Visiting Son1 and Dorcas

Yesterday morning, I visited Son1 in his apartment, now almost two weeks after Wife vacated it.

Partly I was motivated by morbid curiosity: what did the place look like? Partly I was motivated by an acquisitive itch: did she leave behind anything I wanted? And partly I just wanted to be sociable. Normally I don't see my kids very often.

The place looked more jumbled than usual, but a lot less crowded. Most of the furniture was gone out of the living room, and all the nice bookcases. The living room rug was still there, and I know that came from somebody in Wife's family because at one point (back when we all still lived together in a house) one of her nephews tried to extort it out of her. Lovely family. Son1 remarked that there is literally no place in Wife's new digs where it will fit. 

Of course we talked about Wife, and how she reacted to the move. (I notice in passing that half the time Son1 refers to her by her name, instead of saying "Mom." He still says "Mom" once in a while, but the change is striking.) Son1 said that he thinks part of the long-term therapy which she needs is to have all her useless, ancestral junk stripped from her, so that she has to reconstruct her life without it. I didn't say anything specific, but I was thinking that this was exactly what D and I thought way back during the Housecleaning From Hell in December 2008 and January 2009, that I've described as "Second date." (The account stretches from here to here, but you can pick this one as a good solid example of our thinking.)

We talked about Wife's drinking. He thinks she has accepted the designation of "alcoholic" because it gives her an excuse: if she's an alcoholic, then nobody can expect any better of her. I remember how bitterly she hated her own father's alcoholism, and how long she denied that her mother had the same problem because she didn't want it to be both of them. If she's now decided simply to accept the same diagnosis herself, that's a huge change. Of course it has been decades. (Her mother died in 1994. I think her father died in 1978.)

I don't remember all the other things we discussed. For a while we talked about trivia like our respective work, or unusual air travel.

In the end, I did go and look at the wreckage left in what had been Wife's room. One bookcase was still there, with a few books randomly strewn across it. There were a few (the minority) that looked interesting and weren't garbage; Son1 said I could take them. Apparently the criterion for which books to take was "What fits in the truck?" because Wife had done no packing or sorting before Son2 arrived to help load the truck.

Among the contents of the shelf, I found notebooks that Wife had kept. I didn't take them, though now I wonder if I should have. They seemed to be laid out according to one or another psychological theory for dealing with instrusive thoughts, and the entries were dated. This one dated back to 1993. That one dated to 2011. (The layouts were different from one to the other, I should add ... probably she was working with different therapists during those years.)

What I found most remarkable was the amount of guilt that I saw expressed in her notes. When writing in her own journals, she could freely admit that her infidelities caused me pain, and that her crazy overspending caused me distress. She could admit that they were wrong. But then those admissions triggered automatic thoughts of total worthlessness that made her mind spiral out of control. Apparently she was trying to learn ways to stop the automatic spiralling.

But I guess she never did. At any rate, she never got to a point where she could admit to me that she knew what she had done, and that she knew it had hurt me, and that she was sorry. If I were in the room, she'd fight me.

Those journals were a remarkable discovery. I still don't really know how to feel about them. And I wonder if I should have taken them, or if it is better to let them be swept away with the juink?

           

Talking with the boys

Before this summer started, I began collecting a list of things I wanted to discuss with Son 1 and Son 2.  Some of them are practical things about shipping Son 1 off to college in a couple months.  But there were a few other things on my mind too, of a more personal nature.

I addressed the first couple after we had unloaded a lot of their stuff at Wife's place and as we were driving back to mine:

Have I ever explained to you why I live in such a small place? and Have I ever explained to you why I don't have an Internet connection in my apartment?

Of course I have explained both of these things to you, my long-suffering readers.  The first one was a topic in this post, and the second in this one.  But they answered (as I suspected they might) that I had never really explained any of it to them.

So I tried to, although I was improvising words as I drove and not typing them out in paragraphs.  And when I had finished, Son 2 said, "So basically you're saying that you want to be a hippie in the woods, living off the land?"

I clarified that I don't have the practical skills to live off the land, and don't much want to acquire them or to have to do that much work.  But as far as the ideal of living simply goes, ... well, yeah, I think that has a lot to be said for it.  He lobbed back, "So you're still basically trying to be a hippie, then."  Son 2 was born in 1998.  I'm not completely sure he knows what a hippie is.  But I let it go.  Instead I joked back, "What was your first clue?"

"Well I don't know.  You didn't use to be like this!"

"That's because I didn't have much choice.  I'd decide that No, I didn't want to buy this or that, and then I'd come home from work and find that somehow we had bought it anyway!"  Traditionally I have tried not to bad-mouth Wife in front of the boys, but they know we used to fight over money a lot, so I didn't think this would shock them.  Anyway, then the conversation drifted off elsewhere.

Then last night we were talking about my dad -- in particular the boys were discussing some of the things they find particularly difficult about him -- and so I ventured one version of another question, one that my current counselor had proposed:

You know, they don't give you a manual when you become a parent [they interrupt with cries of "That's not fair!"] and so a lot of the time I'm winging it. And there are a lot of things I never ask ["Thank you! It's really appreciated!"] because my own dad can be so intrusive. But maybe I overcompensate the other direction. Anyway, I just wondered -- and you can think about this and tell me later if you think of something -- is there something I should be doing that I'm not? Or that I shouldn't be doing, that I am? Because if yes, ... can you let me know what?

All they said last night was "Naaah, Dad, you're doing fine" before they changed the subject ... possibly because I bet I came across as kind of awkward asking it.  I'm not sure if I really said what I wanted to say.  But I should probably wait just a bit before coming back to it for a repeat ....

Questionnaire 3

This one's easy.

Does a dark cloud of despair or a creeping depression sometimes seem to appear from nowhere to weigh you down?

No.

Used to, though.  Like clockwork every spring.  And other times, sometimes out of nowhere.  But it hasn't for years and years ... I don't know how many years.  I'm not even sure I recognized the transition when it happened, or as it was happening.

