"Die, damn you!"

Last week I was on a video call with Marie. She was talking about the latest news from the COVID-19 pandemic. In among other bits of information, she mentioned that the sharpest recent increases in the death rate were (apparently) all in counties that had voted for Donald Trump in the last couple of elections.

And she grinned a great big, wide, satisfied grin. Which -- for just a moment -- scared the shit out of me.

I pointed out to her that she was grinning. Her only remark was that she guessed she had better not mention this factoid to any of those family members who disagree with her politically, or at any rate not if she's on a video call with them. She wasn't horrified or alarmed. In fact she took the news quite calmly.

Why did she grin? One possibility is that she was glad at the thought of her opponents dropping dead. But there's actually another that I think more likely, based on the other things she was saying. The way she told the story -- I have taken no steps to confirm any of this -- the counties with the highest death rates were mostly those that had rejected the imposition of strict mask and vaccination mandates. And of course there's a high correlation between the counties that rejected strict mandates and the counties that voted for Mr. Trump. So I actually think Marie's glee was the glee of an intense, young grade-school student who just got the right answer when all the bigger kids got it wrong. I think her grin was supposed to say, "My friends and I did what the teacher told us to do, and we're all alive. But you didn't listen and insisted on doing your own thing, and now you're all dying. Now do you see that we were right all along?"

Hermione Granger morphs into Madame Defarge.

There is something terrifying about the Need To Be Right.

  

"Good night John-Boy, … Debbie, … Mattie …."

This week Debbie bought a new house.

She won't move for a while. The current owners don't want to have to leave till November. That's fine with Debbie because she's still waiting for her mom's house to sell so she'll have the money. (You remember that her mom died a couple months ago.)

But wait, doesn't Debbie already have a house? Doesn't she, in fact, own a house that she herself described as "the nicest place she has ever lived as an adult"? What gives?

Well, you know that her daughter Mattie lives in the next town over -- Mattie and her husband and two little boys. (That's the whole reason Debbie is living where she's living.) She regularly drives over to spend time with them, helping out in a grandmotherly way when Mattie and her husband are overburdened. You also know that Mattie and her husband don't make much money, and live very frugally. So Debbie and Mattie put their heads together and decided it would make the most sense to buy a big house where they could all live together. Debbie could help raise the boys, Mattie and her husband could stop paying rent, and when Debbie gets actually old (she's 67 this year, and clearly not yet "old" by this definition), Mattie and her husband could help her out and take care of her. 

Wait a minute -- suppose I want to come visit? How will that work? Debbie figures she'll put a sofa-bed in her bedroom along with her regular bed; then any guest "who is like family" can sleep there. For someone who is less close, she guesses they can figure something else out. I think I'm probably in the first category.

OK, OK, so if we suppose that the question of my visits has been handled, what then? It's interesting. In principle I think it is a great idea. When my father was a kid his grandmother lived with them, and he loved it. And I can personally vouch that parenthood is too big a job for two adults: having live-in help is a great idea.

But at the same time I can never imagine doing the same thing with either of my boys. And I am trying to understand why not.

• Partly, I value my own solitude too much. This will become a problem when I get old and frail and brittle, but I am assiduously not thinking about that right now. (That always works, right?)
• Partly there are two of them, … so in the event that they both start families, which one should I stay with?
• And partly I just assume that neither one of them wants to see that much of me. Didn't they get pretty well sick of me during all those years they were growing up? Sure, we get along fine now, but I assume that's just because we see each other only in small doses. 

Of course, I assume that about most people, really -- I mean, I assume that they can tolerate me best when there are strict boundaries and limited exposure. And, well, OK … I guess strictly speaking I know that Marie wants to marry me or live with me permanently, but I figure she just doesn't know her own desires well enough because she hasn't been married before: I keep telling her that after a few years the bloom will fade and she'll get sick of me. Also I know that Son 1 is living with Wife right now, but I'm pretty sure that's just because of straight-up emotional blackmail on her part. If anything, surely that experience will leave him sufficiently disgusted that there would be no prayer of his ever wanting to do it again.

It's strange that I can think this is such a good idea in the abstract, and yet it feels odd when Debbie does it and I find it unthinkable that I myself ever would. Maybe this makes me a flawed person … I mean, more flawed than we already knew I am. I just don't know.

      

Sociopath postscript

Well, our conversation (following on from here) was something of an anticlimax. I did not raise any of the relationship-shaking issues, but mostly let her talk. I did explain that if she were determined to see the whole topic like a war, then it really made more sense to treat this engagement as an immaterial skirmish rather than anything bigger. For her part, she said (while trying to smile) that at least she hadn't kept her upset a secret but had let me know right away … a sign that she had learned from when I mentioned that I have a problem with her habit of keeping issues bottled up inside her without any word of warning.

