Wife's view of her move

This evening after dinner, I was sitting at my computer browsing through some old posts and trying to get up the energy to write you about my trip last weekend. In the process, I realized that I used to inject a lot more drama into my posts than I do today, by the simple expedient of quoting Wife's perspective on whatever was going on.

Of course, mostly I don't interact with her any more. I drive to visit her at Son1's apartment a couple of times a year (see, for example, here and here). And even when I find something funny to email her, she very rarely responds.

But back in late May I sent her some information about a Japanese cat, who was made station master of a local train station, and who (after dying) was enshrined as a Shinto goddess. You can find her story here. This email triggered a response (though very little of it had to do with the cat). Writing to me the same day that I got this phone call from Son2, Wife told me all about her thoughts on Son2's upcoming marriage to Beryl, and about her fears related to moving. Here is what she said about the move.

Wife will be moving soon!

I got a call this afternoon from Son2. Right away he asked if I had a few minutes, because he wanted to discuss a number of things with me.

It was 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, and I was just finishing up breakfast. (I spent too much time this morning pissing around on the Internet.) So of course I told him Sure, I've got time. What's up?

Well.

You all remember Dorcas? Son1's girlfriend? It turns out that not only is she a Ph.D. candidate, but she owns a condominium. Free and clear. No remaining payments. Son1 has decided that he would rather live with her than with Wife (his mother). Maybe that's not a surprise. So he's going to move out of the apartment that he currently shares with Wife. Wife can't afford the apartment on her own, so she has to find somewhere else to live.

Apparently Son1 and Son2 have been discussing this topic at considerable length for some time. At this point, the plan is to move Wife to an independent apartment within walking distance of the house that Son2 and Beryl currently rent. Son2 says that they will stop in a couple of times each week, to make sure that she has meals prepared ahead, and to make sure that she is still surviving OK. He plans to make up a list of non-negotiable demands: that she regularly take her medications, that she not drink, and a bunch of others. If she violates those, then they'll put her in an assisted-living facility where she has no freedom whatsoever. Son2 admitted that the main reason for not putting her in one right now is that they cost too much. I pointed out that Wife would hate an assisted-living facility because she values her freedom so highly; but I added that in general, the less freedom she has, the better her quality of life will be. This is because she reliably makes terrible decisions. Son2 agreed.

Why is she moving to be near Son2 and Beryl, who are far away in a different state? 

Because Son1 is really, really sick of her. Apparently in the very first conversation, Son1 assumed she would have to be near him. But as soon as Son2 remarked that—logically—she could be near either of them, from that moment Son1 took it as settled that she would live near Son2 and not near him.

There was probably more. I don't remember right now. Son2 called me in the first place to ask some details about Social Security and Disability. I told him what I remember, but suggested that he should double-check the details. He said he will.

I also told him to keep me in the loop on the topic of paying Wife's bills. I explained that I'm on a strict budget this year—in fact I'm taking home (in retirement income) only 77% of what Son2 is (and that doesn't count Beryl's earnings)—but I also figured that somehow I still have some responsibility here, at least as long as my sons think they do! I'm the one who married her, after all. I'm the one who saddled them with her as a mother. It's true that I spent thirty years paying her bills more or less single-handedly. But I can't just let it be their problem.

To put it another way: when they can wash their hands of her, so can I.

This evening I got a long email from Wife where she talked about this development, and spent considerable time complaining about it. Maybe I'll put all that in another post. 

           

Pushing and pulling

Yesterday I was scrolling through Twitter and found the following gem. Someone had posted a picture than says: "I pushed you away because I needed you to pull me close."

It sounds crazy, and part of me wants to ask "Would anybody ever do something so backwards?" But in fact I know they do. Just over thirteen years ago, I asked Wife for a divorce. We talked for most of that day, although Wife's side of the conversation included a lot of weeping, shouting, and recrimination. But at one point I asked her why she was so unhappy with the idea? Leaving aside the financial practicalities for just a minute ... isn't this what she wanted? All through our long marriage she had threatened me with divorce more times than I could count. She regularly told me she hated me. She treated me with disdain. She actively undermined me with the boys. Looking at all that history, wouldn't she be eager to get rid of me?

