. He’s old and harmless, but can be annoying at times.

 

Hosea: Couple times a day? Wow. Good for her, I guess, to have someone to talk to. Surprised they don’t talk about one of them moving closer to the other, but maybe that’ll wait till Son 2 graduates high school. Or not. You never know.

 

Son 1: He’s married.^{SEE NOTE 9} And Mom [i.e., Wife] is scared to death of living anywhere not near [her home town, or at any rate her home state].

 

Hosea: Ah. Well if he weren’t married he could move here but I guess not.

 

Son 1: Yep. I don’t give a fuck. Her life; she’s over 50, she needs to be able to confront her problems and the unknown without panicking.

 

Hosea: No argument.

 

Son 1: I didn’t think there would be.

 

Hosea: J

__________

 

NOTE 1: Wife commonly expresses her anxieties in financial terms. Never mind that it’s impossible to “buy” the love of anyone perceptive and intelligent – Wife is convinced that in the grand scheme of things she is poor, has always been poor, and will always be poor; also that anybody in life who has any more success at anything than she does got it by buying it with money. That’s why she always loses, you see … because she doesn’t have the money to buy victory.

 

NOTE 2: Not sure if I have mentioned it yet, but Son 2 is looking at colleges. He wants to visit two or three of them this summer, and wants me to take him. None of them could be called “nearby” and at least one of them is very far away. So I have been discussing plans for this with him, along with discussing his thoughts about college in general. I have no tincluded Wife in any of these discussions. As regards the travel, it’s impractical and I don’t want her along: I don’t want to have to put up with her company that long. As regards the general discussion … she gets the same e-mails from the college counselor that I do, so she can initiate the conversations if she wants to. I can’t and won’t manage her relationships with the boys. (When they were a lot younger I used to try, but it was a hopeless effort.)

 

NOTE 3: I did the same thing when Son 1 was looking at colleges. In fact, I think I wrote something about his college trips, but I’m writing this disconnected from the Internet so I can’t check just now.

 

NOTE 4: B— is the town housing one of the colleges Son 2 is interested in. Mapquest estimates the distance from my town as twenty hours of solid driving. Maybe we should fly. In that case it won’t be the rigors of travel that prevent Wife from coming along, but the cost of a ticket. All of which are easier to say than “Neither of us wants to be around you that long.”

 

NOTE 5: And that’s true. I gave Son 1 some general advice, including the criteria I would propose for rating his top two choices. He decided to pick the other one, and I told him that was OK as long as he performed there. So far he has (more or less).

 

NOTE 6: The same insecurities as in Note 1.

 

NOTE 7: I have an uncle named C--.

 

NOTE 8: Way back when I started this blog (that was in 2007 for those who are keeping track), I was really upset that Wife was always trying to romance other guys. Now I think it’s probably a good thing, because I hope that it insures her against isolation. Given how bad she is at human relationships, and how helpless her medical conditions can make her (see the recent story about my taking her to the hospital), isolation is both highly likely for her and a danger as well.

 

NOTE 9: Did Son 1 see the irony that he was trolling a dating site while married? Not that there aren’t plenty of other guys doing the same thing, of course. I didn’t ask, because it struck me only now as I was retyping all this.

 

 

 

"Keep an eye on her"

Supposedly Son 1 got a job offer last week at a local supermarket near my apartment, and training is going to start some time this week. They were going to email him with information about when to start, and the email hasn’t come yet. Also, he is at Wife’s place right now. (See, e.g., the post just before this one.)

 

So last night I asked him … what if you don’t hear by Sunday? Do I come get you Sunday night? On the “yes” side … that way you’ll be here when (if) they contact you to start work. On the “no” side … the custody calendar (which doesn’t apply to him because he is 18) would have him at Wife’s until Friday.

 

He answered that he thought it best to stay where he is: “Mom’s better, but I’d like to keep an eye on her.”

