Uninvited parenting

NOTE: I wrote this as an email to Marie on November 28 -- Thanksgiving -- the date marked on the post. But in fact I am only adding it to the blog a couple of months later, January 19, 2020. I emailed this story to Marie because, unlike the year before, she was not able to get enough time off work to join me at my family's big Thanksgiving get-together. (She used up all her vacation time going to New Zealand with me this summer.)

Hey love!

We spent the day setting up for the meal, and making a potato-carrot dish, and some other things. [There follow three paragraphs about cooking, that I will skip.]

 

Also I have a problem with Stan, the son of Paul and Vicky. During the course of the evening he smashed one of Carole’s cute, decorative little plates for hors d’oeuvres; climbed up on top of the outdoor fireplace and pounded on the metal chimney; grabbed a glass of ice water off the table and shoved his hand inside to grab the ice cubes; and generally behaved himself like a Visigoth. I had hopes that he would at least sit at the kids’ table. But he told Paul that he wanted to sit at the other table and Paul should sit at the kid's table. And Paul accepted that. ( WTF?? Stan is ... maybe five? I forget, but around that.) So Stan sat at the adult table while Paul sat at the kids’ table. Vicky, thank God, took a seat at the adult table next to Stan. 

And then he was up and down at random during the meal, never asking to be excused but sliding off his chair when he felt bored and coming back when he felt like grabbing another bite. At one point he came back to the table with a huge basket on his head, one he had been wearing off and on all evening. (He said he was a knight with a helmet.) That was too much; there was too much risk that the basket was going to knock something else off the table. So I barked at him automatically, “No, Stan! You can’t wear the basket to the table. You can wear the basket or sit at the table, but not both.” Honestly I never thought about it. It was a spontaneous reflex. 

Brief silence. Vicky looks at Carole questioningly, as if to ask, “It’s your house — do you agree?” Carole said something ... I don’t even remember what. It didn’t amount to much. Then Vicky engaged in a long whispered discussion with Stan, presumably explaining something to him. And eventually he went away. 

What I would have hoped for was solidarity among adults: “Well if Hosea says so then do it, regardless of the merits.” (God knows I gave Wife that solidarity too often, when she demanded something crazy of the boys and I told them that if Mommy said so then they had to do it.) I didn’t get it. And of course without that backup, what it meant was that I was ordering around someone else’s kid with no authority to do so. 

I finished my food and sat quietly for a while. Stan got down. After a while Vicky got down. At that point I bussed my dishes. Then I walked over to Vicky and told her, “The last thing I ever want to do is to undermine your authority with Stan, so I was really out of line and I apologize for saying anything.” She said not to worry about it. She said she agreed that the basket didn’t belong on his head at the table, and not to worry because it was fine. I suppose it is just a sign of what a corrupt and horrible person I am that this didn’t reassure me much. It’s exactly what I would have expected from someone whose main concern was to avoid unpleasantness. (After all, if she had truly agreed why didn’t she say something?)  Unfortunately I also think that if you prioritize the avoidance of unpleasantness that more or less disqualifies you as a parent. 

I cannot help but reflect that the strongest criticism Wife ever had of my family was that (so she said) they too often tried to avoid unpleasantness. Another way to say this is that they are kind people, forever loyal to each other, generous in their assumptions about others, rational and liberal in all the best ways. And God knows that these are stellar virtues in dealing with adults. But they are vices in raising small children. 

I hate — truly this is not rhetoric — to think that I am agreeing with Wife ( of all people!) against my family ( of all people!). And in no other context besides this could that ever be possible or even imaginable. But. 

After I apologized to Vicky I stepped quietly  outside for a while. After quite a few minutes Vicky came out to ask if I was OK. I could not give a coherent explanation of what space my head was in, so I mumbled something incoherent. She repeated at greater length that it was all fine and I shouldn’t worry about it. I said I would come in again after I cleared my head. And after some minutes more I finally came back in. 

I never meant to write a complete account of the whole evening. So I haven’t and I won’t. I came back in, got some more wine, then after a while got some pie, and sat somewhere away from Stan. After a longer while, Paul and Vicky left, taking with them Stan and their two-year-old daughter. The rest of us sat around chatting aimlessly. The two other kids (sons of my other cousins) wrestled vigorously and interminably on the floor. Jenny [mother of one] cautioned them a couple of times; so did Fred [father of the other]. And for all the energy they were exerting, neither one ever behaved like anything less than a(n age-appropriate) gentleman. So it’s not that I’ve just become a Grumpy Old Man who has forgotten what it is like to be a kid. Those two were delightful. It’s just Stan who was a savage. 