For a moment she looked truly shocked. Then she shouted back, "Didn't you understand? All the times I did those things, I was asking you to love me more!!"

Umm ... no, Babe. I didn't understand. I guess once again we were bad at communication.

So yeah. Have a picture.

      

Does divorce make women hotter?

Wow, browsing the Internet this evening I ran across two really depressing articles.

The first is from The Free Press. It's an article by Kat Rosenfield that asks women, "Does Divorce Make You Hotter?" And apparently there is a whole theme in our culture today dedicated to the proposition that divorce is empowering and "badass". Not some divorces, mind you. Not divorces from abusive bums who put their wives' lives at risk. But all divorces, divorces in general, Divorce as such. And it is empowering because once divorced, a woman can attend costume parties in her lingerie, drink Jell-O shots, and look for handsome young men to fuck. I guess this is what empowerment looks like.

To be fair, the author of the article doesn't buy this definition of empowerment, and recognizes that divorce can come with a lot of anguish and regret as well. Some of the comments on the article seem to assume that she is endorsing the opinions she describes, but honestly she makes it obvious that she is merely diagnosing.

For my part, I can't imagine why anyone would find divorce exciting or empowering. It might be necessary—I still believe that my own separation from Wife was necessary—but it is always a kind of failure. It is true that I have written about the virtue of normalizing failure (see here, for example), and at a philosophical level I still think that kind of detachment can help. But that is a far cry from glamorizing or celebrating the thing.

Maybe I don't have a lot to say that the author hasn't already said, or at least implied. But I find it depressing that this attitude exists in the world for her to write about.    

          

The empty table

A while ago—maybe it was last week—I subscribed to The Daily Dad emails, from Ryan Holiday. It's not like I thought I was going to get advice I could use in a practical sense, since the boys both moved out years ago. But fatherhood is a subject that I acquired a lot of opinions about over the years, so I thought I'd like to see what Holiday had to say about it.

Last Tuesday—when I started writing this post that was still "yesterday" but I see it is now after midnight so let's call it "the day before yesterday"—the Daily Dad email was on the subject "This Is How To Hold Them To You." The idea was that you should be encouraging and supportive while your children are young, not an asshole or a martinet, so that when they are adults they'll still want to spend time around you. Fine, that makes sense. And while I certainly didn't hit 100% on that scale, I think I did OK. Is that all? 

But then he introduced another concept (one that linked to another essay, in fact) and it made me think about the topic in a little more depth.

You say you don’t want to lose them, that you want to see them, that you want the crowded table. But what do your actions say? How are they making your kids feel? Are they making your table an inviting place they can be themselves? If not, then maybe it’s time to let things go. Admit you’re wrong. Apologize. Otherwise you will have no one to blame but yourself for your empty table.

Nobody cares about rights until they want to DO something

A few days ago, I saw a post on Twitter from CatGirl Kulak defending "Lost Cause" historiography. In case that term isn't immediately transparent to you, the "Lost Cause" is an interpretation of the American War Between the States (1861-1865, also called the Civil War, or by other names) which argues that the South was justified in seceding and that the war was not primarily about slavery. Lost Cause historians often argue that the South was driven to secede in order to protect its "way of life," and in particular that the southern states were ticklish on the question of "states' rights"—rights which were already becoming so infringed by a tyrannical and centralizing government in Washington, D.C. that separation was the only way to preserve them.

CatGirl Kulak's argument is that the historians who developed the Lost Cause interpretation were the ones who had direct access to surviving participants of the war, and so could question them. She argues further that the current generation of historians (who reject the Lost Cause interpretation pretty universally) are all Marxists, so what do they know? It's the kind of argument that sounds good until you think about it for a minute. Yes, the Lost Cause historians were closer to the action than we are today; they were also, to a man, Southern. And surely it is only natural that defeated Southerners—especially those who lived so close to the war that they still felt the shame of defeat—should try to put the best possible face on the choice to secede. As for protecting the Southern "way of life," already before the war it was well understood on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line that the critical, fundamental difference between the Northern and Southern ways of life lay in the South's "peculiar institution"—namely, slavery.

