Phoning with Debbie

 Somewhere along the line … maybe it was with the beginning of quarantine? … Debbie and I have settled into a regular phone call, much like the regular weekly call that I have had with Marie for some years now. With Debbie it started as every two weeks. Then somewhere along the line it shifted to every week. It started with FaceTime, and then shifted to Zoom. 

Even though we had already admitted that we still love each other, we made a point for months of doing the right thing. We might spend time staring into each other's eyes (over Zoom) if the conversation ran dry, but we were always careful to sign off with words like Good to talk to you, Be well, Till next time, or Sending you metta. Occasionally I stretched this, as I have done also with my emails, to saying Love and metta, but I'm careful to say it in a conversational way. 

And then when we talked last night … well, let me explain the background. For some months, Debbie has been having trouble at work as her hours and function have been cut back. She understands the logic behind each decision, but her feelings have been hurt. I've been working to comfort her, and of course I'm coming from a place of having had the same thing happen to me only a year or two ago: not my hours, in that case, but my status and my potential for a bonus if we had a good year. (Note that 2020 has not been such a year.) Anyway, more recently her mother has started to show signs of confusion, the early stages of dementia. So finally this month Debbie took leave from work completely to go stay with her mother and try to stabilize her, until the family (Debbie and her sister) can arrange for a full-time caretaker. And of course this is a huge job, and has been taking a lot out of Debbie. Some days her mother is calm and as sweet as pie; then she can turn on a dime and start bellowing rage and fear and confusion, accusing Debbie of crazy things and demanding to be allowed to do other crazy things.

So last night Debbie and I talked after her mother had gone to bed. The battle yesterday was over whether her mother could go to the hairdresser. 

Debbie explained that, because of COVID-19, she couldn't go. 

Her mother said, Well I don't care if I get sick and die, because I'm so old anyway. So if I'm willing to take the risk, then why not?

Debbie tried to explain that it's not fair to make the hairdresser take the risk. Also she, as a nurse, has seen patients suffering from COVID-19, and it is a nasty way to go. So anyway, no, Mom, you can't go. I won't let you.  

At that point her mother declared, If I can't go to the hairdresser then I'll just swallow all of my medications at once and kill myself!

This is what Debbie spent the day yesterday dealing with. So we spent much of our phone call talking about it. Fortunately Debbie is old enough, and has a solid-enough meditation practice, that she doesn't fly off the handle when her mother bursts out like that. But it's not easy, of course. Anyway, we talked.

And we talked about other things. There's a chance we might be able to see each other over the Christmas holiday, and go hiking. (God, I had better work on getting into better shape in the next … umm … two weeks!)

Finally, at the end of the call, Debbie ended with a simple, I love you.

Oh my God. We've gotten all the way back to I love you. I'm fine with it, but … wow. 

I love you too, Debbie. Now and ever.

    

A goal

 The day after I wrote my post about self-esteem, I had an idea. I didn't have time to write it up here, so I scribbled it down for later. Well, now it's later.

Over the years I have written a lot about goals: how I don't have any, how I don't work towards them, how maybe I don't even want them. And as evidence I look at how my professional life has been … undramatic, and how I don't feel that much pressure to change it. I do my job well enough, I guess; but my performance apparently isn't exciting: good enough that people are glad to keep me at it, but not so glowing that they want to move me on. And I've talked about my envy of my classmates from high school or college, who were always so much more directed and focused than I was, and who therefore ended up achieving so much more. You've heard these stories too often.

But the idea I scribbled down was, What if I really did have a consistent goal all along and just didn't recognize it? Is that possible? Sure, I guess. Why not? I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. And on that reckoning, it is clear that my goal has consistently never been to become rich or to join society's power structure. Every time I have faced a fork in the road where one path would take me closer to membership in the power elite, I've chosen the other.

My high school was a private prep school — the same one Son 1 attended — many of whose graduates go on to great things. But when it came time to select a college, I turned down the chance to go to Harvard in favor of a small liberal arts school that no-one at my high school had heard of. At the time my reasoning was that of course Harvard was a great school, but I wasn't so concerned with burnishing my intellectual credentials. What I wanted was to improve my anemic social skills; and I had decided — on the basis of woefully inadequate data — that the school I chose would be better for that. I mean, it was and is a highly intellectual school in its own right too, even though it doesn't labor under the heavy Harvard name. And I met Marie there, so that part worked out.