Jenny and I traded stories about raising sons. She talked about someone she had met who had two daughters (both perfectly behaved) and said she had wondered, “Honestly if you’ve only had girls can you even call yourself a mother?” 😊 I told her that while naturally my data sample has been very small, I have always considered her son to have exquisite manners for his age. She rolled her eyes and said there were a few exceptions; but then she stopped being sarcastic and said she understood what I meant, and thanked me for it. 

At this point I’ve had yet more to drink, and it’s quite late. Everyone has gone home except those (like me) who are staying here in this house for the night. And I still wonder: Am I overreacting? Or is it better if I skip venues where Stan is going to be present? Unfortunately that means big family gatherings like this one, and I don’t see my extended family on any other occasions.

I don’t expect you to answer this question, so don’t bother trying. But I am disturbed.

I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving.

Never forget that I love you ever.

Your Hosea

When is it abuse?

Marie told me where to find some of the Harry Potter fan-fiction she has written, and I've been reading it. She writes well. The characters are sensitively drawn, they sound right, and her plots take the characters in interesting directions without violating what is "known" about them from the writings of J. K. Rowling herself. (The seven Potter books are described collectively as "the Canon".)

Sometimes "interesting" is a pallid understatement. For example, she raises the question whether it is possible to characterize James Potter (Harry's dad) as an abusive husband and Lily Potter as a battered wife, without violating anything about them that is known from the Canon. Then she writes a story which does exactly that; and in her comments on the finished narrative, she adds that it was disturbingly easy. I get the sense from her remarks that she thinks the "real James Potter" (if we can speak of such a person) probably was an abusive husband, even if Rowling claims in interviews that she thinks he's a great guy.

I was thinking about this story while out walking last night, and suddenly I found myself deep in an imagined conversation with Marie about my marriage ... an imagined conversation in which I was trying to defend myself against the charge that I systematically abused Wife, that I was (in fact) just as obvious an abuser as James Potter. It was not a pleasant conversation to be in.

(As an aside, ... am I the only one who does this? You'd think that if I were going to fantasize a conversation with somebody I hadn't seen in twenty-four years, I'd make it something that flattered my own ego. You'd think I would pretend that she had missed me all those years -- her plain remarks to the contrary notwithstanding. Or maybe I'd make a sexual fantasy out of it and then come home to masturbate. But no, I imagined an accusation -- one in which my explanations were peremptorily cut off as transparent excuses just like the ones all other abusive husbands use. "It wasn't my fault. She made me do it. Besides, I never hit her." It was really unsettling.)

In abbreviated form, the accusation was that a lot of the things I did to Wife were subtly abusive.

• I paid all the bills, which sounds fine until we add that I went over every expense (e.g., every credit card) line by line and asked her to justify each one. I fought with her over any expense I disagreed with. And at one point I took her wallet away, with all her credit cards, so that she could not buy anything.
   
• I asked how she spent her time. Where did she go? Who was she with? When she told me things that sounded like lies or didn't add up, I would cross-check the details. If I thought she was lying I would confront her and demand the truth.
   
• At night after she went to bed, I read her e-mails and her text messages without her knowledge or permission. Most of the time I did not have her password and therefore had to hunt around in the guts of our home computer until I found how to get what I wanted. (But I never installed a key-logging program.) I made copies of the messages that mattered to me, so I could retrieve them later.
   
• I almost never hit her. I remember that there were a couple of times that were line calls, and they were long enough ago that I don't actually remember the details of what happened. Therefore if I were asked in a court of law today whether I remember ever hitting her, I could honestly answer No under oath; if I were asked simply whether I ever hit her -- leaving out the qualifier about what I remember -- I couldn't honestly be certain.

Was this spousal abuse? Taken by themselves, these behaviors sound pretty bad. At best they mean treating a grown woman like a child, which is demeaning even if we talk about isolated cases. (And in truth I never treated either of our children this poorly.) To expect a grown woman, an educated professional with a master's degree from a great university, to put up with this treatment on a regular basis -- as a pattern, as a way of life -- sounds worse than demeaning. It sounds abusive. And this is how we lived, for years.

When I finally got a chance to defend myself (in this imagined conversation), my defense was that Wife was crazy.

