Progress of a kind

The last 24 hours have been … really informative. And they've meant a kind of progress in my relationship with Wife and Son 2 … and maybe even Son 1, though that's harder to tell. But explaining it is going to require backing up for a minute. 

Chapter One: Background

This weekend, Son 2 is breezing through town. A while ago I told you about his opportunity to go to graduate school. Since then he applied and was accepted for January admission. Now that it is December he gave notice at his work and his last day was Friday. This weekend he is moving to the city where his graduate studies will take place, and where his girlfriend has been living for a while. He is taking the long way around to get there, visiting first me and then Wife en route, for a couple of reasons: partly winter weather is forecasted to block the more direct route, and partly there are things in my storage unit and in hers that he wants to take to set up his new housekeeping with. He slept in my apartment last night, and he left early this morning for Wife's place. After that I think he'll wind up with a brief visit to my mother before driving to the new city.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Yesterday was the first time I've seen Son 2 in person since last year's Christmas season, when he and I had this conversation about how my strained non-relationship with Wife showed up for him and his brother. At the time I asked him what he wanted from me, in order to make things better, and he was very concrete: Sometime in the coming year, I want you to visit Mom [Wife] at a social level, and be civil and pleasant. You don't have to like each other, but visit and be nice.

Well, as of yesterday that conversation was 355 days in the past. My deadline of "sometime in the coming year" was about to expire. I had a box of old photos of Wife's family, and old Christmas cards from some of her friends, and I had been meaning to get them to her "some day." So pretty clearly this was the time to do it, before Son 2 arrived. I made arrangements with her to show up yesterday morning, and drove the 40 minutes between my place and hers.

Chapter Two: I visit Wife and Son 1

The first thing I saw when I came inside was the clutter. In the past when I visited Son 1 in his own apartment—back when he lived by himself—he might not have tidied the place but it was never cluttered because he didn't own that much stuff. Oh sure, there might have been old pizza boxes in the kitchen trash (bachelor living at its finest!) but there was always plenty of floorspace and you used to be able to see the level surfaces.

No more. Living with Wife has put an end to that. The living room, all the public space, is packed with her stuff. And not just old stuff either, but new. Over here is her sewing machine, and this whole wall is covered with cartons of fabric. Over there is a magnifying glass and soldering tools and a whole stack of wires and charms, because she has decided to go into the business of making jewelry. And selling it online, perhaps? Sure, just as soon as someone else makes a webstore for her. In this corner is a desk, sporting a handsome collection of fountain pens, because she has started collecting fountain pens. Also the desk holds more jars of ink than I could count at a glance. I'm guessing maybe a dozen, at least. (How many jars of black ink can you possibly need at any one time?) And then the table in the middle of the room is piled high with more stuff: I don't even know what because I didn't check. The place looks just like our house used to look, back in the day.* 

I was there to be civil and pleasant, so I said nothing about the fountain pens but asked about her plans for a jewelry business. She talked enthusiastically about the designs she's making, how nobody else seems to have hit on the particular twist she is using. She showed me some of her work, and it's not bad. It's nothing I would ever wear, because it's not my taste. But I assume somebody out there should like it.

She talked about how she recently had to go out and buy a new magnifying-glass-with-light but hasn't been able to put it together correctly yet. I asked why, because the one currently mounted on the table looked perfectly functional. She said yes, but that one belonged to the person who had been her best friend in town, who just recently dropped her and broke off all contact. So Wife figured she should give back the magnifying glass. I commented mildly "How weird" that someone would drop her like that, and then changed the subject. Privately I thought that this was sadly consistent with Wife's usual history with friends.** But of course I didn't say that.

Resting on the table in the middle of the room was a ceramic decoration that used to hang outside when we had the house. Wife explained that when she was living on her own, the wind had blown it down and broken this corner off of it. But now she had glued the corner back on. I remarked, with what I hoped was an encouraging tone, that yes, things could be fixed and that's all to the good. (I remember plenty of times in the past when Wife wept piteously when something would break, because it had been "ruined" and any repair was unthinkable. So I thought that her current willingness to repair meant progress.) She got a wistful tone in her voice and said, "When we broke, we couldn't be repaired." Wow, didn't expect that. But I referenced back to the jewelry she is making, where she sometimes takes apart old broken pieces to salvage the charms or decorations and use them anew. I said, "Sometimes when something breaks you just use it in a new and different form," and tried to sound just as encouraging as before.

Son 1 came out a couple of times to chat and then went back to his room. And after an hour or so I took my leave and headed home. But all in all we got along very smoothly. 

Chapter Three: Son 2 visits me

Son 2 had arrived in town while I was visiting Wife and Son 1. (It was a long drive, but he got a really early start.) So we met at my storage unit. Then I got a haircut (nearby) before we finally went back to my place. We talked for a while about his upcoming move and his graduate program, and then the conversation drifted into talking about Wife.