After college I applied to graduate school in a field that would have left me set for life. I applied to the two best programs in the country, got into one of them, … and then dropped out before classes started. Of course, I had just met Wife a month before (although naturally she wasn't my wife yet!) so perhaps the thrill of having a girlfriend that I was regularly fucking was just a bit more enticing than graduate school.

The year after that, Wife and I went off to graduate school together: different school, different program. This time the program wasn't necessarily one that would have kept me employed, because it was for the most part more academic and the academic job market was starting to dry up in those days. (Though to be fair it was nothing like as bad as it is now.) On the other hand my advisor was famous throughout the field — some might have said infamous — and he knew everybody. The likelihood that I would have made good contacts to put my degree to work was very high. But after two years there, Wife left; I spent the summer thinking about it and then dropped out to be with her, saving my marriage but abandoning my program and whatever opportunities it could have given me. 

Do you see the pattern? The unchanging goal common to all those decisions? I wanted relatedness far more than I wanted greatness. I wanted to stop being a rock or an island; I wanted intimacy, both sexual and emotional; I wanted to be a good father and a good lover and a good husband. That's the goal, perhaps the only goal, that I have followed consistently through all these years. I've made huge mistakes. But when I make a mistake in this area, I come back and try again.

Have I hit my goal? I've done well enough. 

• My marriage finally fell apart, but I worked hard at it for thirty years. 
• My sons appear to be transitioning into adulthood relatively smoothly. Doubtless I screwed up any number of things as their father, but they have proven resilient enough to bounce back anyway; and for that I am grateful. 
• I have an ongoing sexual relationship with Marie, and emotionally intimate friendships with both Marie and Debbie. 
• Looking wider afield, I'm not rich but I guess I'm doing OK. I have a job at which I am good enough that several people tried to urge me to accept the transfer to Sticksville before I finally did so. 
• I have neighbors here whom I enjoy, all of whom are sad that I'm going to leave in a few months. 
• I'm in touch with a couple of other people from college (such as Inga), and at least one from an earlier job (the ex-colleague I mention here). 
• I'm still no social butterfly, but I'm not a rock nor an island.

Maybe now I can stop moaning about not hitting any goals. What I've learned from this is that I can't just set any arbitrary goal and expect to work on it. But that's very different from saying I've never had any goals at all.         

       

Mulling over self-esteem

 About a month ago, for reasons that I can no longer remember (probably boredom or a desperate attempt to postpone some work I had to do) I started to google information about Ayn Rand. I first read Miss Rand over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, and at the time found her perspective fascinating. I didn't stick with her (not sure if that's as obvious to you as it is to me, but really I didn't). But it made my college years a little more interesting, because for a brief time it put me politically at odds with all of my friends. (sigh)

We all know that Google can suck you in for hours, because from one article you find links to another, and then another. That's what happened to me: I went from Ayn Rand to Nathaniel Branden, and from him to self-esteem. 

"Self-esteem" is one of those topics that makes people roll their eyes when the very name is mentioned. As a concept, it seems built for mockery. I'm pretty sure Garry Trudeau summed up the popular opinions of self-esteem in his series of cartoons on the California Task Force for Self-Esteem back in the 1980's.

        

I think the mockery comes from assuming that "self-esteem" means unearned self-esteem: in other words, just the feeling without anything to back it up. But Florence King points out in her essay "The Age of Human Error" that real self-esteem begins with "one tiny seed": doing something — anything — superlatively well. And when Aristotle talks about "pride" (which appears to mean pretty much the same thing) he says explicitly that it is a virtue, one which he defines as follows: the proud man is one "who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them." (This is in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, section 3.) In fact, Aristotle goes on (in the same place) to say that pride can actually keep a good man good, arguing that "it would be most unbecoming for a proud man to fly from danger … or to wrong another; for to what end should he do disgraceful acts, he to whom nothing is great?" Clearly he is talking about something far removed from Garry Trudeau's jokes. Or anyone's.

So if real self-esteem means justified self-esteem — thinking you are good because you really are good — what steps does it take to get there? And also (not coincidentally) am I doing any of them?