This provoked another outburst from the imagined Marie. Of course! It was all the woman's fault! Isn't that what every abusive husband says? "My wife was crazy." Isn't that just like the lecherous husband in the 1950's telling his secretary "My wife doesn't understand me" just before he fucks her on the long table in the board room, after hours? Of course your wife was crazy! You can explain and excuse anything like that!

No. Really, she was crazy. And it was scary. If you can't believe me, that means you've never lived with somebody so crazy -- which is a good thing, I guess, except it means you have no bloody clue what I'm talking about.

• Take the bills, for example. I didn't want to have to pay them all. It was a pain in the ass, and for the first couple years of our marriage she paid them all. I was content to let her take charge of this. That lasted until one day we started bouncing checks, because when she paid the phone bill (we owed some $35 that month) she wrote a check for over $800. I accused the bank of making a mistake, and they produced the physical check itself, as proof. Wife could not account for what had happened. Where did that three-digit number starting with an "8" come from? It wasn't our account number, it wasn't a transposition of any of the digits in the real bill, it wasn't the amount we owed on any other bill she paid that day. The number just appeared out of the blue. That was the last time I let her pay our bills. I figured if this kind of thing could happen with no warning and no explanation, the only way to protect against it was for me to pay all the bills. If we had not been married -- if we had had separate checking accounts and separate credit ratings -- I would have let her continue to do as she pleased. But not with my money and my credit.
• I went over every expense because she bought things that made no sense.
• One night after I had gone to bed she stayed up late on e-Bay and bid on $700 worth of blue jeans because the boys needed some new jeans. Why so many? She figured she'd be outbid on some of them. And she was, so the final bill was only a little over $400. That's a lot of used blue jeans. They boys outgrew them before they could outwear so many.
• When we sold the house, we discovered boxes and boxes of things she had bought that we had to put straight into the trash, or give to charity. We had never opened them or used them ... but we owned them, because she got an idea one day and decided we "just had to have" something we never had any use for.
• There are a lot more stories in this vein -- a lot more! -- but I'm not going to tell them because it will just make me angry, even these many years later.
• I took away her wallet because ... well, I've already told you that story.
• I asked her where she went and what she did because she slept around so much and then lied about it. The sleeping around bugged me. The lying made me crazy. I even asked her, "If you are sleeping around just say so -- it's better than lying." But she wouldn't. I spent the first year of this blog complaining about this topic, so maybe I don't have to go into a lot more detail now.
• I read her e-mails and her text messages because I was genuinely afraid of what she might do online.
• When she got involved with Boyfriend 5 -- who, you will recall, never actually existed -- early on she texted him her social security number and her birthdate and her mother's maiden name, all to prove that she "trusted" him because he was "afraid" that she didn't.
• At another point she was all set to respond to an e-mail from somebody in Nigeria asking for her help because his little girl had cancer. "What?" I exploded. "Haven't you heard that this is the most common Internet scam in the world these days?" She looked at me in dead earnest and said, "But Hosea, what if there really is a little girl in Nigeria dying of cancer? Isn't it my job to help her any way I can?" I finally dissuaded her, but it wasn't easy.
• Then there was the time she was going to steal the children and fly internationally to go meet Boyfriend 5 and live there forever with him. I hid the children's passports so she couldn't take them; but I am convinced that -- had I not known to do so -- she would have gone. So there would have been no Boyfriend 5 abroad to meet her, and she would have taken the children to a foreign country with no money and no provisions made in advance (all because she expected a reception she couldn't get). If they ever got back alive I could have had her arrested and thrown in jail (I think), but it would have been a hell of a risk to run. Fortunately she couldn't take the first step, because she couldn't even get tickets without their passports. Good thing I read her e-mail that night!
• And as for hitting her ... all I can say is, you try living with her day and night for thirty years, and tell me if you never hit her! I'll bet my track record is better than yours, when all is said and done.

After all this my summary was that my actions didn't constitute classic abuse because I didn't want to exercise power over her but did it only for self-defense: now that we live in different places and have different bank accounts, I don't care any more what she does. On the other hand, I added, the evidence also shows that if I feel threatened I am capable of doing almost anything to defend myself.

In my fantasized conversation, Marie ended up unsure: unsure whether I abused Wife, and unsure whether she wanted to be my friend. After all, why would she be friends with a confessed wife-abuser? Again, since it was my fantasy you'd think I could have made it all work out so that she came round to my way of thinking at the end. But "unsure" was absolutely the best outcome I could get.

Maybe I just need to learn how to fantasize better. This particular fantasy was really depressing.

    

Why so upset?