Early on, I made a point of telling him that I had just been to visit Wife and Son 1, in line with his request a year ago. I even made a joke about how the time had gotten away from me until I realized he was on his way here and the year was almost over. Son 2 thanked me for following through on that request, and said it meant a lot to him that I had done it. He also added that in fact he had already known that's where I was, because Son 1 had texted him about the visit and described it by saying "There were no dead bodies."

But then he went on to say that Son 1 is very unhappy. Wife has—as I had just seen with my own eyes—completely taken over his space. The way Son 2 put it was, "He's paying for everything, and he just feels like he has to hide in his room the whole time he's home. And he goes into work pretty much every day of the week, just to get away. He's miserable." I said I completely understood. In fact, "I'm paying for it all and there's no place for me here" was pretty much exactly how I myself felt for years. This outcome is (one version of) what I was afraid of a year and a half ago, when I first heard that Wife would be moving in with him. But I didn't have anything useful to say, or any real help to offer.

Son 2 explained that after he finishes his graduate program, he expects to earn a pretty good salary. So his long-term idea is that maybe he and Son 1 will be able to pool their resources and rent a cheap apartment for her somewhere. I suggested that it would be best if they paid the landlord directly instead of passing the money through her, because she is so feckless and irresponsible with money. (See, e.g., the fountain pens and all that damned ink.) Son 2 emphatically agreed. He also wondered aloud what would happen if either of them paid off her credit cards, since she claims to have run up $20-30,000 in debt in recent times. Then he answered himself by saying that she would probably just run up more debt. He characterized her as a "bottomless pit of neediness." I agreed at a financial level, and also an emotional level. And I explained that when she and I first got together, I had believed that if only I could love her hard enough I could fix whatever was broken in her. But I was wrong. Son 2 understood everything I said, and added that one reason he makes sure to live so far away from all of us is that he is prioritizing his own mental wellness and sanity by limiting his in-person contact to brief holiday visits. He added that he does call Wife on the phone every couple of weeks, but always works hard to manage the call very carefully so that she doesn't spiral into despair or fury over some incidental event in her life. He also tries—very gingerly, to hear him describe it—to encourage her to see things from someone else's point of view. He remarked as a casual fact that of course Wife has no empathy for anyone else, and that he is trying to encourage her to build that empathy but can't tell whether he is having any success. Sometimes it feels to him like every conversation starts over again from zero. I described one conversation I had with Wife where I asked if she ever found other people's emotions contagious (It's the second of two conversations that I described here.) and she replied with genuine puzzlement at the idea.

What else did we discuss? I forget. We talked for a couple of hours, before changing the subject to plan dinner instead. Son 2 said something about getting my perspective on all this once a year, and then that was enough to last until the next year. But it sounds like his perspective is close to mine. Certainly he was not just responding to my prompts, because the things that he said unsolicited chimed with my experience too.

Image by Alain Audet from Pixabay

One more thing that came up was the relation between children and parents. Son 2 commented that a lot of people say they want to have children so that someone will look after them when they get old. He and his girlfriend are pretty well agreed (for now, at least) that neither one wants children, and so he says they have had to think about what that's going to mean for them in their turn. I told him I thought that attitude had it all backwards. I said that the fundamental duty involved in the parent-child relationship is always forward-looking: it is the duty of the parent to prepare the child for life as an independent adult. So if he or his brother ever had kids (and I admit that after seeing my relationship with Wife they might not!), I would believe that their first duty was to their kids and not to me. Now, having said that I admitted there is room to make the picture a little more complex. I explained that my mother is in her eighties now, and that I want to stay within driving distance so that I can be there to be a help for her. As for what's going to happen when I'm in my eighties, I said that's still far in the future. Maybe it will be convenient for one or the other of the boys to help me out with this and that. Maybe it won't. We'll figure it out when the time comes. But in any event I don't believe any kind of duty towards me is baked into the relationship from the beginning.

Son 2 said he thinks my firm conviction on this point is a minority opinion. Maybe he's right.

The rest of the visit was fine, but there's not a lot to report. I heard some more about his graduate program, and about what his girlfriend might like for Christmas. And he left early this morning. He'll be back—with her—in a couple of weeks.  

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* Just now I looked for an earlier post to link, as a reference to the clutter we used to live in back then, and I find the theme winds like a thread through everything I wrote even if very few posts are about that directly. But you might try this one, for example. Or this one. Or this one. Or, … well, you get the idea.

** Again, I looked for a post to link and came up short. There's one in particular that I remember writing, but searching has not turned it up; a post where Son 2 exclaimed something like "She always makes the worst friends and then gets into fights with them." Except that's probably not quite right. Anyway, I can't find it. But there are plenty of posts referencing Wife's poor social skills in general. Here's a short one.