"You knew what I was ...."

I've spent the day mulling and fretting over what I saw when I visited Son 1 and Wife yesterday, and what I heard from Son 2 afterwards. I'm sad that Son 1 is so unhappy now that Wife is living with him. At the same time, I'm kind of amazed by Wife.

Absolutely unreflective—a wooden
mirror as an art installation!

Has there ever, in the history of Man, been anyone else so absolutely unreflective? It seems like she has learned nothing—nothing!—from all her years of troubles relating to others. She is still behaving exactly the way she did back when she and I lived together: spending money recklessly, without any thought for the future (or even the present!), and dominating any space she lives in because she has no awareness that anyone else exists or that anyone else's priorities might be different from hers. 

No awareness. 

None.

Total oblivion when it comes to Other People or The Rest of the World.

How is this even possible? Surely she has suffered enough from her collisions with Others! Surely Others have caused enough pain in her life, as they have systematically obstructed her access to everything she ever wanted in life! (Just ask her.) Confronted with a life like that, wouldn't anyone—wouldn't you—try to think through their [your] own contribution to what happened? You don't even have to care about other people to do this! Even if your motivations are purely Machiavellian, even if your only goal were to learn how to manipulate others better than you do today, surely it's obvious that one of the things to review should be the question, "When I do A, what happens? When I do B, what happens? OK, now, what do I have to do differently in order to motivate people to do what I want out of them?"

You'd think that, but then my Father never figured it out either. To the end of his days he believed that his third-grade teacher was consciously malicious and hated him in particular, wanted to cause pain to him in particular. It never occurred to him that she might have been overworked, or underpaid, or hungover, or facing a bad situation at home, or anything else that would have meant she never even noticed him at all but merely troubled him by accident, as an unforeseen by-product of whatever else she was doing that day.

In other words, maybe it's "obvious" that you should react self-reflectively, but not to Wife. I want desperately to believe that people can learn to be better, but maybe (at least when it comes to fundamental, core behaviors) we simply are who we are. Maybe, in the end, Wife is like the snake (or sometimes scorpion) in the story.

"You knew what I was when you picked me up."

Maybe that's really the message to Son 1, as well, though it seems a hard-hearted thing to say.