Last night I got a text from Wife that she had gotten a call from Father that our storage unit was threatening to impound our stuff for non-payment of rent.  I’d written the check and mailed it a month ago, so this made no sense; but I called my dad and he read me a card that said exactly that.  This was crazy, so I called the storage unit from my hotel room (I was still in Weather City at the time), got their answering machine, and practically shouted into the phone.  Then I went back to packing, but rehearsed angry speeches to myself for at least an hour afterwards.

Why?  Specifically, why was I so upset?  It’s not like there was anything I could do about it till today anyway.  And I’m flying home today, so in reality it’s not like I can do anything until I get home: I plainly can’t call to yell at them while I’m on the airplane.  And why in fact do I even want to yell at them?  I logged into my bank account on-line, and the check hasn’t been cashed, so it’s not like they mistakenly applied it to somebody else.  But the checks on either side of it – all written and mailed the same day – have been cashed, so it’s not like the Post Office went on strike.  And no business in the world would refuse to cash a check on purpose just to cause a problem for me personally, so it has to be some kind of mistake.  Why was I so upset?

Partly I can still get triggered when Wife accuses me of something: “You said you already paid them through the end of this month! [As if I hadn’t.]  And now if they aren’t paid by July 3 they’ll block our access to the unit and I’ll lose all my things! [As if I hadn’t already told her I was going to empty it this coming weekend.]”  The feeling that I am being accused of negligence or lying hits me somewhere very sensitive and I respond with anger; when the accusation comes from Wife, to whom I am already allergic, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard.

Partly it’s that I felt blindsided.  I really had written the damned check a month ago.  And why was this news coming to me from my parents, for God’s sake?  I felt blindsided, or trapped somehow in a net that made no sense at all.  So I felt panic anf this came out – again – as anger.

I suspect those two factors are the reason: feeling accused and feeling blindsided, feeling trapped in a situation that makes no sense and with no warning.  It’s better today.  I’m embarrassed at having lost it last night, at having shouted at the storage unit’s answering machine.  I’ll drive over there when I get home, and try to straighten it out.

Meanwhile, I guess the moral is that a year of meditation doesn’t stop me from getting angry, nor from taking myself by surprise when I do.

Blast from the past -- Back in 1987

Posting stories from the past got me thinking about one that's really old, but that may date from the first time I ever wrote down any account of my troubled marriage with Wife.  So I rummaged around a bit and dug out the journal that I started keeping back then ... and kept up for three weeks before abandoning it.  (sigh)  Still, there's a lot in there reflecting about me and my marriage, about how things went and why I reacted in a certain way.  I don't know how much of this I'll end up posting, but at any rate some of it ....
__________

Hosea's log, star date October 23, 1987.
Location: a city we haven't lived in for a quarter century now.  The time is a full twenty years before I started this blog.  Dear God but that's a long stretch of time ....
What follows is what I wrote then, with minor edits for readability, etc.  Every so often I intrude editorial comments in a different type face, between square brackets. 

I tried to hit Wife last night.  We tussled for a minute and then I broke off and went back into the bedroom.  The issue was seemingly immaterial, but managed to be more frustrating than I could handle ... apparently.  Wife's friend Laguna was working late, at a company a few blocks away from here; and Wife was going to take her some of our leftovers to microwave for dinner.  A simple question: should she take some of this or some of that?  I didn't much care which, but she kept pursuing the question; worse, each time she said or asked something, I thought she was suggesting the other option from the one she had suggested a minute before.  I suppose I was involved at all because I was in the kitchen at the time and she wanted me to put something on a plastic plate and wrap it up.  But I got frustrated enough with her rapid-fire changes of tack that I left the kitchen, went to sit down, kibbitzed briefly, and let her do it.  A lot of our decisions seem to go like this.  I don't even remember -- after she had that mostly taken care of -- what she said that made me so mad.  I think she said something about not understanding why I was making such a big deal over something so tiny.  My impression was precisely the opposite -- that she was the one making it difficult by constantly sending mixed signals about what she wanted to do.  [Let me break in from today to point out what should be obvious -- viz., that another problem is I was trying to read her mind instead of just asking her, "I dunno Babe, what do you want?"]  As usual the real problem was that we weren't understanding each other; but this particular accusation -- that the problem was my doing -- infuriated me.  It's similar to the last time I tried to hit her, when we were trying to go somewhere and I kept waiting for her before we could, and she later bitched about our late start and about her having to wait for me.  Of course we were waiting for each other.  I wouldn't have gotten so angry that time either, except that (a) this is another longstanding problem, and (b) I was accused of being -- all by myself -- the party at fault.  This feeling, compounded with the sense that this was part of an endless cycle (since it has happened so many times between us) resulted in a combination of pain and despair that distilled briefly into murderous fury.  I say this with only minimal exaggeration: for a brief moment -- both times -- I really wanted to kill her.