For a long time I thought I owed the change to finally growing up, so that I had some kind of accomplishments to lean on, something of substance: marriage, job, car, house, kids.  Sex.  Income.  Authority.  Respect.  Something more solid and nourishing than the non-nutritive activities that had substituted for achievement for so long in my life: brilliance, scholarship, good grades ... all shiny and showy, but thin and easy and pretty trivial stuff in the long run.

Then later it occurred to me that maybe I owe the change to wellbutrin.  If that's it, I'm very grateful and the stuff must really work.

It would help if I could figure out when it really started to change, so I could check if I had started taking wellbutrin by then.  Of course, maybe it's both ... and, rather than either ... or.

Questionnaire 2

Maybe I should come back to this questionnaire Debbie asked me to review, from her Al-Anon book, or I'll never get past the first question.  So here's a shot at the second one:

Do you feel uncomfortable or draw a blank when asked what it is you really want?

It used to be the answer was Yes in all sorts of venues.  I did not have the confidence to believe that I deserved to want what I wanted, so it was easier not to know what it was and to go along with whatever anybody else wanted to do instead.

It's less true now – in many respects a lot less true.  The only reason I don't just flat out say No is that I'm still lousy at career planning.  But I have come to believe (or at least I tell myself) that this is because my career isn't as important to me as ... well, as what?  As daily life?  What's that?  What does it mean to say that my career isn't all that important to me, now that I'm no longer married (except legally), nor in a romantic relationship, nor do I have children living at home (most of the time)?  If my career isn't important, just what the hell is?

Hmmm.  OK, so maybe I still have some issues to work out on this front.  But I'm better than I used to be.

I remember exactly how I started getting better, too.  I was working a job almost twenty years ago – the same company where I met Debbie, but a couple years later.  I had been promoted into my first managerial job, and it was time for annual reviews.  I had no idea what I wanted to say.  Now this company had a program that I liked very much, where new managers would be matched up with some existing manager as a mentor.  So I went to my mentor and tried to explain my problem.  I said that I knew what my people were actually doing, and I knew what I would have done if I held each of those jobs, but I didn't know what it was really fair to ask them to do and so I didn't know where the lines were.  What were the standards?

She was about my age but in a totally different department (engineering), and she said, "I don't know what you mean.  I don't have any trouble knowing what I want software engineers to do."

And it hit me.  All my hesitation about evaluating these people came from back when I was in school, when my grades were always so much better than everybody else's that I forced myself to refuse to compare other people to me.  I would find something nice to say about Fred or Sam or Max and then my evaluation would stop.  I would never let myself get anywhere near saying, "Of course he's dull as ditch water," because I told myself that it just wasn't fair to use myself as a standard.  It was towering arrogance disguised as cringing humility.

The thing is that this attitude makes no sense in the workplace.  First, I wasn't being asked to evaluate my employees on their merits as human beings.  The question was how well they met the requirements of the job.  And that's the second point: it's not a popularity contest or a contest of grades ... because there is an objective standard.  Each job requires that the person holding it actually do something.  So the process of writing employee reviews really requires two steps: (1) figure out exactly what the job requires – in other words, what size are the gears on this cog and which other cogs is it supposed to connect with? and then (2) measure how closely the employee's performance meets those requirements.  If I was as god-damned smart as I always pretended, I should have no problem doing this.

I sweated over those reviews.  I spent more time on them than I ever have on any employee reviews since then.  But I was satisfied with the results.  One woman objected, "Yeah, everything you say is true but are you really gonna say those things in my permanent record?"  (Yes I was.)  Another came back with a two-page, single-spaced rebuttal to my claim that people found it hard to work with her – which was exactly what I had heard from several people independently.  (She insisted that everyone loved her at her last company so they must love her here too.)  But because I had spent the time to think it through, I could answer her.  And the whole exercise gave me a tremendous confidence-boost.  After that, in time after time when I normally would have fallen back into saying I didn't know what I wanted, I asked myself instead, "Really?"  And if I waited just a minute, quietly, and listened to myself – if I reminded myself that there is actually nothing wrong with knowing what you want – I found that indeed I did have a preference and indeed I did really know what it was.  All I had to do is listen for it.

Maybe that's the problem I have with career-planning.  Whenever I ask myself what I really want out of a job, all I can hear is "I want a nap."  As I say, there's probably still some work to do there.  But I've gotten better.

Questionnaire 1

Oh, Debbie sent me a book about Al-Anon, which has a two-page list of intake questions.  She asked me to think about the questions seriously: then if they mostly apply, maybe I should join an Al-Anon group; if not, maybe not.  I told her I would think them through seriously.

There are twenty questions in all.  So whenever I don't really know what to write about, I'll take the next one in line and tackle it.  Here's the first:  

When difficulties occur, do you need someone to blame, even if it is yourself?

No.  Sometimes shit just happens.  I don't remember how I would have answered that question thirty years ago.  But after thirty years of having to pull Wife down off her high horse when she started blaming every Tom, Dick, and especially Harry for whatever bad luck she was having just then, I have certainly been cured of any tendency I might ever hypothetically have had in that direction.  That one's easy.    

None of the above

After all that cogitation, my counselor and I didn't discuss any of the things I thought we would.  She asked how my month had gone.  I told her that I'd been writing as if in a journal every day this month (or almost).  I mentioned that I had thought about some of the issues related to Debbie, but that I had also come to the conclusion that yes, right now is not the time for me to be involved with someone romantically.  Then I started talking about the boys, and about how Son 1 is in the last stages of choosing a college to attend ... and we spent the bulk of the session talking about my relationship with them.

She asked if the boys know I love them and am there for them.  I said I'm sure they know I love them and I hope they know I'm there for them ... but there are certain questions I would never expect them to ask.  Relationship questions, for example.  Really? she asked.  Why not?  The sarcastic answer would be "Because obviously you've done such a piss-poor job in your relationship with Wife!"  But what I said was that I just kind of assumed they wouldn't want to ask those questions because I would never have wanted to ask my own father ... and that's largely because he pries so pruriently and incessantly that I had to build a wall of privacy to have any space of my own at all.