I found a couple of articles to look at: one by Branden, and one that just summarized his ideas more schematically. And it appears that in Branden's system there are six regular practices that you have to undertake to build a sense of justified self-esteem. They are as follows:

1. Living Consciously
2. Self-Acceptance
3. Self-Responsibility
4. Self-Assertiveness
5. Living Purposefully
6. Personal Integrity 

How am I doing with this list?

Living Consciously: I think I do better at this than I used to. Specifically, I think it is something I have learned from meditation, to be more aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it. I'm no sage yet, but I do think I am part of the way there.

Self-Acceptance: Again, I think I have something of a handle on this one. There were times in the past when the contemplation of my own faults made me feel terrible. I could fall into deep depressions over them. Now I'm more likely to shrug and think, "Yup, that's one of my faults. I know that one." I don't have to like them, but I know they are there and I don't expect them to go away any time soon. I have tried to be pretty open about my faults in this blog, in particular. So writing here has helped me on this point.

Self-Responsibility: I guess so, but this one is not as clear as the last one. On the one hand, self-responsibility has an intellectual component: that you understand yourself as responsible for what you do, rather than seeing yourself as helplessly buffeted about by forces outside your control. I think I've got that part covered. But it also includes "own[ing] our abilities to manifest our desires," and that's an area where I know I am a little weak. It's one of my faults. 😀 And I know that when I really have to, I can decide to make a big change and make it. That's what I did with the decision to leave my marriage. It wasn't easy, and it took a long time. But when it really mattered I could (finally) do it.

Self-Assertiveness: Most of the time I don't feel very assertive. But Branden connects this with the practice of living authentically — living as yourself and not playing a part. I just talked about that in my last post, so maybe I am farther along with this practice than I realize.

Living Purposefully: Nope. This means using your powers to create and implement a plan of action to attain a goal you have selected. And long time readers have heard me talk about goals at great length over the years (for example here). I don't see my life as having been very goal-oriented. 

Although maybe I have to qualify that. On the one hand I never set clear professional goals, but followed paths that opened themselves up. (Just recently, since the onset of quarantine, I have started thinking I'd like to write a book about certain aspects of my work that I see differently from other people. I've got a draft, but have no idea where to go from here. So I don't know if that counts yet. Anyway, that's about the first concrete professional goal I can remember thinking of.)

On the other hand, Branden also includes "raising a family" or "sustaining a happy romantic relationship" as goals a person might try to achieve. I certainly wanted to be a good father, from the moment I knew Son 1 was on the way. I'm not sure I ever had a clear action plan about how to achieve this, except possibly on the topic of sending the boys away to boarding school when they reached ninth grade. But every day I thought about what was the best way to handle whatever was going on that day, and I tried hard to learn from my mistakes. Also, on a broader canvas, I really tried for many years to be a good husband to Wife. In the end it all fell apart, but I worked at it for a long time.

Maybe those are the purposes I set out to achieve, and all this professional work has just been a sideshow to pay the bills. I don't know for sure. 

Personal Integrity: I try. God knows I try.  

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

Wow. I actually scored better than I thought I was going to. (I hadn't figured this all out before I started writing.) In particular, I was sure that I'd give myself a flat zero for "Living Purposefully," because that's what I've always told you about me and goals. It was only while writing that I realized maybe the truth was a little more nuanced than that. But then, as I said way back at the beginning of this blog (in the third sentence of the first paragraph of the very first post), one of the reasons I write this is that I figure things out in the process of trying to explain them. So stumbling across surprises is the way it's supposed to work, at least once in a while. 

So does that mean I have self-esteem? Let's say that many of the building blocks are in place. So there's an opportunity. I'll accept that as good enough for now.

             

Authenticity or acting

 A couple years ago -- or no, it looks like almost three -- I wrote about my company's Diversity Day and the slogan "Bring your whole self to work!" As you may remember (or can just imagine) I was against it. You can follow the link to see what I said at the time.

But we had another presentation today, this one on "Giving to Yourself," that said what might almost have been the same thing in a different way. After establishing why it's good to give yourself the things you need (it lowers your stress, makes you less likely to burn out, makes you less cranky around others, and therefore actually improves your performance and sociability), the presenter had a couple of slides of "small steps" -- things you can start doing to get into the habit of self-care. And the very last one on the list was, "Be yourself." The notes I took gloss that as "not trying to be the person others expect you to be."