But the main point I want to make has to do with the topic of "states' rights," and it is a point far more general than the specific argument over Civil War historiography. It is simply this: Nobody in real life cares tuppence about the details of their legal rights until they actually want to do something!

Being there

The dharma reading in Sangha this evening started us talking about what would be important in our lives if we learned we were going to die soon. I didn't have anything profound to add, but it put me in mind of the time when Wife and I were still trying to hash out a Parenting Plan for the boys, as part of our legal separation.

Part of the Parenting Plan was an agreement about how much time the boys would spend with me each year, and how much time with her. In the end, we agreed that I got 50% +1 day, and she got 50% -1 day, so that I could claim them on my taxes. (Her income was small enough that the deduction would have made no difference.) But my initial proposal was that I should get a much larger fraction of time, because her mental health and parenting skills were both so poor. Naturally she disputed this. But during one of our discussions she said something very interesting.

The news from Cassius

In the first few years of this blog, the posts were urgent and angry. These days they are mostly a lot more sedate and reflective. Some years ago I wondered about that and decided it was because Wife was no longer a major character. Or at any rate, Wife-as-she-was-back-in-the-day was no longer a character, partly because we had separated and partly because she is no longer the dynamic, brazen bitch she was back when I met and married her. In one respect, the blog really lost something when it lost her as a central character.

But after my long phone call with Cassius on New Year's Eve, I think maybe the whole problem could have been avoided if only I had let Cassius add posts of his own. Of course, literally speaking that would never have happened, because I was totally out of touch with him. But what he told me to fill in the history of the missing 37 years made his story sound just as exciting as mine.

It's late tonight, but it has also been a couple of days and I haven't posted any of this yet. So let me post the details briefly. Then maybe later I can discuss some of them at greater length, at least to try to wrap my head around them.

Cassius mentioned that he had been diagnosed with ASD, and he then explained further that this is The-Syndrom-Formerly-Known-as-Asperger's. That news didn't surprise me much. I mentioned before that Cassius usually sounded scornful and acerbic when I knew him back in college. If he were somewhere on the autism-spectrum -- somewhere well towards the high-functioning end, but still on it -- that might explain why he would routinely speak in a way that risked alienating people. It's just a thought, and perhaps wrong ... but it did mean that I wasn't surprised by this particular piece of news. That makes this point stand out, in a conversation that largely had me raising my eyebrows ever higher.

Then he told me his wife had died a few years ago. Nothing strange in that, right? Only his wife was 22 years older than he was. She already had two daughters at the time she met Cassius, girls who therefore became his stepdaughters. (He has no children with his own DNA.) One of his stepdaughters was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. I remarked that this narrow age gap must have made his relationship with them rather ... umm ... unusual, if not actually strained. But no. He said that the girls told him that the years their mother had with him -- the 28 years their mother had with him [damn near as long as I was with Wife!] -- were the "only" happy years of her life. I'm left thinking that this must be a remarkable story, although Cassius didn't go into it a lot. He did mention that the age gap gave her a level of power in the relationship that could almost turn abusive, though he didn't dwell on this point. (He had more dramatic things to talk about later. See below.) 

But I do wonder what the story looked like from his stepdaughters' perspective? ("Oh look, Mom has married a boy our age! And it sure seems that things are better for her now than they were -- say, just for example -- all the time we were growing up!" I'm just saying that it's probably a hell of a story.)

Some time after his wife died, Cassius entered a relationship with a nonbinary individual that I'll call M. I'm not sure how long this relationship lasted, but apparently it ended only about a year ago. 

With Cassius getting a restraining order against her ... sorry, them. 

A restraining order issued some time after M had threatened his scalp with a machete ... and smashed a plate glass window with something they were throwing at him ... and ... oh gosh, there was more but I don't remember it all. 

