Blackmail

 Wife has discovered a new way to blackmail the children. Or at least (for the moment) Son 1.

You know that I'm out of a job. I have severance through the end of August and a little bit into September. And I have applied for Unemployment Insurance, for whatever that adds up to. (Not much.) According to my Separation Agreement with Wife, the alimony I pay is partly dependent on my income: if my income drops too far, the alimony goes to zero. (It never turns negative, though.) So if I don't get a new job by September -- or at any rate October, just to be certain -- Wife's alimony stops.

She explained all this to Son 1 over the phone one evening, in a dead panic -- the kind of panic she gets in where there is no way to placate her or to reason with her. And she kept it up until he told her, "It's going to be fine, Mom. If your alimony runs out you can move in with me." (Son 1, remember, has a job and his own apartment now.) Apparently that let her calm down.

And that's great and all, except … God in heaven, who ever thought this was a good idea? In the first place Wife is crazy and emotionally abusive. Beyond that, how is Son 1 supposed to live a normal life as a young man if he shares an apartment with his mother? 

• What happens when she starts telling him not to spend so much time playing video games? Properly, at that point he should throw her out. But if his whole motivation is that he doesn't want her to be homeless, will he be able to do that? 
• What happens if he wants to bring a young woman home for the night? Does he tell her, "It's fine, my mom won't mind?"
• One point I mentioned directly to him on the phone is that when you are responsible for paying somebody else's bills, you cannot help but judge their spending. So it is a foregone conclusion that if she moves in with him, one day he'll find himself screaming at her, "For God's sake, woman, why did you go spend money on that, of all things?"

But of course he doesn't want her to be homeless. That speaks well of him. But it really bothers me. I see it as the opening wedge, as her putting her nose in the tent in such a way that Son 1 will never get her out again. She would love that, but it's wrong.

I also can't help wondering what she has been doing for the last eight years since we've each lived alone? Did she never understand that one day the alimony would run out? It runs out when I die, for example. If my income ends when I retire, it runs out then. And there was always the possibility that I might be laid off. Did she really take no steps in all that time to secure some kind of income on her own? Of course she often says that she can't get a job, because of her various illnesses. But surely there are ways to secure an income of some kind without working a regular 8:00 to 5:00 job, or without having to type 150 words a minute in a legal office. Flannery O'Connor suffered from lupus just as Wife does, but it didn't stop her from writing. Has Wife really been willing to be simply dependent for the rest of her life, and to leave it at that?

Apparently so. And it's very sad.