This sounds awfully close to "bringing your whole self to work," but it struck me very differently. And after some reflection I see why. It all turns on the meaning of the word self.

• When I heard "Bring your whole self to work," I understood my self to include all the baggage that defines where I stand in relationship to other people: my family and friendships and loves, my hobbies and beliefs, my successes and failures. All the stuff that makes up a life. All the things that Nietzsche once called "finery." I thought of these things because the examples used in the company's literature on the subject talked about letting your office colleagues know about your kids, and that you are active in coaching Little League. And that's fine, I guess, except that my office colleagues already know all the things I care to share publicly about my kids. On the other hand, the things I don't share are things I'd rather keep that way. 
  
  
• But when I heard "Be yourself" in the sense of "be authentic," I understood my self to mean just me, without all that other stuff. And that set me thinking in a whole different direction.

I think I have said before* that my father was an actor, and that he chose acting as an avocation** because he found he was already acting all the time in real life anyway. So why not take the opportunity to do something he did reflexively and get applause for it at the same time? The critical part here is not that he acted on stage or in front of cameras, but that he never stopped: even when the stage was dark and the cameras were off, even when he had gone home, even in the Real World. He admitted this to me a few times, when it was late and he was really drunk and we were sitting up talking. And I even thought I could see it in subtle ways.

• He didn't remember what you told him, unless it was what he already thought you were going to tell him; in fact, he often remembered what he thought you were going to say instead of — and as vividly as if it were — what you really did say. At the time I found this endlessly frustrating, but some time in the last few years I realized that it may have been because he was waiting for his cue. He couldn't actually pay attention to the substance of what you were saying, to the reality here and now, because he was trying to figure out when in the script he was supposed to break in and what his character was supposed to say. Therefore the only things he could remember were based on his understanding of his character and yours; which means that he remembered you saying what he thought you were supposed to say. If he misunderstood you on something important, it might take a very long time to disabuse him.
  
  
• I watched him over the years adopt different personalities. When I was young he was a Liberal Intellectual. Later he became a Business Owner, which meant adopting some caricatured attitudes that were obviously what he thought a Business Owner ought to believe. When he acted in community theater in middle age, he took on the role of Jovial Dirty Old Man … I mean, not onstage but when he was pretending to be real, offstage or back stage. And I specifically remember times when he was being a Jovial Dirty Old Man that he said and did things for which he used to have the deepest scorn back when he was a Liberal Intellectual.
  
  Naturally I understand that people in the Real World change their opinions; it is a cliché that liberals turn conservative when they get older. But it is a lot less common for people to start doing things that used to disgust them. Disgust is something more than simple disagreement, something a lot stronger and more visceral. That insight is part of what helped me to understand that the Jovial Dirty Old Man was just a mask … and therefore so was the Business Owner, … and (in time I accepted) so was the Liberal Intellectual. (Since the Liberal Intellectual was the mask he wore when I was very young, I long thought it must be the reality. But I finally concluded that it was no more real than the others.)    

My father lived this way most of the time, and I don't think he understood there was any alternative. If I had to guess, I would speculate that it was a style he adopted very young, out of self-defense. His mother was a strong and overbearing personality who disciplined him inconsistently, and he was an only child; it would have been only natural for him to study how he had to act to get on her good side. He was smart in school and therefore got advanced to higher grades when he was still physically small; it would have been only natural for him to study how he had to act to avoid being beat up. I'm pretty sure that this Peanuts cartoon from the 1950's is how my dad survived elementary school.

I have almost lost touch with my original topic, but not quite. The point in all this is that yes, my dad was very good at living this way because he had done it all his life, but it didn't make him happy! He was very lonely, and I think this was because he could never be real with anyone. He could never afford to talk heart-to-heart with his friends, because he was always trying to entertain them. I think he tried to drop the mask with my mother. And on rare occasions (usually when he was very drunk) he tried to drop it with me. I assume he also tried with my brother. He sometimes seemed to believe that he had a right to expect or demand intimacy inside the nuclear family. 

