Pleasantly surprised

Background

I got an email today from Wife. The context is that when my company-paid health insurance ended in September, I dithered for a while and then signed up for a COBRA policy. I told the boys I'd cover them until they could sign up for insurance of their own through their jobs; I told Wife I'd cover her through December. After that, I said, either I would cancel her coverage or I would deduct the cost from her alimony check: her choice.

OK, strictly speaking it's not even "alimony" at this point. Our Separation Agreement ties the amount of alimony to my salary: right now I am unemployed and have no salary, so legally I should be paying zero alimony. But I told Wife I didn't want to be an asshole, so I am continuing to make payments as long as I can afford it. I have explained that if some day I can no longer afford it, she should remember that there is nothing legally binding about these payments.

On the other hand, the cost of COBRA coverage for her totals just over 50% of the size of those payments. So if I deduct that from her payments, she won't have a lot left. At the time, I suggested that she look for cheaper insaurance.

What I expected her to write

I expected her to have done nothing since then, to have been paralyzed by the need for action. I expected her to be frightened and panicked, and therefore angry and accusatory. I expected her to have forgotten just how far I have done her favors during this process, and to demand more because she needs it.

I was wrong on all counts.

What she wrote instead

Her email was clear and detailed. She explained that naturally the best case from her perspective was something other than what was available, but she fully recognized that it wasn't available. She had, in fact, found and signed up for an alternate insurance plan, and described in some detail what it will and won't cover. Therefore, she said I should go ahead and cancel the COBRA insurance for her at the end of this month. She also expressed gratitude for everything I have done for her so far, and ended the email by mentioning some happy things that have dropped into her life lately.

She said nothing about her needs. She thanked me and demanded nothing beyond what I had offered. She did ask a couple of clarifying questions about what expenses she could slide under the wire, but they were all posed as pure questions and not disguised challenges.

And I was just a little bit stunned. Has she been able to do this all along, and just chose not to? Or has she been practicing? Has she turned over a new leaf somehow? Is she in the process of another dramatic personality change, kind of like the one I wrote about a few days ago, but in the other direction? That last option sounds far-fetched, but who knows? I suppose anything is possible. Anyway, reading her email was a little bit like preparing for a step and then finding that it's not there. Almost disorienting.

But I was pleasantly surprised.

Does this mean that my long-standing fear of her is going to be out of date some time soon? That might be a lot to ask, but I suppose anything is possible. I guess we'll see.  

  

“You’re being childish and cruel!”

A few days ago Iwrote a post in which I speculated that the reason Son 1 was planning to stay away from celebrating Christmas with the rest of us was that he was being emotionally blackmailed by Wife. Son 2 is staying with me for a couple of days, and last night we talked about it. I suppose the good news is that I was completely wrong.

No, the point is that Son 1 believes – and Son 2 agreed with him on this – that I am being childishly vindictive and cruel in my repeated refusal to let Wife visit my family for holidays. And he decided he no longer wants to dignify what he sees as petty game-playing on my part with his presence. So either I grow the hell up and drop my resistance, or he won’t show up. Son 2 said he agreed with the moral stance, but chose to come anyway precisely so that he could discuss this with me in person. Several times he said, “I know this isn’t pleasant to hear, but I want you to understand”; and I assured him that I would rather understand what is true than be placated with what is pleasant.

Actually, in a sense this story is more pleasant for me than the one I believed before. There’s a part of me that doesn’t especially mind being hated: I figure it’s only fitting punishment for my sins, or something like that. (In the past I have explained that attitude in one way, for example here. Now I am starting to think that story is really too glib and not deep enough. But the phenomenon is a reality anyway.) As I say, there’s a part of me that doesn’t especially mind being hated. But it alarmed me to think of Son 1 victimized by Wife’s abuse and emotional manipulation. So yeah, hearing that it’s really all my fault is actually an improvement.  