Before we finished, my counselor suggested one thing.  She said, You can always admit to your boys that you are still learning the job of father; and so you can always ask them, "Twenty years from now when you are looking back at today, is there anything you are going to wish I had done that I'm not doing? Or that you're going to wish I hadn't done, that I am doing?"  She added, You can even go so far as to say that there are a lot of questions you don't ask because you've been hypersensitized by your own Dad, but it doesn't mean you aren't interested or don't care.  And of course you don't have to say any of this if you don't want to.  But just remember that you can ... if you want ... and sometimes you learn things that way.

Good to know.

What to talk about?

I've arranged it with my counselor that I see her once a month, at this point.  That doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not.  On the other hand, what exactly am I working on?  Relationship issues, I think ... with Debbie (but she's out of the picture) or with the boys (who are away at boarding school) or with some hypothetical future romantic partner (but she, if she exists, is still pretty hypothetical).  In other words, none of these areas is one where I'm going to get a lot of feedback, and it's not clear what progress I can make in a vacuum.  On the other hand I didn't want to drop her completely.  So we're checking in with each other once a month.

Tonight's the night for April.  What do I want to talk about with her?

One great advantage I have in figuring this out -- I think -- is that I've been doing all this writing in April.  So what is it that has been on my mind?

Looking over my list of posts in April, I see a few recurring themes:

• There is the breakup with Debbie: here, here, here, here, and here.
• There are the wider-ranging posts where I try to analyze my thoughts, feelings, or behaviors in relationships past, inspired by the breakup with Debbie or other events in my past: here, here, here, and here. 
• There are stories about my past with Wife: here, here, here, here, and I suppose I can include this one about the present day.
• There are snapshots of what I'm doing or thinking about concretely that minute: I was going to include links, but I suppose if you take this topic generally enough it includes all the others, so why bother?

But which of these would be useful?

Probably the most useful ones are these:

• Reply to Debbie, part 2
• Bad habits

So those are what I'll lead with.  And we'll see where the conversation goes from there .... 

Reply to Debbie's farewell, last part

And finally, in conclusion, ....
__________

I suggest that you tell your therapist the whole story of your relationship with Wife.  Tell her about how you met, what the early years were like, how Wife’s behavior changed over the years.  Tell her about the incident with the kitchen knife when Son1 and Son2 were little.  Tell about the many affairs and about Boyfriend4.  Tell about Wife’s many episodes of taking her medications and drinking and passing out.  Tell about Son2 coping for and “parenting” Wife.  Tell about the many threats and accusations and about the dramatic suicide attempts.  Tell her about how you behaved in reaction to all this and about measures you took to protect yourself and the boys and to get free.  Tell your therapist everything from beginning to end.  This will be difficult and you won’t want to do it, so start with what you are able to tell her and go from there.

I may have told her some of this already … I forget what I have, and what I haven’t.  But I sent her this letter unedited.  Her reaction was not “Oh my God, she did what???”  Her reaction was, rather, “So how did all these things affect Debbie? Why did they matter to her? It seems like that one piece of the puzzle is missing.”  I described your story of going through four years of therapy and twelve-step work after separating from your husband, and only then coming to see things in a clearer perspective.  And I told her that you have suggested the same may be true for me.

Of course it might be.  We’ll have to see.  Her general comment, though, is that she tends to think there’s not only one way up the mountain.  Maybe my path is a different one, and will go by way of different steps than yours.  Not that she said she doesn’t want to hear any of this stuff … she’s willing to listen to anything I want to talk about.  But she did suggest that I should have an idea why a story matters before I start telling it, to make sure we are using the time productively.  And other than letting her know that these things happened – which I did in any event by sending her your letter – I’m not sure I can tell right now why it matters that she know all the details of how they happened.  Maybe I’m overlooking something, though.

I’m not sure where this leaves us.  Of course I’m never going to send this letter, so I could just stop here.  Maybe I will be able to think of a clever summary tomorrow morning.  I don’t have one right now.

I will always love you,

Hosea

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 3

Continuing some more ....
__________

3. This is something we have not talked about.  I see a pattern in your Mom’s relationship with your Dad and Wife’s relationship with you that worries me.  Your mother is very, very passive in her relationship with your Dad, and remains super-calm and non-reactive in response to him.  While Wife is not passive – she acts out- over the years she became helpless.  I really don’t want to step into this pattern of women who do not function to their full capacity. 

This is the easiest one of all to deal with, because your interpretation is simply wrong.  Yes, my mother is very passive around my father, super-calm and non-reactive.  What you fail to see is that she is the active and competent one.  My father is the helpless one.  So if you want to compare my parents’ relationship with mine-and-Wife’s, it is wrong to see them both as cases of helpless women and active men.  The real parallel is that Wife is like my father and I’m like my mother.  It’s the same pattern, all right, but with the sex roles reversed.  The pattern is that one partner is loud, self-centered, belligerent, and helpless; while the other is quiet, passive, self-effacing, and gets things done.  What interested me so much about our relationship (yours and mine) is that you are like my mother.  You even look like her, a little bit.  So I did kind of wonder what it would be like in the long term, for the two of us to be together with each other … since we both fall on the same side of that equation.

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 2

Continuing ....
__________

2.  A specific event that seems important… the morning we were going to drive from my place to visit your Aunt and Uncle. I was somewhat scattered and having trouble getting it together with my last packing to get out the door and go.  This little bit of chaotic behavior on my part triggered a full blown reactive response from you that lasted all day.  Yes, my behavior was irritating and even maddening, but your reaction seemed way out of proportion to the stimulus and seemed to be about more than just me.  In addition, you expressed that you had made a decision to just go with the flow and accommodate whatever I ended up doing, but in fact you seemed angry and reactive all day long.  The next day, you didn’t seem to remember much about what had happened and that suggests to me that you may have dissociated.
When I was little, I did this a lot: overreacted if things weren’t “right” according to how I per­ceived “right”.  Don’t know why, but I did.  Once my parents were going to divide a couple of doughnuts between me and my little brother, and I threw a big fit until they were divided exactly in half.  Then I gave him my half anyway because I wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat a doughnut.  So why did I throw the fit?  To this day I don’t know.