 

At first I thought he was talking about her quasi-stroke last weekend. But no, it seems he was talking about her depressive spiral, the one that sparked our long conversation by text.

 

And I’m trying to figure out how I feel about this plan. There are a lot of pieces, and of course they pull in different directions.

 

At a purely selfish level, it is certainly a lot easier when I’ve got nobody else here. Nobody else to cook for, nobody else to plan around, nobody else to think about. I won’t go as far as Sartre, one of whose characters famously declared that “L’Enfer, c’est les autres.” But other people can certainly be a nuisance just by being there.

 

I have very little confidence that the supermarket will plan very far ahead. In principle if they want him to report on Tuesday you’d expect them to email him no later than Monday. But in practice I wouldn’t be surprised if they email him at 9:00 asking him to show up at noon. That would be a problem already because my apartment doesn’t have an Internet connection. But they also might call. He has a cell phone. And really I can get him only in the evenings after work.

 

It seems like a good sign that Son 1 is sensible and compassionate, that he cares enough about Wife to want to keep an eye on her … to make sure she doesn’t do something crazy, like try to kill herself. (The boys were already there when she tried to do that once before.)

 

But how much help is he really? Note that in the conversation on Friday he told me he had gotten to the point of throwing up his hands and deciding there was nothing he could do till she calmed down. Maybe she did calm down and maybe he was able to help … or maybe she just got over it on her own. I don’t know which.

 

This would mean that – for a while at least – both boys would be occupied this summer with caring for older relatives: Son 1 for Wife, and Son 2 for Father. What does that say?

 

On the one hand it speaks highly of their compassion, self-reliance, responsibility, and good sense. The world needs more such people.

 

So why do I feel uneasy about it?

 

The world needs compassionate and responsible people, but shouldn’t we exercise that compassion and responsibility down and out rather than up and in? Down to our own children and out to the wider community, rather than up and in to our parents (or grandparents) closed up inside the walls of our own houses? Spending yourself for the sake of your parents feels somehow indecent to me, as if they bore you for nothing but this – to serve them in their age. Taken to an extreme, it feels like a dead end, or a cul-de-sac … spending yourself always inside the house and never out.

 

Parents should serve their children – not by giving them whatever the children think they want, of course, but by raising them to be decent, compassionate, hard-working, responsible individuals; by disciplining them so that they learn. By teaching, by training, and by constraining – so that the children can take part as members of a civilized society. And this service is – by rights should be – all one-way, all unpaid. Or rather, it is paid by the children growing to adulthood in their turn and serving their own children in the same way ... or serving the community at large.

 

The bargain should not be, “I’ll take care of you so that later you will take care of me.”

 

Of course we do have to take care of our parents as they age. We help them move, we help them keep up, we help them with any number of things. In earlier ages and in other lands, there’s been nobody else available to help them and so the family had to rally around. I recently met up with a former colleague from work who had taken two years off to be with his parents as they died; now he was trying to get another job and found it tough, but he said, “You never regret the time you spend with your parents.”

 

So probably this is just my problem. Probably I’m the one who is out of kilter by finding it indecent. And certainly I’m making way too much of it right now.

 

Doesn’t stop it from bugging me.

 

Son 2 is helping with Father

This note is just a placeholder, I guess, to keep the summer’s developments in chronological order. Son 2 hasn’t been able to land a summer job, either in my town or in Wife’s, and Brother has to get back to his own job. So Brother asked, Could Son 2 come stay with my parents for a while this summer? He promised that my dad can now take himself to the toilet (which would have been a sticking point, I think); my my mom still needs help around the house and my dad needs help doing a lot of other things. So last Thursday, Son 2 climbed on the train to travel to my parents’ town.

 

Also, Brother says that Father is on the mend, so maybe they won’t need somebody permanently. By the time Son 2 is no longer available, they’ll re-evaluate.

 

 

 

 

Just like old times, part 1

A week ago, I drove Wife to the hospital. Yes, we’re separated. Yes, we live in different cities, an hour apart.