But in the course of the account, Cassius definitely used words like violent, sociopathic, and narcissistic. Also the word abuse. He used that one a whole lot, actually.

So he and I spent a while discussing what it is like to come to the realization that you are being abused, long after the events themselves.

But there was even more after that. Or it might have come before, ... I don't quite remember. This post is a logical reconstruction of the call, and not a chronological one.

On top of the rest of it, Cassius explained that he has been in therapy recently (no kidding!); and after deep reflection, he has come to understand that he suffers from gender dysphoria. And so he is currently considering (or perhaps planning) whether to transition to being a woman.

Honestly, I had not expected this last point. Even with all the rest of it.

This evening I talked with Marie over Skype, and I brought her up to date on the news from Cassius. (We had all been friends together back in college.) She said the gender dysphoria didn't surprise her, and she reminded me of one Halloween when Cassius decided to dress elegantly as a woman. I remembered the occasion, but I thought he had just dressed up like that for the hell of it. Marrie said yes, of course once Cassius had established his character as scornful and acerbic, anyone would naturally interpret his choice to dress up as a woman as no more than a way to tweak everyone's expectations. And that was certainly how he played it at the time. But she added that just because he played it that way doesn't mean that was his real or only motive.

I've mentioned before that Marie is really smart. Right?

Anyway, my conversation with Cassius was really long.

           

Pleasantly surprised

Background

I got an email today from Wife. The context is that when my company-paid health insurance ended in September, I dithered for a while and then signed up for a COBRA policy. I told the boys I'd cover them until they could sign up for insurance of their own through their jobs; I told Wife I'd cover her through December. After that, I said, either I would cancel her coverage or I would deduct the cost from her alimony check: her choice.

OK, strictly speaking it's not even "alimony" at this point. Our Separation Agreement ties the amount of alimony to my salary: right now I am unemployed and have no salary, so legally I should be paying zero alimony. But I told Wife I didn't want to be an asshole, so I am continuing to make payments as long as I can afford it. I have explained that if some day I can no longer afford it, she should remember that there is nothing legally binding about these payments.

On the other hand, the cost of COBRA coverage for her totals just over 50% of the size of those payments. So if I deduct that from her payments, she won't have a lot left. At the time, I suggested that she look for cheaper insaurance.

What I expected her to write

I expected her to have done nothing since then, to have been paralyzed by the need for action. I expected her to be frightened and panicked, and therefore angry and accusatory. I expected her to have forgotten just how far I have done her favors during this process, and to demand more because she needs it.

I was wrong on all counts.

What she wrote instead

Her email was clear and detailed. She explained that naturally the best case from her perspective was something other than what was available, but she fully recognized that it wasn't available. She had, in fact, found and signed up for an alternate insurance plan, and described in some detail what it will and won't cover. Therefore, she said I should go ahead and cancel the COBRA insurance for her at the end of this month. She also expressed gratitude for everything I have done for her so far, and ended the email by mentioning some happy things that have dropped into her life lately.

She said nothing about her needs. She thanked me and demanded nothing beyond what I had offered. She did ask a couple of clarifying questions about what expenses she could slide under the wire, but they were all posed as pure questions and not disguised challenges.

And I was just a little bit stunned. Has she been able to do this all along, and just chose not to? Or has she been practicing? Has she turned over a new leaf somehow? Is she in the process of another dramatic personality change, kind of like the one I wrote about a few days ago, but in the other direction? That last option sounds far-fetched, but who knows? I suppose anything is possible. Anyway, reading her email was a little bit like preparing for a step and then finding that it's not there. Almost disorienting.

But I was pleasantly surprised.

Does this mean that my long-standing fear of her is going to be out of date some time soon? That might be a lot to ask, but I suppose anything is possible. I guess we'll see.  

  

TEDx talk about fathers and the law

I wish I had seen this TEDx talk back in the day: back when I was so afraid that the courts would be prejudiced against me because I was a father, and that Wife would automatically get custody in case of divorce because Motherhood. (But see also here.)