I’m aware of this tendency and try to control, repress, or defuse it.  That’s probably not a very Buddhist thing to do J but the habit is unattractive and causes suffering in me and others.  In any event this too has nothing to do with Wife.

In this particular case, I was thinking of how long the drive really was.  I knew it was a long drive – in fact, I had a pretty good idea how long it was, since I had made the exact same drive only a couple of months earlier.  I also remembered that when I made the trip in October I hadn’t left till noon, and I got into town about 10:00 pm.  Fortunately my other aunt and uncle [with whom I was staying that time] were still awake by then [I’m still talking about October], but it did seem to me kind of rude to show up that late [on this second trip, in January] if it were avoidable.  Besides, I knew that Aunt and Uncle were expecting you and me for dinner.  So as the clock got later and later, this is what was going through my mind.  I forgot to factor in that for the trip in October, when I left at noon, I was leaving from my place and not yours: this meant, naturally, that we had two hours more leeway than I was banking on.  On the other hand, I knew you wouldn’t want to drive the way I drove when I made the trip by myself, so already I had no idea how much extra time we would add simply by adhering to the posted speed limits.  And, as I say, I was worried about showing up late when we were expected for dinner.  An overreaction?  Yeah, sure.  But if we had been staying in a motel I wouldn’t have cared.  It wasn’t the time itself that caused me the anxiety, but what it would mean for the people who were waiting on us.  Of course I knew that they would make allowances, whatever happened.  But that’s because they are wonderful human beings, and I didn’t want to presume on their kindness because to do so would have ill repaid the hospitality they were showing us.

Then when we were finally ready and I went to move my car, I found I had gotten a parking ticket for parking on the street.  If we had left when I thought we were going to leave, I wouldn’t have.  OK, that wasn’t as big a deal as the rest of it, and by then I had already decided to accept whatever happened.  But it didn’t make me happier.

You say I felt angry during the drive out there.  From the inside that wasn’t it at all.  I felt ashamed of having made an issue of the time, and so I felt like I had to prove to you that I didn’t mean it.  I was scrupulously careful to drive no faster than the posted speed limit, and to offer you the wheel at every opportunity so you wouldn’t think I was insisting on controlling the drive.  Maybe I was angry at myself. 

More exactly, the interchange that bothered me was when I said – out of frustration, but not meaning it seriously – that we could make up the time if I did all the driving [because I drive a lot faster than Debbie does].  Then when I tried to assure you it was a joke, you wouldn’t accept the assurance and told me that you thought I really meant it.  At that point I felt trapped, because you wouldn’t let me apologize for some­thing that I really didn’t mean.  That was a behavior that Wife in particular did all the time … never allowing me to back up.  So anytime I said something stupid or clumsy or unskillful, I was stuck with it forever.  I could never just apologize and undo it.  Now we (you and I) had promised each other from the very beginning that we would always allow each other to apologize, to back up, to undo what we had said.  But it felt to me like that was exactly what you were not doing.  And that one moment – the moment where I felt that your unwillingness to forgive meant that I was forever, irredeemably guilty for something I didn’t even mean – was what poisoned the interchange for me.

That’s amazing: I didn’t think of it in terms of the promise you and I had made to each other until just now, as I was typing this.  When I discussed this with my therapist, the only part that I saw was the hyper-reactivity, which is as old as I am and which truly has nothing to do with Wife.  Only now do I see that the specific poisonous moment was the one I describe in the immediately preceding paragraph … and what made that moment so incredibly painful was indeed that it was exactly something she used to do all the time.

These two things seem to me to be related to living so many years with a person whose behavior was chaotic, unpredictable, often threatening and sometimes actually violent. Anyone would develop similar coping behaviors in the same circumstances, but they make me feel cautious.

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 1

Yesterday I explained about Debbie's farewell letter, and about the reply that I wrote a couple days later but never, ever intend to show her.  (It's easy enough to keep that resolution because she doesn't want to hear from me again.)  So here is part 1.  It's probably already cringe-worthy, but I have to start somewhere and this is what I actually wrote when I sat down to the exercise.
__________

To Debbie, 03-29-2014

Dear Debbie:

I am writing this reply at the suggestion of my therapist.  I have no intention of sending it – now or ever.  But her idea is that it could be worthwhile to capture what I think today (she and I discussed this in our session a couple days ago), and then compare it with what I think in a few months.  Will it be the same?  Will it have changed?  There’s no way to know except to wait and see.

Let me say right at the beginning, though, that I am immeasurably grateful that you sent me this letter.  Some of our emotional discussions in the past have frustrated me because they seemed long on portent and short on data.  I haven’t always known what exactly we were talking about.  But this letter is clear and exact.  I recognize perfectly the phenomena you describe, even though in several cases I understand them differently than you do.  But at least I know exactly what we are talking about, and for this I am very grateful.  So to begin ….

A couple of things I have noticed:

1.       You seem to compartmentalize different parts of your life and keep them very separate.  When one person strays from one part of your life into another, it seems to make you feel extremely anxious, even if you have planned the crossover and want it to happen.  In general, you seem to put a lot of effort into planning, orchestrating and managing your life and events in it in order for things to go as smoothly as possible and to not have anything unexpected happen.

There are two points here: one about compartmentalization, and one about managing my life to make it smooth.

It is absolutely true that I compartmentalize different parts of my life, and that I’m good at it.  What is not really true is the thought that this behavior has anything special to do with Wife, although I certainly deployed the skill to isolate Wife from other parts of my life when she began to become socially intolerable.  But I had developed this skill long before I met her, probably in response to living with my father.  (He even encouraged it – not in those words of course – when from time to time, as far back as grade school, he would encourage me not to let my friends at school know that he and my mother smoked pot.)  Certainly by the time I was in high school I understood viscerally that I wanted my father to know nothing about my life at school, and I didn’t really want my friends at school to meet my family.  School and home were different places; I was a different person in each; it took me time every day to morph from one person into the other (so that sometimes I dawdled quite a bit coming home, until I was really ready to be that person again); and so I didn’t want them to mix.  And for the most part, they didn’t.