After that, Son 2 and I talked for a couple of hours. I tried to explain, in a kind of fumbling, ham-handed way, that my attitude towards spending holidays with Wife comes not from cruelty, but from thirty years of abuse. I conceded that I had never talked about this with him or his brother (and that in a sense I was glad they hadn’t already figured it out) because all the advice I had read from Judith Wallerstein and others said that it is a terrible thing for children of divorcing parents when the parents bad-mouth each other to their kids. Son 2 agreed that it is indeed terrible when that happens; but he added that one of the consequences has been that for years they have heard all of Wife’s complaints against me but never the other side of the story. And when you only ever hear one side of the story, well, what are you supposed to think? Besides – and on this point we both agreed – the boys are now adults. Rules that applied when they were still kids don’t have to apply any longer.

Son 2 still thinks that I haven’t handled my damage from the marriage in any kind of useful way (seems to me I remember Debbie telling me the exact same thing years ago), and that there is a lot of room for improving the current situation. But he no longer condemns my attitude on straightforward moral grounds. It’s progress. He wants me to write a short email to Son 1 summarizing the same points, and then the two of them will discuss it some more.

Two days ago I did a Tarot reading where I asked “What do I need to understand about today’s events?” I dealt three cards: for my Self, the World reversed; for my Situation, the Fool reversed; and for my Outcome, the Five of Pentacles reversed. I looked up the card meanings from an online site. At the time I wasn’t sure how to put together the suggested meanings, but in retrospect it looks as if the cards were telling me something like this:

Self: The World reversed: I am seeking closure on a personal issue.

Situation: The Fool reversed: I am acting recklessly.

Outcome: The Five of Pentacles reversed: There is a possibility that this might not end with my losing the relationship with both boys, or (figuratively) being shut out in the cold. In other words, there could be a way forward. But don’t fuck it up, bubbeleh.

I suppose it’s easier to read a divinatory message when you already know what’s going to happen, isn’t it?

                 

Lao Tzu on shamelessness

Eight years ago -- gosh, it's getting on towards nine by now -- I wrote in a poem here that failure is freedom while success means a kind of bondage. 

Recently I found that Lao Tzu had a similarly dim view of success. In the Tao Te Ching, poem 13 reads, in part:

SHAMELESS

To be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear....

What does that mean,

to be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear?

Favor debases:

we fear to lose it,

fear to win it.

So to be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear.

--- from Ursula K. LeGuin's Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, 1997.

Sent from the all new AOL app for Android

Saturn return

OK, after all the depressing shit in my last two posts, this one is just for fun. A week or two ago I was farting around on the Internet and stumbled across a reference to something called a "Saturn return." What's that? I wondered. I looked it up and found lots of sites that were happy to explain it to me.

It's an astrological term. The idea is that a "Saturn return" is that period when the planet Saturn comes back to the same place in the sky that it occupied when you were born. Apparently Saturn is connected with themes like maturity, hard work, and discipline, so a lot of these issues start cascading around you at this time. One site put it this way:

Think of it like this: during your Saturn return, you are a teenager and the planet of discipline is your dad, barging into your room checking to see if you’ve done your homework. If the assignment is complete, you are rewarded. But along with this accolade comes a warning: you can’t rest on your laurels. You must keep going to maintain your status. On the flip side, if you haven’t done the work, you still have to learn those lessons. What you’ve been avoiding catches up with you—Saturn doesn’t let you get away with it anymore; you must correct the course. For many, the Saturn return aligns with fulfilling milestones: weddings, giving birth or promotions. For others, it lines up with unnerving shakeups: cross-country moves, career changes or heartbreaking breakups. However the transit manifests for you, you can’t escape this total renovation of your life. It’s a rite of passage; it’s a time to grow up.

Another site talked a lot about challenges, tests, existential crises, and growth. You get the idea. It's supposed to be a turbulent time when your normal routines are all upset and you have to buckle down to focus on what really matters.

After I read all that, my next questions were, When are (or will be) my Saturn returns? Do these descriptions work out in practice? Fortunately there are calculator websites which will tell you just that. I found one and plugged in my birth date. 