 

I guess in a sense the story started the Tuesday before that – June 23, just a couple days after I had driven the boys down to visit my dad in the nursing facility where he was. Monday (the day after visiting my dad), I dropped the boys off with Wife for a week. Then the very next day, Son 1 texted me from Wife’s house asking if I could identify what was wrong with her. She had gotten up that morning: her speech was slurred, her actions were totally uncoordinated, and soon (with Son 2’s help) she tottered back into bed and slept soundly. It was now several hours later. At the time, I said what sounded most likely was that she might have taken one of her sleeping pills in the morning by accident, and they should just wait till it wore off. (If she wakes up any earlier in the morning than usual, she’s so worried about being sure she gets enough sleep that she will take a sleeping pill which knocks her out for another four to six hours.) I heard nothing more from them that day.

 

Sunday afternoon – we’re up to the 28, at this point – Son 1 called me again. Basically the same story, except that after sleeping several hours she had woken up and was making no sense. That is, Son 2 was talking to her, trying to keep her calm and reassuring her that she didn’t have to get up and do anything until her coordination was working better. But when she spoke back to him, what came out was gibberish. He started writing it down, to keep track; apparently at one point she told him there were men underwater controlling how we think. Their question to me was, WTF? In all the years I had loooked after her, had I ever seen something like this? Answer: no, not really. We discussed on the phone whether it could be one of her psychological ailments, but those have been pretty well under control lately. Son 1 suggested maybe a TIA (mini-stroke). I asked, could they get her to a hospital? Well, she was in no shape to drive. They could call a taxi, but the way she was talking they thought she would refuse to go.  So I asked:

 

“Do you think it would help if I drove up there?”

 

“Actually, Dad, yeah – that would probably be a good idea. She might not want to see you, but it would probably help.”

 

So I drove to her place. When I came in her house, her first reaction was hostility and suspicion: what was I doing there? Had I come to take the boys away from her permanently? (She still wasn’t making a lot of sense.)

 

I sat and talked with her, as gently and slowly as I know how. I reassured her that nobody wanted to take anyone or anything away from her, and in fact that I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I explained – many times – that Son 1 and Son 2 were worried about her and had called me because they were afraid something had happened. And finally I persuaded her to let us take her to the hospital to have her checked for a stroke.

 

OK, that took several hours. Hospitals always do. But during that time she began to come around. By the time we left that evening, her speech still sounded just a little bit funny but she was lucid and making sense. The tests for stroke came up negative, but the doctor said yes, it might have been a TIA and she should follow up with her regular doctor.

 

Gosh – taking Wife to the hospital, explaining her symptoms because she’s unable to do it, sitting around for hours and then listening to the after-care instructions. Just like old times.

 

When I drove back Monday night (to bring the boys to my place for the week), she seemed completely normal. She also said that she remembered nothing of Sunday before I walked into the house.

__________

 

So far I’ve told this story to two people: one co-worker, and Elly. (In fact I more or less re-used the e-mail to Elly in writing the above.) Both expressed concern for Wife, and said they were glad she had come around. Elly added, “What on earth happened? That was very odd. The boys dealt with it very well. It must have been scary for them” – so I’m pretty sure she has no idea how self-reliant the boys are, nor how familiar they have become with Wife’s intermittently debilitating medical conditions. Still at some level they must have been frightened for her or they wouldn’t have called.

 

I have imagined to myself telling Debbie the story, and have imagined her critical of my still being “entangled” with Wife. Maybe that’s not what she would say at all, though in general she is a stern critic of co-dependency and believes that if you’re going to break with someone then you should break … not let yourself get sucked back into the same old dance. She still communicates with her ex-husband, but apparently they get along like old friends now (or that’s how she tells it). Mind you, this conversation never happened in real life – I haven’t heard from Debbie in a couple of months now (not since we went on a weekend meditation retreat together). So I don’t know why I invested the energy in imagining this scene (though I imagined it quite a lot in the subsequent week). Maybe I was just trying to criticize my own involvement, and was using Debbie as a mask for doing so. Certainly at this point I thought I was out of the business of coaxing and cajoling an irrational Wife, much less the business of taking her to the hospital and acting as her advocate because she can’t advocate for herself. And yet at the time it seemed the most natural thing to do.

