Catching up with Son2

I got a phone call this morning from Son2. It has been a while since we talked, and it was great to hear from him.

Most of his news was about how Wife is settling into her new digs. (See here, here, and here, for example.) And his summary answer was, Actually pretty well, all things considered.

Her new space is full enough to be homey, but empty enough to be kept clean. (Wife keeps asking if he can rent a trailer to collect the rest of her stuff, and he keeps declining to do so.) She has her sewing machine so she can make things, but none of the ($10,000 worth of) equipment she bought a few years ago to set up a home business that never went anywhere. She has set up new doctors (always a big job any time she moves). She no longer has two different car insurance policies that she is paying on. (Why two? He has no idea.) 

And Son2 has taught her how to use Google Maps.

That last point is huge. For all the 30 years of our marriage, Wife was helpless with maps. If she had to go somewhere unfamiliar, either I drove her there or I wrote out a page of instructions. The boys have mostly just driven her, especially as her driving has gotten worse. Years ago I bought her a GPS device for her car, though heaven only knows where it is today. But somehow Son2 has been patient enough to teach her how to read maps. Hallelujah.

He talked for a while about what it is like to communicate with her, and he says he has been testing different approaches scientifically to see what works. Sometimes it seems like extended A/B testing. For example, he asked me, Does it sometimes seem like she says something specifically to trigger you to yell at her, so that she can be a victim of your yelling?

Oh yes, I told him. That's an old pattern. Then I described the kind of argument I sketched out for you in this blog 18 years ago, in this post here.

He made affirmative noises and then said that he has tried various kinds of answers that don't engage with the fight. [At the same time I couldn't help but think of John Michael Greer's observation that many people don't want to be happpy, and you can tell because whenever they get into a happy situation they ruin it as fast as possible. So does Wife actually want to be all the time fighting?] She has accused him of trying to control her behavior by setting boundaries for himself. And of course he pointed out that this accusation can only make sense if you start from the assumption—as Wife does—that she is always perfectly passive and uniquely a victim. Whatever someone else does to her counts as aggresssion, and whatever she does—either in response or on her own initiative—is a baseline kind of activity that is utterly unremarkable.

One technique that he says he has learned is to distract her from venting about someone by praising her for something related instead. If she starts complaining about some eveil deed by her rotten insurance company, he might say, "I'm really impressed with how you've been following up on that issue so consistently. I know it's difficult, but it is really making a difference." Sometimes this succeeds in throwing her off her complaint, so that she's not sure what to say next.

There were other examples, but I don't remember them right now. I did tell him, more than once, that I am really impressed that he has started learning how to navigate these dynamics now, in his twenties. I think I was in my forties before I made much progress. (Hell, I was in my forties when I first started this blog!) Of course, he and his brother both had my failures to communicate with Wife as an example to measure against. And Son2 suggested that not only has he learned from my failures, but from Son1's as well. Studying failure scientifically in order to learn what might work better is definitely the philosopher's approach. So I'm glad to see it.