Turns out my first Saturn return stretched from March to December of 1990. I remember that time. In March I was working at a placid, easy, nothing job where I'd been idling for four years. That summer we moved to Beautiful City, where I live now; in the early autumn I got a job there, and nine weeks later I was fired. By December I was collecting unemployment and scrounging temp work. I was also just about to get a job (through one of those temp agencies) that would open up the career path I followed for the next ten years, that brought me my first management assignment, and that lifted me out of pissing away my days in placid, easy, nothing jobs. Of course I couldn't see that at the time. All I could see at the time was that I had smashed into my biggest fear in the world of work — being fired — but the sun had come up again the next day and I somehow had to find a way to move on. So yes, challenges, tests, unnerving shakeups, and growth all seemed to play a part in the story right about then. 

But I'm old enough that there's a second one, too. That one was in January of 2020. Now when I look back at that time, January 2020 doesn't seem to have been unusually turbulent or challenging. So maybe the theory falls apart. Or maybe it just requires a longer view: that was, after all, just before COVID-19 broke out and I started working from home; it was the beginning of the year in which my company decided to close my office for good. (And while we all assumed the closure was related to COVID, it might not have been. For all I know the decision might have been taken back in January, for other reasons, and COVID just provided a good cover.) If it had only fallen a year later, I could have blamed by second Saturn return for my current joblessness, and for the way I am now wrestling with the question what I really want to do next. Do I even want another job? Or is it time to retire and do something different for a change?

I suppose if you are generous enough with the parameters you can make it work. Of course if you are generous enough with the parameters you can prove anything. Anyway, it's fun to think about.

      

What happened to her, anyway?

I don't know why I'm writing this now. It's late, and I'm far from sober. If I want to write a think-piece, much less an analysis of someone's personality, I should take time over it. I should have all my wits about me. Right?

Whatever.

To this day I cannot give a satisfactory answer to the question, What the hell happened to Wife? How did she morph from this into that? Honestly, it looks like magic: I don't know how else to explain it. And since magic was her whole métier, back in the day, I guess that's an appropriate explanation. Any way you look at it, it's bizarre.

Back when I met Wife, she was strong, energetic, and magical. We were both academic nerds, and of course the normal question then — even before you get as far as a pickup line — is What's your major? If you want to be really classy, you can ask, What's your research about? Her research was about the Arthurian legends and the character of Merlin. She knew, seemingly, everything there was to know about King Arthur and Merlin, and could trace both figures effortlessly back into the prehistory of Celtic mythology. She had ambitions to pursue these topics through a Ph.D. and into a tenured professorship somewhere important, and the same passion also fueled her dedication to learning real magic and her commitment to achieve a third degree as a Wiccan High Priestess. Even then she could be difficult, but she was invigorating to be around. Her conversation crackled with a tangible passion and energy.

Today? She's tired, spent, cranky, and totally self-centered. Everything wrong in her life is the result of bad luck or ill-treatment by others — none of it is ever her responsibility. (Just ask her!) Everyone picks on her, and then they abandon her. And wait, wait — let her tell you about all her physical ailments! She's got these debilitating headaches, plus of course her doctor tells her that she's permanently disabled so it's not like she could work to earn even one thin dime. Basically she's helpless, completely helpless — also miserable, but in a way that precludes her taking any steps on her own behalf, to make her own life better. Life has just been really difficult for her, you see, and it doesn't help that her ex-husband is such a heartless son of a bitch ....

And so on.

What the hell happened?

Part of it was that she got so sick. I mean, even back when I met her, she would sometimes get sick with weird symptoms that no one could really identify. Somewhere around the year 2000 (when we had been married for 16 years, and when the boys were respectively 4 and 2) she was finally diagnosed with systemic lupus. Probably a decade before that, she had been diagnosed with depression and put on Prozac. 