But even when he wanted to drop the mask, and it wasn't often, he wasn't very good at it because he had no practice. It's not easy or automatic to learn how to be real with other people. You have to work at it. And I don't mean just intimacy. Because if you find that you can be real with your intimates, then you can start being real (in a more guarded way, to be sure) with acquaintances and even strangers. This doesn't mean you share the details of your love life with them. But it might mean you know what your opinions are, and that you are not afraid to state them. Or if you think your opinions will cause a distraction, if (say) you hold a minority political view in your office and still have to work cordially with your colleagues, knowing how to be real in your private life can give you more confidence to wave the topic away rather than trying to improvise an answer that you think people will like. 

This is a lesson that I am still learning, because I grew up imitating my dad. For the first three decades of my life, I didn't know what my own opinions were. (See, e.g., here, where I discuss topics related to this at considerable length.) It took me many long years to find my way out of that life and into a realer one. It's not easy, but it is so much better a way to live. And in a way I'm sorry I didn't understand this soon enough to try to help him find it too. Of course it would have been complicated, because there were so many other layers to our relationship as well. I might never have been able to explain it to him. But it is a damned shame that he never figured it out on his own!

If that's what Authenticity means, then I'm all for it. If that's what it means to Bring Your Whole Self to Work -- that and not all the colorful baggage -- then I have to accept that's OK too.

* But I will probably never be able to find it. This blog has lasted long enough for me to realize the indexing is very poor, and when I want to cross-reference an earlier post it can take me a lot of time to find it. So I may end up repeating stories just because I can't identify that I already told them a decade ago. Sorry.

** Only in midlife was he able to make it a vocation too, to try to earn a living from it. That part never worked out very well, any more than any of his earlier career ventures worked out. 

          

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 2

 Unsurprisingly, she doesn't think so. When I asked whether she had ever been tested, she replied:

No, I haven't, and I don't have any reason to believe I'm on the autism spectrum. I'm curious as to why you asked, though. What makes you think I might be?

I wasn't going to give her my real reasons for thinking so, which I hint at here and here and here (for example) … and in other posts linked out of those ones. Any suggestion that she is in any way imperfect makes her furious, even though (or perhaps because) she thinks of herself as a failure in many ways. (See e.g. here and here.) So I wanted to write something that put any onus on me but might make her look at the data just a bit. I replied:

Obviously I’m no doctor. 

But I was reading something about it the other day, and realized that the specific manners in which I often tried to communicate with you would have been very unsatisfactory for anyone afflicted with Asperger’s or anything like it.

Reasoning backwards made me think that IF (hypothetically) you had suffered from any syndrome along that spectrum, then it would be perfectly obvious why some of the ways I tried to communicate were in fact so unsatisfactory for you. (And I think neither of us ever claimed communication with the other to be a real strong suit.) 

That’s only enough to raise the question, and clearly not enough to deduce an answer. Logically speaking, my communications could have been unsatisfactory in plenty of other ways too. But it made me wonder. And I know you have collected enough zebra-weird diagnoses over the years that it’s entirely possible there was one I didn’t remember.

If nothing else, you can tell Counselor that I asked so the two of you can get a good laugh at what a silly question it was. :-D

No answer yet.

      

Could Wife have Asperger's?

 As I was mulling over the events I describe here, I had an idea. Is it possible that Wife suffers from Asperger's syndrome?

It might explain why she is so terrible at picking up the emotional nuance in interpersonal interactions (see here and here and pretty much anywhere else in the whole blog that I talk about her). In fact, it would be consistent with her poor social skills even in the face of superior linguistic ability. It could also explain why she has never found other people's emotions contagious.  (And actually when I went to find the link for that last post, I see that Janeway already suggested then that, "Wife sounds as though she might fall somewhere on the autism spectrum," and I commented that D had said the same thing. I even followed up with these remarks here. Gosh, I had forgotten all about that exchange.

But also, I remember years ago that Debbie told me she had been angry for decades at how emotionally unresponsive her ex-husband was, and then he was finally diagnosed with Asperger's and she decided she had to cut him some slack. Could that be true here too?

I emailed her to ask if she has ever been tested. I said nothing beyond that. Maybe she'll ignore the email, but I'll let you know if she replies.