[It goes on for several more paragraphs, as I talk about my depression, about my fanatical need to be clearly understood (I hope I've eased up a little on that in the interim), and so on.  Several days later I pick up the story, after Wife and I made time to "talk about the incident."  I relate that she said I must have a lot of repressed, pent-up anger in me towards her, to be able to explode like that. Mulling this, I write ...]

It is true that I can get awfully angry at her, and that in many ways she is quite a burden.  The simple fact that my time at home is not my own is painful enough for someone like me who cherishes privacy and solitude.  I would happily do less housework and fix less elaborate and less regular meals, and so forth, to have time to read or think or write or enjoy the silence.  But if Wife is home too there is none of that -- I feel that I should be busy doing something domestic, or else I will hear later about the problems when it is not done.

Then there are the ways in which she is dependent on me.  Weekdays I fix three meals a day.  She says that she prefers homemade lunches to school lunches [in those days, Wife was a schoolteacher], but if I don't have time to make her a lunch she certainly won't do it.  In fact she lies abed late enough that if I didn't make breakfast and iron her clothes I doubt she would ever get to work on time -- or at any rate fed and pressed.  If she needs to go somewhere new, I have to write out directions for her and go over them as with a child -- she found her way around well enough when job hunting the last time we were apart, but if she can palm the job off on me so much the better.  [The invention of the GPS was one of the high points of our marriage. No joke.]  Ditto with finding her keys when they get lost.  Ditto with balancing the bank statement.  I see why her mother drags her feet about sewing for Wife -- she wants Wife to learn to do it herself.  But she won't learn while her mother is alive, if ever: this I can guarantee.

Then there are the things she does that are irritating in themselves, like leaving her clothes and shoes strewn about the house.  Like preaching doom to herself so convincingly that she concludes nothing can improve her situation ... and then telling me at great length all about how hopeless everything is, in tones that suggest she wants my advice on how -- miraculously -- to make everything all better.  Like the sheer complexity and busy-ness that attends life with Wife: the constant scheduling around doctor's appointments, the train of friends calling or showing up, the fact that into every block of free time she schedules three or four mutually conflicting projects and then gets upset when she is perpetually behind....  It's all very draining, which is why it would be such a relief if she did leave me.  [Wife always said she would leave me if I ever struck her, so part of the "talk" a couple days before was about whether my almost striking her "counted" or not.] 

[Then the next day I picked it up again right where I left off, with ...]

On the other hand, I would also be crushed by it.  First of course would be the recurrence of all the loneliness and depression that I felt as a bachelor, the sense of permanent exclusion from the world of social relationships....  The cold, abandoned loneliness that I used to feel so often is not something I have felt since meeting Wife and it would surely return.  Plus there is enormous comfort in living with someone.  I need solitude too, but to be totally cut off from others is vertiginous and disorienting, and life too easily loses its beauty or meaning....  In a real sense, Wife is my hearth.  It is her presence that makes my dwelling a Home, ... that gives the place warmth and light.  Then there is sex .... [And so it goes, on and on, at very great length.]      

Violent, or just an asshole

Not a good evening. The kind of evening that makes me look like a real shit, in fact. Probably fairly.

I just wrote D that, in effect, I wouldn't be writing her tonight. (I write her most nights, at this point.) I didn't say why, except that it wasn't a good evening. She'll worry, but I don't want to attach this narrative -- dumb as it is -- to my real name. I probably wouldn't write it here, either, except I figure I had better record the facts somewhere in case Wife comes along later to accuse me of something a lot worse.

It's not even dramatic. Just stupid.

It's the first day back at school after the Winter Break. As usual, the boys come to my office after school. I'm in meetings till late, and then I have e-mail to mop up for a while. The boys are both in high spirits, which somehow makes them both very loud. All the way home, they are making the small car echo, singing and chanting highly repetitive nonsense phrases, or words out of context with no meaning. I don't do well with repetitive noises, and ask them to stop. Then I start insisting that they stop. Again. And again. And louder. Finally I shout, and they stop ... until, a couple of minutes later, Son 1 utters one of the words they were riffing on -- "moose" of all things -- in a low, quiet, monotone. He isn't even making an obnoxious noise at that point, but the semantic repetition was just too much. We are only a couple of blocks from home at that point, so I stop the car and make him get out and walk the rest of the way. (In fact, he beats us home by a few seconds.) Not that it accomplishes anything, but I am hoping to make a point.