Privately I suspect she suffers not simply from depression but from bipolar disorder — a diagnosis she got just once, and which was never repeated, and which she has resolutely denied. But the phenomenology of bipolar disorder includes those marvelous, manic highs as well as the deep, depressive lows; and I think those highs are exactly what made her seem so magically exciting and attractive back in the early days. In any event, she denies that she suffers from bipolar disorder but these days she is treated with mood stabilizers that are normally reserved for bipolar patients. Her excuse is that these are the only medications that work on "treatment-resistant depression." Sure, babe. Whatever.

Anyway, I think the combination of physical and mental illnesses knocked the stuffing out of her, and convinced her that she was never going to achieve any of those great things she'd always dreamed of. Certainly there were years when she achieved almost nothing. Back when Son 2 was about three years old, he drew a picture of her and then ran to show her. "See Mommy? I drew a picture of you! I drew you lying down in bed, because that's where you always are." She absorbed comments like this into her own self-image rapidly, indeed almost eagerly.

On top of her health issues, she ran into a lot of obstacles in her professional life even before she left work on permanent disability. 

• Some of these obstacles may have been health-related, like when she did unexpectedly poorly on her qualifying exams for her doctoral program, as a result of which she failed to get a second master's degree and left school forever. 
• Other obstacles resulted directly from her execrable social skills, that led her to get fired from one job after graduate school and almost fired from the next. (In the end she went out on disability because of her lupus just before her boss lost patience with her forever, so they agreed to call it "permanent disability" and avoid the ugliness of termination-for-cause.) 
• Strictly speaking, these same execrable social skills meant that she had burned all her bridges back in graduate school, so when she did (as I say) unexpectedly poorly on her qualifying exams she had exactly no leeway with the department in which to lobby for retaking them, or working for another semester and trying again, or any other reasonable accommodation. No one was willing to extend her any more than the strict letter of the law; and the letter of the law was that she failed. Too bad, so sad. Goodbye!

In case it's not obvious, these are the same execrable social skills that I described earlier this evening — the ones that have left her virtually alone for Christmas, because nobody wants to spend time with her. 

And so she gave up.

Over the years — back before I, too, gave up and decided to leave her — I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile these two different pictures of her, Before and After. Some days I settled for a simple explanation: that her anti-bipolar mood-stabilizing drugs did indeed smooth out her emotional affect, but that in the process they also eviscerated all the energy and power that had made her so attractive back in the old days. 

Other times I explored a more metaphysical explanation, that there is some correlation between (on the one hand) an openness to the gods, to divine revelation and to magical experience, and (on the other hand) an emotional fragility or instability that easily collapses into mental illness and pathology. For what it is worth, I think this principle is true: that is, I think there really is such a correlation. Think of any of the great prophets of the past: if they lived among us today, I think we'd find them emotionally fragile, and we'd probably consider them mentally ill. But, as Nietzsche pointed out, just because they are sick doesn't make them wrong. [I don't have a reference to hand, and it's too late at night for me to want to look it up. But I know he said it somewhere.] Or, as the Who once expressed the exact same idea, "Sickness will surely take the mind / Where minds can't usually go / Come on the amazing journey / And learn all you should know."

Anyway, I told myself that an openness to the gods required this mental and emotional fragility. And therefore, I went on, it was just bad luck — but totally predictable — that Wife's mind and emotions collapsed under the strain. In every generation, so I told myself, there are a few people who are able to access the divine, who can communicate with the gods more clearly and easily than any of the rest of us. But they pay dearly for this gift, and Wife's collapse was an example of what this payment looks like. [Compare also, if only for sheer preposterous grandiosity, this post here.]

I spent years telling myself these things. But were they true? Or was I just making excuses for her, the way I made excuses for her emotional abuse over decades and refused even to call it what it was? Honestly, I have no idea. 

What this means is that, to this day, I can't give you a good explanation of what the hell happened to her. I don't know how she changed from this to that. 

All I know for sure is that it was bad.    

   

The evil that men do

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.

– Marc Antony, in Julius Caesar, III 2, by William Shakespeare 

No, nobody has died. But I can't help thinking of Marc Antony's lines anyway. Wife is still poisonous, despite and after the separation.

