R looks angry

After leaving the weekend retreat, Debbie and I came back to her home. I'll be visiting here for a couple of days before flying back to my own home.

As you no doubt recall, Debbie shares this house with her daughter Mattie, her son-in-law R (Mattie's husband), and her two grandsons. Debbie has her own little apartment in one wing, and the other four occupy the rest. Debbie has said she wishes she had space for her fiber-arts hobbies, and in fact her loom is in a big room downstairs. But she doesn't like to go down there to use it, because she doesn't like to intrude on "the family's" space. In many ways she feels confined to the two-rooms-plus-kitchen-and-bath that are allocated as "hers."

Last night we had dinner with the rest of the family. The boys were silly, as little boys often are, but remarkably well-behaved. Mostly I assume that's training, though a little bit might be that their grandmother's Friend-from-out-of-state was visiting (that's me). Mattie was pleasant and cordial—that is, she still felt cold and reserved, but to me she always feels cold. I don't know if anyone else perceives her the same way, and there's nobody I can ask.

But as dinner progressed, I began to get the impression that R was angry. Not about anything specific, but more as a way of being in the world. To be clear, R is often quiet and reserved. So it's not that he was unusually quiet over dinner. Nor was he visibly out of humor: I even managed to make a couple of jokes that coaxed a chuckle out of him. But there seems to be a set to his jaw that I don't remember seeing before, and a firmness to the gaze. You could chalk this up to maturity: despite his two children, despite owning a house, R was a young man when I got to know him, or youngish. I would guess that today he's somewhere around forty: time enough for the softness of youth to wear off, and to be replaced by muscles built of responsibility. Maybe what I am seeing is no more than that.

It is true that he has had disappointments already in life. He and Mattie were graduate students together, but she finished her Ph.D. while he did not finish his. She therefore has a teaching post, while he is working in business. They picked the town they live in based on Mattie's teaching assignment. Even his house—for which he is on the deed—is shared with his mother-in-law, and it was her inheritance that bought it. I don't know whether R keeps score, but he may feel disgruntled about the turns his life has taken.

Nor am I convinced that he is fully happy with his domestic life. It's just little glimpses that I've noticed in moments over the years, and I could be reading them all wrong. Heaven knows my own difficult life with Wife could have predisposed me to see troubles where there are none. But I feel like I might also be able to see trouble where it is well-hidden, because I certainly tried my best to hide my own troubles back in the day.

I know that Debbie wishes Mattie and R were more easy-going with the boys. It would be easy to attribute the same point of view to R, and to assume that Mattie is the only martinet in the family, but that accusation feels false to me. I think the strict parenting is as much his as hers, and may be one direction that he channels his anger at the world. So I have no guesses at what lies behind his anger. Strictly speaking, my whole diagnosis may be false, especially as it is based on no more than glimpses.

But R looks angry to me.