When I first got together with Wife, I was very much in love and wanted to integrate her into all the other parts of my life.  I usually feel that way when I’m in love.  My first rude shock on this front was our first year in graduate school, when we had several of my friends from my program over to our apartment for some kind of party or dinner and she started making a string of shockingly racist remarks about Mexicans.  I had never known before that she was so racist.  It shocked me, it shocked my friends, and I made sure never ever to repeat the experience.

Even so, when we left graduate school and I started working I wanted her to meet my friends from work: M, RC, and RH.  And B, of course, because they were both witches.  It didn’t occur to me to keep her separate from work.  Even in the early days at the company where you and I first met [I mean my early days there, back in 1993] I was happy to have her come to company events.  I always brought her to Christmas parties, to summer picnics, … everything.  Ten years later, by the time the company shut down, I was less sanguine about it and brought her mostly out of habit or duty.  At my current company I used to bring her to Christmas parties because I figured I had to, and then tried to spend much of the parties somewhere else.  The last several years I just didn’t go.  But all that was much later.

Anyway, my original point was just that this was a skill I learned as a kid living with my father, not as an adult living with Wife.  I also tend to think of it as a useful skill.  Isn’t this, in fact, what we want of people in the business environment?  If you ask why your employee was late to work, do you really want to hear the details of his hangover, his fights with his wife, and that he had to bail his teenaged son out of jail?  Or is it enough to hear that there were some unex­pected issues that came up at home, but they were exceptions and won’t become the rule?

Do I become nervous when someone strays from one part of my life into another part?  It depends.  I was nervous having you visit me in my office a year ago, when I hadn’t moved out yet … when so far as the office knew, I was still peaceably married at home.  But I expected to invite you to the recent Christmas party, except that it conflicted with our silent retreat.  I was nervous about you meeting Son1 and Son2.  But that’s because I had read so much about how you have to be careful introducing your children to your new girlfriend … and even my therapist said that the timing of the introduction was awfully soon.  She asked, in fact, what was the rush?  Why so early?  And I was a little bit nervous having you meet my folks, just because I’m ill at ease around my father in general … with or without anybody else.  I was worried how he would act around you, and I was trying to guess what he would say to me afterwards … or to anybody else.  My father is a loose cannon, and everything about him makes me nervous.

The point is that most of these issues would have faded with time.  As I say, I expected to take you to my Christmas party, and to dance with you there just the way we had danced at your Christmas party.  I figured the boys would relax around you with time.  And you showed yourself able to take my father admirably in stride.  He still acted a little forced around you – the waiting for you to show up around Christmas got to be a real strain on every­body because my parents were both treating it as such a big deal – but again I figured that would wear off with time.

As for managing my life to make it smooth – I wonder about this.  It’s true that a lot of my life has been uneventful and boring: I attribute this partly to the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, and partly to my excessive timidity.  But I am trying to widen my circle, now that it’s just me.  I went to Peru, for example.  I’ve been going to more museums and so forth.  I drove out to another state to spend the weekend with my relatives for my cousin’s wedding.  OK, none of this is really adventurous, except maybe the trip to Peru.  But I am trying to break out of the routines I have caged myself in. 

Or maybe this is not what you meant.  Maybe you meant the stuff above, about compart­mentalization.  But in that case, … where is the dividing line between over-managing my life (on the one hand) and striving for simple courtesy to guests or friends (on the other)?  There probably is one, but I’m not sure where it is.  In the case of trying to cushion my relationship with Son1 and Son2, if I haven’t already done too much damage, the reason there is simple: that relationship is more important to me than my relationship with you, or than my relation­ship with any other new romantic interest ever could be.  Girlfriends, after all, come and go; but I hope to be connected to my sons as long as I and they are alive.  The relationship will take different forms over the years, to be sure.  But it is still primary.

Debbie's farewell

In my post yesterday I promised I'd say something about a farewell letter I got from Debbie just about two weeks ago.  The background is that way back in January when she left, she suggested that we get together in April and again in the summer, just to test the waters.  So at the end of March she wrote me to say that here it was almost April, and she thought it was too soon.  I thought so too, but it didn't stop me from being really sad when I get her letter.  Then I pushed a bit to ask if we were really delaying or really saying Goodbye, and she said that yes this was probably Goodbye, ... unless things changed suddenly.  I asked her for one favor:  she had said over and over that she thought I had psychological damage to work through after years with Wife, but she'd never given me any specifics.  Could she now send me a list?  Something I could take to my current therapist?

I didn't expect her to follow through, because I had come to believe that her reservations were all just a smoke screen for inchoate fears that she couldn't articulate ... all because up till now she had not articulated them in a way I could understand.  But I was wrong, and glad to be so.  She sent me a letter and then asked me not to contact her again.

I'll post the letter here.  My therapist suggested that I write a reply (with no intention of ever sending it!) just to capture where my head is at today; then in a few months I can check to see whether I am in the same place.  Usually when I post something really long that I've written elsewhere, I look back on it later and wonder what I could possibly have been thinking to inflict it all on you.  But in the spirit of yesterday's post -- in the spirit of getting content out there -- I will post it.  Not all in a lump: I'll break it into pieces and scatter it over a couple of days.  No, I don't think this gets me off the hook of writing something every single day.  It just breaks up the monotony of my whiny self-justifications.  Or I hope it will.

Anyway, here is her letter:
__________

For Hosea 03-25-2014

A couple of things I have noticed:

1.       You seem to compartmentalize different parts of your life and keep them very separate.  When one person strays from one part of your life into another, it seems to make you feel extremely anxious, even if you have planned the crossover and want it to happen.  In general, you seem to put a lot of effort into planning, orchestrating and managing your life and events in it in order for things to go as smoothly as possible and to not have anything unexpected happen.

