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.