I feared something like this when Son 1 first made plans to let her move in with him, though I never committed myself to particular details. Not that I claim any genius as a prophet. But this doesn't require genius. 

What happened is that we as a family started planning Christmas. Yes, it's only a week away — that's actually not abnormal for us. Son 2 will be driving into town from the faraway place where he now has a job: he plans to spend a couple of nights with me, a couple of nights with Wife, and several days at the home of my mom, including the afternoon of Christmas and then Boxing Day. Brother and SIL will probably cook up a big feast at my mom's place on the evening of the 25th. We'll all eat too much, drink too much, and sit around opening presents or just visiting. It should be fun.

What about Son 1? I emailed him to ask about his plans, and he said,

Ok, welp, this probably won't be popular but I wasn't planning to go anywhere or do anything for Christmas. We'll have Son 2 crash here for a couple nights, but that's about the limit of my planning.

When I inquired a little further, he explained,

It is my intention, while I live with [Wife], to abstain from all Tanatu family gatherings if she does not get an invite.

Oh. Got it.

There are so many things I want to say in response, and most of them aren't going to be helpful. The reply I sent him this morning just pointed out that he might find himself living with Wife for several years to come, and it would be a shame if he let himself drop out of touch with the family during that time; also — though I devoutly hope that this won't be an issue for some years yet — I asked him to make an exception for funerals.

Meanwhile inside my head I'm screaming.

Is this because you are trying to avoid us, or because you are trying to placate her? 

If you are trying to avoid us, I'm baffled, because Mother and Brother and SIL have never been anything but kind to you. 

If you are trying to placate Wife, I get it — but it will never work. I tried for thirty years to placate her, and she still inflicted misery on herself over and over. Finally I realized that placating her would never work — and I also realized that I had sub-contracted out all my decision-making to her when it touched any of the (all too many) issues that wounded her oversensitive vanity. I had allowed myself to stop doing things I enjoyed because Wife would be upset. 

So I broke with her and the break was total. If you want to have a good relationship with her in the long term, you have to start by setting some boundaries now. Otherwise it will take a lot of years — years when you avoid doing things you want to do, for her sake — and then one day you'll decide never to speak to her again.

I know that Wife gets whiny and emotionally manipulative around the holidays — any holidays. Whenever things unroll in a way that differs from the Perfect Holiday Script that she has in her mind — the foods aren't exactly what they were in her girlhood, the dramatis personae aren't quite right, whatever — she goes to pieces, weeping and wailing that the Holiday has been Ruined Forever. If you spend even part of the holiday with somebody else she'll claim that she has been Abandoned For Christmas, and that she has No-One to Spend It With. I've heard the same speeches from her for years. And I can kind of understand why you don't want to have to listen to it.

But why is she so alone? 

• Her birth family is a lot bigger and more extensive than mine is. Why isn't she spending Christmas with some of them? Answer: Because she has alienated them all. Every single one, so far as I know.
• She used to have a wide circle of friends that she called her "family of choice," and for years she talked about how "families of choice" are so much better than families by birth. Why isn't she spending Christmas with some of them? Answer: Same reason she's not with her birth family. One by one she has driven all of them away, or the friendships withered to the point that there was nothing in it to make it worthwhile for her friends to keep up with her.
• More recently she has talked a lot about how my family is "the only real family she ever had." But did they actually like her, or did they just put up with her for my sake? Seems to me that if they'd actually liked her, they would have made overtures to get together some time when it's not a holiday, just for the pleasure of hanging out. To the best of my knowledge that hasn't happened. So it kind of looks like they don't much care for her either.
• I totally agree that her isolation is sad. But it's like Greek tragedy. The fates of Oedipus, and Agamemnon, and Hippolytus were all sad too, but they were also self-inflicted. She has brought this on herself.

I don't know if Son 1 will reply to my short email. If he does, I don't know what direction the conversation will go. I may not say any of these things. But inside my head I'm still screaming.