Of course, what she says is that the courts really are prejudiced against fathers, and that fathers really do lose their children when they shouldn't. But it would have been nice to know there was someone in my corner anyway. She also says that things are very slowly getting better, which is good to know. Of course, the talk dates from 2020: that's seven years after Wife and I finally separated, and eleven years after I first engaged an attorney and planned to serve Wife with divorce papers. On the other hand, even back then my attorney told me that in our state courts usually assigned custody to be 50/50.

Probably it is just as well that, for all her tough talk, Wife was so inert and passive, so dependent on me, that she basically let me write the whole separation agreement. At least it meant that I dodged any number of bullets which would have come at me in case of a serious fight. I guess it's good to know that things are slowly getting better for other fathers.

    

Celebrity gossip can be terrifying

A couple of months ago I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a post by Chris Ryan about Woody Allen, who has lived under the shadow of child sexual abuse accusations since 1992 (almost 30 years as of this writing). This was never a case that I was terribly interested in, but I knew in a general way that Allen had been long ago convicted of Doing Bad Shit in the court of public opinion. So I was a little surprised by what Ryan said.

Then a couple of days later he posted a link to a blog post by Moses Farrow which discussed the whole sordid story in detail and rejected all of it.

Moses Farrow's blog is here. 

Why do I call it "terrifying"? Because for years I lived in fear of Wife making exactly the same kinds of accusations against me, and in fear of her getting away with it. Maybe I had a warped notion of how the legal system worked, but it was not until I finally got my own attorney that I could even imagine that the Court might not automatically take Wife's word against mine, or that reason and evidence might stand a chance against her self-proclaimed identity as a Woman Abused. I don't know where I picked up these ideas: maybe from the Internet, maybe from listening to my father's troglodytic opinions on sexual politics, maybe just from my own generic insecurities. No idea, really. But this is part of why I wanted us to stay out of Court when we separated, even though by then I was a lot more confident in my ability to survive the process.

At one point Wife did tell her pastor and a teacher at the boys' elementary school that she thought I was too violent with them. The case got referred to a local Social Services office (I don't remember the exact department name after all these years), so that she and I had to make an appointment to go sit in someone's office and explain What Really Happened. She had based the whole story on some event that really had taken place a few days ago, though she had twisted elements of it to make it sound far worse than it really was. I described what happened, she didn't contradict me, and the official dismissed the whole event with a vague irritation as clearly not having been worth the time and effort. 
 
I don't know if she was trying to play some kind of three-dimensional chess by getting my name on a record somewhere so that she could use it against me later? Or maybe she didn't even know why she did it? Honestly I don't know. If she had really believed the children were at risk, surely she would have made some objections when I described what really happened in a way that exposed how small a molehill this really was. Wouldn't she?

I also remember that one time when the boys were playing with her very rambunctiously she got a bruise on her stomach from one of them careening headlong into her. She took a Polaroid photo of the bruise right away and kept it in her dresser. Whenever I asked why she gave an answer that told me nothing. I always assumed she was going to claim I had hit her and that she had the photo as proof.  

In any event it seems like she stopped trying to build this kind of a case against me after the night she was arrested. That whole business cost us lots of money, but if it made her decide there was no point in trying to make me look bad, I suppose that was an unexpected benefit. 

I've wandered a long way from talking about Woody Allen. As I say, I was never very focused on the story in the first place. But reading Moses Previn's blog was terrifying in retrospect, for much the same reason that I found "Gone Girl" so scary. And I guess I'm grateful that Wife never actually did any of those things to me in real life. For whatever reason ....
         

Home ownership

Back in February, Marie and I had a conversation (over text) about home ownership. It started when she was talking about some routine natural disaster in her area -- I don't remember if it was heavy rain or sudden snow or quite what it was. And she talked about a coworker who had been delayed getting to work by having to mop up after the crisis. Anyway, from there the discussion went on like this: .... 

 
The poem she is referencing is this one here.

I'm not sure whether I have more to say about the subject besides this. But yes, sometimes I do miss owning a house....
   