 

Of course it seemed natural: thirty years is a long time to build up a habit. And it is less likely that I would have stepped in had the boys not been there; in a sense I was bailing them out as well as rescuing her, because otherwise they would have had to deal with her alone. For all their self-reliance, they are still only teenagers.

 

And I know Wife pretty well. At first they called me because they thought I might have seen this behavior before. But in the end I think the main value I added (besides a driver’s license) was that I knew how to talk to Wife to dispel her distrust and coax her into the car. I knew what words to use and how to pace them. Not that I had it planned out in advance – I could never have told them over the phone, “Say it this way.” But I “talked with all of my senses” as I tried to describe it later: watching her closely and listening carefully to see how she reacted to each word, each idea. So I could try out this approach and later that one; if this one nudged her towards a better place, I followed it up; if that one threatened to shove her back into a worse place, I cut it short and tied off the end to make it innocuous. In a weird way this is one of my strongest skills, though it is fine-tuned around just one person – Wife – and it’s not one I enjoy using.

 

Part of what made it possible, too, is that Wife trusts me with her medical care even if she doesn’t trust me in other areas. Years ago, when she first stopped working, she was in bed for most of each day and relied on me to pull together all her medications three times a day. The few hours she was awake, she would spend on her e-mail talking with Church Tenor about what a jerk I was and how she wanted to leave me and take me for everything I’ve got; but she would willingly swallow any collection of pills I handed her.

 

In fact, this side of the relationship is very old. Back in the early 1980’s, before we got married, we lived together for a while. Wife’s mother didn’t think much of the idea, and kept encouraging Wife with observations like, “Why should he buy a cow when milk’s so cheap?” Finally we planned a wedding, and for a while Wife moved back with her mother in order to do the sewing and baking. They fought constantly and it was a miserable time for all. But one evening – just before the wedding itself – I got a call from Wife’s mother. Wife had just left her house to come back to where I was staying. And Mother-In-Law explained, …

 

Hosea, I’m really disappointed, but it’s going to work out. There were a lot of things I hoped for from having this time with W, and none of them happened. But I know this marriage is the right thing for her. See, all the time she was growing up, whenever W got sick she wanted to come home to me … because when she was sick she felt vulnerable and defenseless, and being with me meant home and security. Even when she was in college, wherever she went or whoever her friends were – when she got sick she wanted to come home to me. Well, she’s been coming down with a sore throat and headaches these last few days – probably all the stress – and finally this evening she told me, “Mom, I’ve got to go. I’m sick, I feel rottten, and I have to go to Hosea.” What that tells me is, she’s made the switch from me to you. Now you’re the one she wants to be with when she’s sick. You’re the one that means home and security to her. And so it’s right that she’s marrying you. Now is the time. It’s going to be OK.

 

Wife’s mother may have been a little off-base with her guess that it was going to be OK, but at a medical level Wife has always put unbounded trust in me. And apparently still does today.

 

I really did think I was out of this job. But maybe it’s true that as long as you have kids together you can never really separate all the way.

 

Definitely not a date

A week ago -- was it only a week ago? -- I went out with Suzie for a couple of hours. There was an art event in town, where studios and commercial art venues throw their doors open after work, serve wine and snacks, and encourage people to stop in and look. Maybe it encourages people to buy, but it also makes us aware just how much art there is locally. This event comes around periodically, and I try to walk through whenever I can.

 

A week and a half before, Suzie had texted me out of the blue. The last time I had heard from her had been a month before (when I had texted her); the last time before that was another month (back in April) when she had texted me. Pretty much she has dropped off the edge of my horizon. But here she was texting me and saying “We should hang some time.”