2.       A specific event that seems important… the morning we were going to drive from my place to visit your Aunt and Uncle.  [I talk about this trip briefly here. -H.]  I was somewhat scattered and having trouble getting it together with my last packing to get out the door and go.  This little bit of chaotic behavior on my part triggered a full blown reactive response from you that lasted all day.  Yes, my behavior was irritating and even maddening, but your reaction seemed way out of proportion to the stimulus and seemed to be about more than just me.  In addition, you expressed that you had made a decision to just go with the flow and accommodate whatever I ended up doing, but in fact you seemed angry and reactive all day long.  The next day, you didn’t seem to remember much about what had happened and that suggests to me that you may have dissociated.

These two things seem to me to be related to living so many years with a person whose behavior was chaotic, unpredictable, often threatening and sometimes actually violent.   Anyone would develop similar coping behaviors in the same circumstances, but they make me feel cautious.

3.       This is something we have not talked about.  I see a pattern in your Mom’s relationship with your Dad and Wife’s relationship with you that worries me.  Your mother is very, very passive in her relationship with your Dad, and remains super-calm and non-reactive in response to him.  While Wife is not passive – she acts out- over the years she became helpless.  I really don’t want to step into this pattern of women who do not function to their full capacity. 

 I suggest that you tell your therapist the whole story of your relationship with Wife.  Tell her about how you met, what the early years were like, how Wife’s behavior changed over the years.  Tell her about the incident with the kitchen knife when Son1 and Son2 were little.  Tell about the many affairs and about Boyfriend4.  Tell about Wife’s many episodes of taking her medications and drinking and passing out.  Tell about Son2 coping for and “parenting” Wife.  Tell about the many threats and accusations and about the dramatic suicide attempts.  Tell her about how you behaved in reaction to all this and about measures you took to protect yourself and the boys and to get free.  Tell your therapist everything from beginning to end.  This will be difficult and you won’t want to do it, so start with what you are able to tell her and go from there.

  [And as I post this I stop to wonder ... have I told you folks all of these stories? I've told so many it's hard for me to remember, and my indexing system isn't the greatest. Hmmm ... this could give me a lot to write about, I suppose. -H.] 

Letter sent this afternoon to two local therapists

Good afternoon!

Are you currently accepting new clients?

I am in the process of leaving a highly dysfunctional marriage of nearly 30 years.  We have two children, boys aged 17 and 15.  And I am trying to sort out how my relationships are going to work in the future, wrestling with such questions as: what boundaries can/should I set up with my soon-to-be-ex-wife? what do I do to be the best father I can to my sons? how can I help them (as well as myself) navigate this transition? how do we build a nurturing life on the other side?  And so on.

A dear friend of mine is a client of --- --- here in town.  She asked him for recommendations who I could see to work through these topics, and he gave her a couple of names of which yours was one.  Hence my question whether you are accepting new clients?  And if yes, what’s the next step?  To iron out practical questions?  (costs, times, insurance, etc)  Or less tangible ones? (e.g., is this the right match?)  Please let me know how to proceed ….

Thanks very much, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Best regards,

Hosea Tanatu

Aftermath

For what it’s worth, she was better the next day.  Maybe she had gotten it out of her system?  Or maybe all the attention satisfied some narcissistic urge inside her?  Or maybe all my theories are full of shit and I have no idea?  But she was brighter and more able to focus.

She also told Son 2, “Wow, I must really have been tired last night. I went to bed at something like 5:00 and I guess I slept all the way through the night.”  Was she trying to spin the event, so that he wouldn’t remember it?  Or did she genuinely black out and not remember it herself?  I have no idea which.

The next day I wrote to Counselor (whom she still sees weekly) as follows:

Hi Counselor,

Wife tried to commit suicide last night.  (Thursday evening, August 15.) 

She took some of her medications (don’t know what or how much) on top of one or more martinis and no food, and then lay down and went to sleep.  When she got up again, several hours later, she was stumbling and muttered that she “didn’t try hard enough.”  She tried to vomit and couldn’t, but was speaking in a disconnected way.  I called 9-1-1; but by the time they got there she was able to answer all their questions coherently enough that when she refused treatment they had to allow her to do so, and they left.  I sat with her until she went back to sleep and then I left too.  Son 1 stayed up most of the night on the computer but also watching her medications, to make sure she didn’t try it again the same night.  And apparently she didn’t.

I am concerned for her, naturally.  Her overall level of functioning has been getting worse and worse since I moved out, and the challenge of having to pack and move is taking a real toll.

I am also concerned for the boys: they are both competent and resilient, but they shouldn’t be in the position of having to conduct a de facto suicide watch on a parent.  Adolescence can be tough enough without adding that to the mix.  I’m not sure I know what to propose instead.  But at the very least I figure you should know about it.

If it also turns out that you have advice, so much the better.  :-)

It wasn’t until Monday that I got back to my e-mail and saw this reply:

I've tried to contact Wife on the home phone and her cell, Hosea, but have yet to speak with her.  Can you tell me how she is doing?   we should talk about the question of hospitalizing her, if that's the only way to keep her safe.   my cell is xxx-xxxx.

I know this may be traumatizing for you, and especially the kids... I'm sorry.  Depending on her emotional state, we should try to find a way to get the kids out of the situation where they are feeling responsible for her safety.

Call or email... Either way, can you let me know the situation?

And my answer, that I sent just about an hour ago:

Hi Counselor,

I only got this e-mail this morning.  Several things:

1. Wife’s mood was significantly – very much -- better the next day and over the weekend, partly because she may have found a place to live when she moves out of the house.

2. It’s also better when she doesn’t drink (and the boys have more and more urged her not to drink).

3. Son 1 is now back at school: we drove him to Hogwarts over the weekend, so he will now be occupied with school activities and not in the middle of it all.  He has a cell phone, which means she can still text him (and sometimes she does, sending him long screeds of panic).  But as far as day-to-day supervision or intervention goes, he is out of the picture.  He can still be splashed, but he can’t be called on to do much about it.