     

Closing up shop, part 4

When I sent out email to colleagues and friends and family telling them all that I had accepted the job in Sticksville, the replies were mostly pretty positive. Some were perfunctory congratulations; one or two gave me earnest advice about preparing for the weather. Then there was this from Hil:

I am glad to hear that we as [Company] will not lose you!!! ... I hope to get the chance next year to see you again – I am missing my friend Hosea!

And this from Kathleen:

: ) : ) : )   I am so glad to hear this.

It's always nice to hear.

But I noticed something interesting. We were originally told that 27 positions were being relocated from Beautiful City to Sticksville. But to my knowledge I am only the fourth one of us to accept an offer to move. And since the announcement was back in August, I assume I am probably the last. Of course it is easy to guess why a person wouldn't want to leave here to go there, but still ... 4 out of 27? That's not a lot.

Also in a recent announcement about how the business as a whole is doing, our regional president mentioned that (as a cost-cutting measure) 25 positions had been eliminated from the books. I wonder if 23 of those were the remaining spots that were originally designated to move from here? In other words, I wonder if the ship has now sailed, or if it's still possible for anyone else to change their mind? I'll never know, of course.

  

Closing up shop, part 3

 In earlier posts here and here, I explained that my office is closing at the end of next March, and my job is moving to Sticksville (with or without me).

Today I accepted the offer to go with it. Next spring I pack up my apartment and leave Beautiful City for Sticksville. I'm not exactly excited about it.

To be fair, I did look around -- both inside my company and locally through Google and LinkedIn -- for alternatives. And I did apply for a job with my company in International City; maybe not Timbuktu, but close enough. I didn't get it. In fact, I didn't even make it as far as the first interview. (To salvage my pride, I tell myself that they figured in an age of COVID-19 it would be too hard to relocate an American internationally as an expat. Sure, that must have been it.)

This afternoon I decided to characterize it to myself by saying that my fear of being unemployed turned out to be bigger than my fear of the terrible, man-eating weather. But another way to look at it is that I just accepted the easiest and most inevitable outcome.

I do this. When something becomes inevitable, or seemingly so, I simply accept it. The clearest example is my marriage to Wife. (And see how that turned out!) First we were just sleeping together, then I moved into her apartment, then we applied to graduate school together, and when we learned that the only way we could share an apartment in (university-owned, rent-subsidized) graduate student housing was to be married, we decided to marry. Even as I began to get one sign after another that this was the wrong thing to do, I went ahead and did it.

Of course one reason (out of many) that I went ahead with the marriage was that I was reacting to a time a year before when I had applied to a different graduate school (in a totally different field), ... gotten accepted, ... moved there and moved into the dorms, ... and then dropped out before classes started. It was a strange time; I was frightened and very confused. But the experience left me afraid that I couldn't commit to something, that at the last minute I would bolt. So at the next big decision (marriage) I resolved not to.

Coming back to my job situation today, I think probably the best advice I've gotten from anyone was from Schmidt, back when I first learned about the shutdown. He told me, "Some time ago, I saw a funny tattoo (in of all things a candy bar ad) that read "No regerts!" [sic] I think that really sums it up. You make a decision and then you make it the right one. That's life."

As I say, good advice. Anyway, I'll be moving in a few months. It won't matter to the blog, of course, which will stay right here.

This will put me a lot closer to Debbie: I'll be able to drive there to visit on a weekend. But I'm going to miss Beautiful City.

      

It's the little things

Two days ago, I got a couple of long emails from Wife.

A lot of what she wrote had to do With Son 1's health: he had a couple of COVID-19 scares this year (though his testing is consistently negative … but then there are a lot of false negatives with this disease) and she's concerned that he may have lingering damage to his lungs.

But then she went off in another direction. She reminded me that "years ago you wrote a poem, an invocation to the Lady, that I liked better than the one in our Book of Shadows. Do you have it, or remember it? Since I'm totally re-creating my Book, and since [her teacher] is dead (I don't know why that should matter since I've been out of touch with her for years, but it seems to, emotionally), I feel free to change the book as I rewrite it. That is based partially on … [There followed an obscure piece of gossip from the prehistory of the coven she trained in.] Anyway, I have only VERY recently (like last week) finished reading Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon even though you gave it to me for Yule years ago. Thank you very much for the gift, BTW.... [There followed a very long, quasi-historical justification for her making changes to the "tradition" she was trained in. See also, e.g., here or here.] And maybe I want to make some other changes, too. All of which is by way of saying that I liked your invocation very much, and would like to make it primary (though I see no reason not to keep the old one on file, too). I'd also like to ask you to write a parallel invocation to the God -- something in the same style. Please, when you have time. Something to mull when you're standing in line at airports or whatever."