 

For a moment I wondered whether I should even bother answering. But I want to put myself in a space where I welcome new friendships, so I figured yeah, I’d better. Otherwise the Universe is going to think I don’t mean it when I say I want more friends.

 

On the other hand, I’ve learned not to give Suzie too many options … in fact, not to take the lead in planning anything at all. She stops answering. It’s as if too much information overwhelms her. So I asked when she’s free. And slowly, over the next week, we settled on meeting after my work for this art event.

 

It wasn’t a great example of hanging out together. I drove by where she was supposed to be, but couldn’t park for the traffic; she, on the other hand, wasn’t out by the corner but sitting in a Starbucks – very visibly in the picture window – intently involved with her phone and not looking for my car. She spent a lot of time complaining about her job; and while admittedly it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, it fills Saturdays and Sundays only and it gives her free housing and food in exchange. Somebody else might use this as an opportunity to get a second job Monday through Friday which would be pure profit (or pure savings); Suzie uses it as a chance to swim, join an acting group, take drawing classes, and complain about how she is misused. And she talked about her plans to get out of her current living and working situation: since she doesn’t want to move back in with her ex-boyfriend, she’s going to take out loans in order to pay for a new apartment while she starts yet another pre-professional program in school (at least her third, by my count). When we’d exhausted the art studios within walking distance. I said I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I drove her home. Under other circumstances I might have suggested going out to eat, but I didn’t really feel like buying the two of us another $50 meal (like the last time we went out together). She suggested the movies, but I managed not to be interested in any of the movies that were showing just then so I deposited her at her residence with a perfuctory hug and a vague statement about next time.

 

Why am I telling this story? Partly because – like Mount Everest – it’s there. This is something that happened to me recently, and to some limited extent I use this blog as a diary these days. But also partly I think there is something here to understand. I don’t mean trying to understand whether Suzie is impractical, self-centered, and short-sighted: I assume that the plan to take out loans to pay her rent settles that point conclusively. (I believe, in fact, that we are talking about educational loans – the kind that can’t be discharged even in bankruptcy. At any rate, I asked how she planned to repay these loans and she answered vaguely that she’d heard they could be forgiven if you joined the Peace Corps. In other words, she has no such plans.)

 

No, the thing I want to understand is: how could I ever have been interested in her friendship in the first place? I can think of a couple of factors that might have been relevant.

• She’s a girl. Ever since … oh, about my sophomore year in college, I have found it easier to make friends with girls than boys (women than men). Also, I’m not romantically involved with anybody right now, so there was a certain undercurrent of sexual fantasy at work. Not a lot, I think – Suzie’s not very pretty, and at a rational level I don’t really want anybody right now. But my chromosomal patterning may not have gotten that message, and Suzie has the right chromosomes.
• She’s pagan. This had a huge drawing power: it was the first thing about her that interested me. At a verbal level, I don’t suppose that I “believe” neopagan doctrines any more than I “believe” any other kind; but I remember finding some of the rituals very moving. Also it is kind of fun running across another member of the (extended) pagan community, in sort of a masonic way ….
• I enjoyed trying to sympathize with all the dysfunctional things going on in her emotional life, and trying to sound wise when I gave her advice or conjured up similar stories of my own.
• More generally, I enjoyed showing off: that I can cook; that I can drive; that I can afford to pay $50 for dinner and not worry about it; that I know how to give a back rub. I have so many skills or attributes now that I never had at her age, and I enjoy showing off that I acquired them. This desire to show off even fed the fantasies: back when I was her age, I had no idea how to make love well.

 

Maybe there’s more, but I think those are the big reasons. And I hope it will help to put them down in words like this – to understand that these things are triggers for me, but that they do not guarantee that the person out there who activates these triggers is also someone I can respect … nor even someone who can command my bare interest for more than a few hours in total.

 

Even wanting more friends, I want more than Suzie.