4. The downside of Son 1’s departure is that more will fall on Son 2. In the normal course of things that ought to mean just “More of the work of packing the house.”  But of course if she takes a downturn it could also mean “More caretaking.”

5. Traditionally Son 2 has taken on a significant amount of parenting Wife, starting as early as when he was three.  From time to time I have tried to suggest that she’s the grown-up and he’s the kid, so really he’s not responsible for her.  But he has spent a lot of years acting as if he felt responsible for her emotional well-being.  It may take the advice of someone besides his dad (i.e., a counselor) … and on a regular basis (not just once in a while) … before he really accepts that it’s not his job.  Or maybe I’m wrong and worrying too much.  I don’t know.  I guess someone who understands this stuff should evaluate him …?

6. For what it is worth, Son 1 several times urged me to take the next two weeks off work completely to help with the house, “because otherwise Son 2 will have to do it all by himself.”  Ostensibly his words were all about packing, but I wonder if he had in mind the emotional burden as much as (or more than) the physical burden?

7. Our custody schedule has Son 2 with me for two weeks now, starting last night and continuing until Friday night August 30.  However, while that addresses where he has dinner and breakfast and where he sleeps, I have not been able to articulate a plausible reason for forbidding him to help pack the house: so this morning, for example, I gave him bus fare and a map of the busses to take to get from my apartment to the house.  I plan to pick him up in the afternoon after work.  And unless something changes, other days are likely to be the same.  This puts him back there for most of the hours of the day.

8. I totally agree with you that the boys should not be in a situation where they feel responsible for her safety.  I’m not sure how to make that happen.

9. Son 2 goes back to school on Sunday, September 8: two days before escrow closes.  So one way or another, he would normally in the middle of things until the end unless some kind of deus ex machina removes him.

10. On the other hand, once he is gone he doesn’t have a cell phone (and his school forbids them).  So his only window into the home situation becomes his traditional once-a-week phone call home.  And if it were important or advisable, perhaps that could be cancelled or cut back.  It would need someone besides me to say so, though.  I could not appear to be disinterested, obviously.

11. The boys haven’t been acting traumatized, so far as I can tell what that looks like.  Maybe I can’t tell.  We can talk more about this if it is relevant.

12. My cell number is xxx-xxxx.

Drama from Hosea, letter from Wife

Nobody ever said I was easy to live with. But we had a spot of drama last night, and this afternoon while I was at work Wife wrote me the most eloquent e-mail. I have no idea yet what I'm going to say back to her. But you've all heard me gripe and whine about her for years on end, so I thought it was only fair to let her speak for herself this once.

The background: I blew up at something trivial and said some things that were badly chosen ... false and hurtful. Wife asked me for an apology while I was still seething, and I was very grudging about it. She talked to Son 2 about it, and he consoled her. "No, Mom, of course it feels rotten to have to ask for an apology. Of course he should have just offered it. No, I know that what he said to you doesn't count as an apology. Of course." I came out into the dining room and tried to tell Son 2 that he shouldn't assume he knows what is going on with us. I wanted to say, "Your mother may treat you as her confidant, but I don't -- so you will never hear my complaints about her. Doesn't mean I don't have them. But it does mean that you are getting a one-sided picture of what a beast I am." But I couldn't spit the words out. They would have been self-contradictory, after all ... a complaint precisely when I said that I won't complain about her to him. And it wasn't just that. Somehow I really could not make myself say the words.

Anyway, I felt awkward and humiliated all evening. I made dinner but had trouble engaging in conversation. After dinner, once Son 2 had gone to bed, I apologized for my outburst far more deeply; I had cooled down by then and felt really terrible. Not long thereafter I was piddling around in the kitchen after I thought Wife too had gone to bed, but then Wife came out to get a glass of water and I was startled. ("Jumped out of my skin" is probably more accurate ... I do that when my mind is wandering elsewhere.) Wife was concerned that she had scared me and asked if I was OK, but all I wanted her to do was to go back to bed and leave me alone. This on top of the shame and humiliation I already felt was just not making me very good company. It also meant I really didn't feel like sleeping in our bed, though somewhere about 3:00 in the morning I crawled in just for comfort. But my mind really wanted to be elsewhere.

Anyway, this afternoon at work I got the following e-mail from Wife:

Hosea,

I've been thinking all day about what happened last night and I want to make sure I understand and that we're ok.

The whole mess that started it is over. Forgiven, forgotten. It's not that.

I certainly didn't mean to startle you as I so obviously did. I don't know what I should have done differently. Your reaction was so volatile that I could tell I had REALLY upset you, and that wasn't my intention at all. You really wouldn't talk to me after; all I could get out of you was that it was ok, but since you were huddled in a fetal ball in a dark room facing away from me at the time, I have a hard time believing that it was ok. But I didn't know what to do besides go back to bed. In the past, I've tried to comfort you in situations where I could tell you were upset, and you seemed to just want me to go away; I never was much of a source of comfort, I guess. FWIW, I've tried. I hope going away was the right thing to do last night. Please forgive me for startling you. It wasn't intentional.

I couldn't help but notice that after that, you didn't come to bed with me. I woke up at 1:30 to pee and you still weren't in bed. I went looking for you; sometimes you work REALLY late in the study. But you weren't there. I finally heard you snoring in the living room. I went out there and couldn't see where you were, but I could hear you. I didn't know if you had just fallen asleep on the sofa where you sat down to rest until I had gone to sleep, or if you were intentionally sleeping away from me because you were still that angry with me. Again, I thought of approaching you to try to get you to come to bed, and decided against it. I figured that if you wanted to come to bed, you would, and if you didn't want to, you'd just be angry that I woke you up. So I went back to bed. But I hate to think you were avoiding me that thoroughly. No, I'm not trying to second-guess what you were thinking when you stayed out there, but I'd really like to know, and if I caused it, I'd like to know what I could've done differently to prevent it.