Wife is fixing dinner, so she and I talk about the day while she finishes up in the kitchen. Then we all sit down to eat, and it begins again. Wife and I try to maintain the veneer of a civilized conversation during the meal, meaning a conversation that includes the boys as well. But the boys keep up the banter, the echoing repetition, the annoying voices, the hysterical laughter ... all this stuff that was so getting on my nerves in the car. They are having a blast. The meal goes on. The meal winds down. The boys are still riffing energetically off of each other, having a wonderful time. I can even tell it is fun. If it weren't making my whole nervous system go TILT! I would probably want to join the game. But as it is, it is making me absolutely crazy.

Finally I send them both away from the table. I explain, somewhat peevishly, that I just can't take any more of the noise or the echoing repetition. They won't go. I have to raise my voice and insist: "Get down from the table, bus your dishes, and go wash up! Enough already!"

Fine. They get down, bus their dishes, and head off to the bathroom to wash up. I am holding my head and trying to maintain. Then suddenly Son 1 comes bouncing back into the room, feet together and hands together, being a kangaroo. I lose it. I chase him back into the bathroom. (He is squealing with laughter all the way.) I put my foot in the door before he can shut me out. And then I make a fist and start pounding him on his head and his back, as he sits down on the toilet and curls up to protect himself. In all, I probably hit him four or five times, no more than six. And I am pulling each blow -- I can guarantee on oath that they might cause pain but there is no way that any of them can possibly do any lasting damage. But still, my hand is a fist and they are blows.

A hundred years ago, nobody would have noticed, of course. But times have changed.

I probably don't have to add that the noise stops, almost instantly. The boys wash up, brush their teeth, all that sort of thing. A few minutes later, Son 2 comes out of the bathroom and just stands there, staring at me. Finally I ask, "What? I didn't hurt him." He says simply, "You hit Son 1." I reply, "But I didn't hurt him!" Son 2 walks away.

I go talk to Son 1, who is sitting on his bed reading. I ask him, "Are you wounded?"

"It hurts."

"But are you wounded?"

"No, I guess not."

"Can you tell your brother that?"

A few minutes later I go back in. Son 1 is still sitting on his bed, reading. I say, "Look, I'm sorry I hit you. I don't want to do that, and I don't want us to get to the point where we can only communicate by hitting each other."

Silence.

"Really, I'm sorry."

Son 1 grunts.

"But can you please do me a favor?"

"What?"

"I need some way other than hitting you, to let you know when I have really had enough and I can't take any more. Right now, I don't know how to do that. I don't have a good method. But I need some way to communicate that to you, so that next time I don't hit you again. Can you please think about it, and tell me something I can use? Something that will work for you, so you understand that I really can't cope with it any more? You don't need to tell me right now, but please tell me something. I need something I can use. Please."

Son 1 grunts again. And I leave his room.

Over the next 15 to 30 minutes, everybody else in the house goes to bed. Son 2 finishes his shower. Son 1 brushes his teeth. Wife decides that she is really exhausted and has to turn in early. Almost nobody speaks to me, nor I to them. Honestly, I am too ashamed of myself.

I also figure that this is the kind of event that will transmute into one of Wife's amazing stories about what a brute I am, and how I am always violently abusing the children, and how they live in constant terror of me. It could happen. Hell, it will happen. It is only a matter of time, and not too much time at that. Just you wait.

Oh well, what's the worst that can happen? I guess the worst possible case is that the authorities take away my children forever and lock me up somewhere as a menace to society; and at that point, at the very least, my life will be a lot simpler. So there is a silver lining to even the darkest cloud. Oh yes, and if we are constructing a worst case, then let's assume also that Wife divorces me and takes everything (because I am such a brute), and that D never wants to see me again. Hell, why not? If I'm imagining a worst case, why not go for broke? But then think of all the things I'd never have to worry about getting done. If you look at it right, the inevitable upcoming catastrophe has its positive side.

Oh, and let's also assume that all of you get disgusted enough nobody wants to read anything more that I have to write. That's always possible too, while I'm at it.

I suppose nothing is truly "inevitable." But some days it feels like it. So, how has your day been?