This looks long, but trust me I have cut it down by at least half. Wife never learned the art of concision.

Normally I try to keep my communications with her strictly business, but in this case I was chattier.

I didn't know that [your teacher] had died, but I googled her after reading your letter and sure enough I found her. [Link to death notice.] July 11 of this year, from COVID-19. How did you find out? Also I wonder what ever happened with the child she adopted? Of course that child must be an adult by now -- around 30 or so? Time flies. 

As for the invocation … I wonder if we are remembering the same thing? The only one I can remember was meant as a direct replacement for [and I quoted a specific invocation from her Full Moon liturgy, something ponderous and not rhyming]…. 

Anyway, with that as a framework it came out as:

Holy Isis, holy Isis, 
She who comfort ever brings,
Pallas Isis, Hathor Isis,
Shelter us beneath your wings!

Sothis Isis, Sati Isis,
She who steers the stars above,
Accept this Self in sacrifices,
Fill this cup with all thy love!

Is that the one you meant? If not, I'll have to ask you to give me some more clues to jog my memory.

Honestly, I never knew you liked that. Thank you. It's nice to hear.

I couldn't tell you exactly what I wanted to hear back, but I meant the email to be friendly, to be an opening. I was struck to learn that her teacher was dead, though in retrospect it wasn't a huge surprise: she was older than we are (no longer young!) and always in poor health, so it is not shocking that COVID-19 should have killed her. But I always kind of liked her teacher, and was sorry anyway, even if it wasn't strictly speaking a shock. Also I was curious how she had heard, since so far as I knew Wife was pretty much completely detached from the pagan community these days.

And I wanted her to hear that last sentence. During all the years we were together I took in her criticisms with my food and drink, practically with my breath, but praise was rare indeed. Maybe once a year or so, usually on Father's Day, she would give me credit for being a good father; about that often, more or less, she would admit that she felt she could always trust me, that my sense of honor and decency was more or less unimpeachable. Even after we separated, she conceded that I did all the heavy lifting in drafting our separation agreement, and that she would have been in a much worse situation if I had not been fundamentally kind and equitable. She did say these things -- bloody rarely -- and of course that mattered.

But more commonplace compliments were nearly non-existent. We had been married four years or more before she ever admitted to finding me sexually attractive. Once year I wrote her a brace of four sonnets for her birthday, and I don't remember her saying anything kind or gracious about them … just "Thank you," in a tone that could have applied to doing the laundry. And it really made a difference. It set my expectations for the whole marriage. So I wanted her to see that last line, and to understand that she had never communicated any kind of appreciation for the creations of my mind … and maybe even to guess that this could have affected the marriage.

So what happened? She never replied to that email at all.

Sometimes she is just bad at replying to email, but that wasn't it. About the same time she had sent me another email asking for a definition of exurb. I replied pointing her to the Wikipedia article on the subject, and that she thanked me for! But to the more substantive email … silence.

Yesterday I finally broke down and asked her if it had arrived. She replied, "Yes, thanks!"

In other words, nothing much has changed. If I think about it, I realize that her failure to provide little compliments for little things wasn't really because she hated me (though it often felt like that) but because she somehow didn't understand why they mattered. She even said, once or twice, that in her mind if she didn't say anything, that meant things were fine. That was a compliment, from her perspective. She would only speak up when things were bad. And it flatly never occurred to her that this strategy could be a problem.

I shouldn't have posed that kind of a test for her, leaving a clue that I waited and hoped she would pick up. I should have known up front that she would never see it, never pick it up, and never understand why that mattered.

It still hurt, though, to hear nothing at all.

I know this is a little thing. It is silly even to write a post about it. It's one tiny thing in a forest of similar events that stretches back to when I first met her, more than 35 years ago.

But little things matter. Leaving aside all other considerations, they can (if you leave them alone) accumulate into big things. 

And they can hurt. Even something as small and simple as not being seen.