Then, early this morning, I woke up to go to the bathroom. When I came back to bed you were in our bed still asleep, facing the window. I snuggled over closer to you, put one hand on your hip and my head against your back. I wanted to tell you everything was ok by my lights and how much I love you. I wanted to comfort you, and I wanted you to do something like pat my hand to say that you were there with me and still loved me, too. But you pushed my hand away and pulled your body closer to the edge of the bed, away from me. So I moved myself back to "my space" in the bed and let you sleep comfortably away from me. You've reacted to me that way before when I was just trying to be affectionate, but a couple of times you've let me cuddle a bit. I was just trying to show you affection, hoping I could settle emotionally something I really couldn't settle by discussion earlier. But I was wrong. That made me very sad. I felt very rejected. Maybe you were just asleep, and as youi've told me before, you can't be held responsible for what you do in your sleep. I'll buy that. Or maybe you were conscious of what you were doing and were trying to make a point. Again, I don't know and I can't second-guess you.

But for the record, I thought we had been making good progress together, then last night really shook me. I've been working with Counselor. I've been role-playing with him, trying to get my discussions right and learn how to keep things from escalating. And obviously, I haven't got it yet. I'll keep working on it, but Hosea, if we're going to continue to share even just a house, much less a family, I need your help, too. You've been so nice to me lately, even for the last six months, that I've enjoyed home and family life a lot. I don't want to end that. Yet apparently I did a lot more wrong last night than forget to ask you before I had Son 2 re-feed the cats and talk to him about the issue of apologizing. I thought we had it settled and over by dinner, even if we were both still a bit edgy. Dinner was normal.

But even this morning wasn't. Usually these days you at least say goodbye to me and tell me to have a nice day; a few times you've even kissed me goodbye. This morning you didn't say a thing -- just left. I was awake, and I think you knew it. Anyway, you know that I'm generally up by that time and you could've talked to me. I felt bad again when you left without saying anything because it seemed like you must still be mad at me.

At this point, I don't know how you feel about me or what you want of me. I want you to know that I love you very much, and I'm trying very hard to make this a comfortable, safe place for all of us to live; even if I'm failing too much of the time, I'm doing my best. When that isn't good enough, I get very depressed again because things seem hopeless, and then it's easier for me to revert to old habits.

I thought it would be better to write this to you than to try to talk to you. We have so little "us" time. Things get too dramatic just when we need to be feeding everybody if I need to talk to you about something as soon as you get home. But I've been totally miserable today, and I'm at a loss as to what to do. If you don't respond to this, all I can do is talk to Counselor tomorrow and get his take on it, which, as you can point out, will be based on MY narrative and won't include your side of the story. I can't help that. That's where it would be very helpful if you were still in the sessions with me, but I can't make you come and you've been very clear that you're unwilling to, that you won't work on making us a couple anymore.

You said you wanted me to change, Hosea. I'm trying, and to some extent at least, I'm succeeding in doing that. At least that's what Counselor says. You said two years ago that whether you stayed in the session or not depended on whether I wanted to change. Well, I've made the decision to do that. Will that ever be good enough? Will you ever acknowledge that not ALL our problems are the result of my bad qualities that need to be changed? That I'm not all bad? Or am I wasting my time and making you miserable?

I love you. I hope/wish yesterday/this morning could be put behind us.

Wife.

A call from the psychiatrist

Not long after the last conversation I reported [see "Do you like being blackmailed?"], Wife took her evening pills and fell into bed. And a few minutes after that, the phone rang. I picked it up out in the kitchen at the same time that she picked it up in the bedroom. I said, "Hello?" She said, "Uh-h-h-h-o-o-o?" The voice on the other end of the line asked for her fairly brusquely. I said, "She's pretty tired right now." She said, "-a-a-a-at's me-e-e-e." I didn't hang up until the voice identified himself as her psychiatrist, and pretty peremptorily asked me to get off the line. So I got.

But from there I walked into the bedroom, to see how this conversation was going. Not well. Wife was lying face down on the bed, with the phone leaning against one ear, grunting "Uh-huh" at rare intervals. Her psychiatrist seemed to be trying to talk to her, but no such luck. [Readers will remember that this is exactly how she gets every night once she takes her sleeping medication. See, e.g., "Calling the paramedics."] Finally I picked up the phone and introduced myself to her psychiatrist. I had been able to overhear that he was trying -- with some considerable degree of concern -- to figure out what was going on with her and why she was so incoherent. What pills had she taken? I explained that I hadn't watched her take them, but that she is like this every night at about this time. He clarified -- more than once -- that he was worried lest she had taken a deliberate overdose of something (presumably he meant one of her narcotics). I answered, again, that I couldn't swear in a court of law to exactly what she had taken this night in particular, but in general she is very much a creature of habit when it comes to her pills and her incoherence tonight is absolutely consistent with the way she is every other night.

He said a couple of other things, all of which were innocuous enough by themselves but interesting in combination. First, he made it very clear that patient privacy laws forbid him to discuss her case with anybody else, so of course he couldn't say anything to me. But then he added that there is no law preventing him from listening [to me, that is], and sometimes that might be useful since all he ever hears is "one side of the story." He repeated that his concern tonight was to make sure she hadn't taken a deliberate overdose of anything; and while that would obviously have been anybody's concern once he heard how slurred her speech was, he never once said, "Also I need to reschedule our appointment next week so please have her call me tomorrow." The unstated implication, I think, has to be that the reason he dialed the phone tonight in the first place was out of a fear that she might be deliberately overdosing. And that, in turn, makes me guess (without his having said so) that she has said something to worry him.

In the end, he asked me to keep an eye on her tonight, just to make sure that she continues to look routine. (She has and does.) I gave him my cell phone number, in case I could be of any further help. He fumbled a little awkwardly at the offer, since of course he can't call me up to say, "Wife tells me that XYZ, and what is your side of the story?" But he took the number down. And then immediately he gave me his cell phone number too. Now, it might have been just a polite gesture, of course. But I wonder.

I'm not completely sure about all of what this conversation meant, but somehow I think it was important.