I also mentioned as a casual observation that she and I almost never discuss politics, but didn't bother to explain why not. There's time for all that later.

And then after a while we discussed trivial shit: things like what medical insurance plan should she select during her company's Open Enrollment period? I guess the rest can wait.

     

So now I'm a sociopath?

The last couple of days I've had the most interesting exchange with Marie. It started Friday, when she emailed me briefly to tell me how one of her relatives was weathering Hurricane Ida, and to mention (seemingly in passing) her dismay at the Supreme Court's recent decision to take no action in the case of Whole Woman's Health et al. v. Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al. I didn't know anything about the decision so I googled it and read a couple of articles. Based on what those articles told me, I replied (later the same day) that it looked to me like this "decision not to decide" was at most very temporary, and that bigger cases (substantive ones, not to be decided on procedural details) appeared to be on the horizon. What I meant by this was that, if she wanted to engage in any kind of political activity around the issue, she would be well advised to keep her powder safe and dry for a time that it could make a difference. 

What I got back from her late that evening was an impassioned screed that started, "You fucking sociopath!" She went on to remind me that I'm not a woman [err, … yes, that's true, was there any doubt of this?], to express gratitude that none of my children had been daughters, to explain that everyone else "in the universe" is currently "register[ing] excruciating agony" over this topic, and to excoriate me for not "giv[ing] a FUCK for anything that makes other people's, REAL OTHER PEOPLE's, lives utterly, HORRIFIC[ALLY], WORSE." Then after adding a little more juicy substantiating detail, together with some odd predictions for the local politics in my own state, she concluded:

You don't care, do you?, so long as you imagine you cannot be affected.

Go fuck yourself.

Seriously.

Fuck yourself again and again.

Fuck yourself in every orifice.

And then again.

This email was followed by a one-sentence email later the same evening in which she apologized for swearing at me.

Wow. 

Kind of exciting, actually. I don't remember anyone ever accusing me of sociopathy before.

I waited a while before replying. Saturday, around noon, I asked her to double-check the articles I had read (and had previously linked for her), so she could tell me whether there was anything in my email that I had not lifted directly from them? Also, did she think those journalists were sociopaths too?

She replied in a longer email that mostly avoided capital letters, in which she explained why any decent human being would feel as helplessly, hopelessly distraught as she did right now, before closing with:

But [the word] sociopath was ill-chosen.  You struck me as exhibiting a lack of empathy marked enough to feel to me like a slap in the face, but you certainly don't exhibit tendencies either to personal irresponsibility or to violence. 

So sorry about that term as well.

Love, Marie

Does this mean I'm not a sociopath after all? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also I have to wonder, where does this leave us as a couple? Does it make a difference? Do we go on as before? Or do we have to do some kind of work around this? I know that in general I avoid discussing politics with Marie, because I know that she gets crazily over-invested in it. But in this case I wasn't even expressing an opinion on the issue that was different from hers. (To the extent that my political opinions are different from hers – on this issue or any other – I am even more careful to keep my silence.) But clearly avoiding disagreement isn't good enough. Even if I am "not-disagreeing," apparently I have to use exactly the right words to express that "non-disagreement" in. This could get old fast. 

And of course it's not even remotely news. (For example, compare this post here, which dates from almost exactly four years ago.) That's why I don't talk politics with Marie. But I thought my remarks were totally innocuous, so I was taken by surprise.

Let me clarify that I'm not hurt, or offended, or insulted. I didn't take her outburst seriously enough for any of that. After raising two children up from birth, and after living through Wife and D as romantic partners, I'm used to handling infantile temper tantrums. (Go ahead – tell me I'm being condescending. You're not wrong.)

But I was taken by surprise. And at this point I may have to explain to her that this is part of the reason I am not about to trust her emotionally. Of course that doesn't stop us from fucking. But will she really be happy in the long term with a relationship where we fuck whenever we can travel, but where I keep large parts of myself off-limits and out-of-bounds? Where we can't even discuss the daily news, for Pete's sake, because usually the daily news involves politics and I won't discuss politics with her? What kind of relationship is that?

We have a regular, weekly phone call about an hour from now. Let's see how it goes.

    

Mattie, or, Movie meme 8

I've figured out what name to use for Debbie's daughter, if I ever have to write about her again. (The most recent time was here, for example.) I'm going to call her Mattie, after Mattie Ross in the movie "True Grit." 

Partly there is a physical similarity between Debbie's real daughter and Mattie as played by Hailee Steinfeld. But most of the similarity is in attitude. I am thinking specifically of Mattie's absolute conviction, rock-bottomed and copper sheathed, of her own righteousness – and of the determination that it gives her.

Maybe this is only part of the story with Debbie's daughter, but it's the part I see.