The Oscar Diggs problem

I own only a small number of movies, and I've seen most of them multiple times. But I'm also stuck home alone for weeks on-end in coronavirus quarantine. So one by one, I've been re-watching them.

Last night I re-watched "Oz the Great and Powerful," and I found myself thinking afterwards about the Oscar Diggs problem. Oscar Zoroaster Diggs is the protagonist, played by James Franco; he's a con man and a stage magician in a traveling circus in Kansas around the turn of the last century (the movie starts in 1905), who gets caught in a hot-air balloon during a sudden tornado and is blown into ... the Land of Oz. Right away people start to ask him if he is perhaps the great Wizard who -- according to prophecy -- was destined to appear mysteriously one day and save the land from its troubles. And of course you can tell right away where this is going. From the beginning, we all know that James Franco is going to grow up to be Frank Morgan.

So what do I mean by "the Oscar Diggs problem"? Right near the beginning of the movie, Oscar (still in Kansas) is talking to a beautiful young woman who is apparently a sweetheart of his, about his future and prospects. She has come to tell him that another mutual acquaintance, a man named John Gale, has proposed marriage to her; and to her clear disappointment Oscar tells her that John Gale is a good man and should make her a fine husband. She suggests that Oscar, too, is a good man, and he replies, "No, I’m not. I’m many things, but a good man is not one of them." When she then goes on to say, "But you could be, if you wanted to," his reply shows that he has really thought this question through in a serious way:

Well, that’s just it. I don’t want to. See Kansas is full of good men, churchgoing men that get married and raise families, men like John Gale. Men like my father, who spent his whole life plowing the dirt, just to die face down in it. I don’t want that, Annie. I don’t want to be a good man, I want to be great one. I want to be Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison all rolled into one.

I give Oscar Diggs credit for seriousness even though in many ways he presents as a very unserious man, because he is clear-headed enough to see that this is a choice and that (mostly) you can't have both. The things you do to be good are not the things you do to be great; and he is willing to lie, deceive, seduce, use others, and walk out on his commitments — all without a second thought — in order to get closer to being great.

The first two years after we married, Wife and I were both in graduate school. At the time I wanted to be a great scholar, and I believed (based on having been patted on the head so nicely all the way through school) that I had the raw talent to get there. We fought a lot during that time, because we both had unstated agendas that we never bothered to articulate for the other (let alone discuss, negotiate ... anything like that). And after two years, Wife announced she was leaving. OK, it was more complicated than that. She had interrupted a burglary and was the only witness to it; the accused was another graduate student, but Wife is white and he was black; the University (mostly white or immigrant) had a deplorable history of arrogant and entitled racism with respect to the surrounding Town (mostly black), stretching back for decades, so when criminal charges were brought against a black student by a white one it became a political hot potato overnight. There were threats against Wife, and the local police suggested she might find it easiest just to leave town. She finished out the semester but then did exactly that. And she told me I could come with her, or I could stay in school, but I had to pick. I had one summer to make up my mind.

Oh, that was also around the time she met Boyfriend 1, started fucking him within the same week, and admitted it to me a week later. He lived in our home state, so if I followed her back she wasn't going to promise that it would save the marriage because she might decide for him instead of me. But if I stayed at the University she would for sure divorce me.

What a "might-have-been" .... Wow.

So I spent the summer thinking about it. I figured that if I left graduate school, I would never go back. (This turned out to be true, although Wife went back to graduate school -- a different one! -- after three years of teaching high school.) I had no idea what I would do instead. The only thing I had ever done in my life was to go to school; so while I knew I was pretty good at it, I had no idea what else there was out there I could do. On the other hand, with the absolutism of youth, I also interpreted this as a make-or-break moment for me as a married man. That is to say, of course it was critical for this marriage; but I also felt that if I failed at this marriage, it would be careless or reckless for me ever to enter another one. I had entered this marriage partly in a spirit of desperation, because I knew that my social development was weak and I was shy-to-the-point-of-aphasia around personal questions or relationships or sex. I knew I didn't want to spend the rest of my life like that, and I oversimplified the question to myself to the point where I assumed I had to stay in the marriage to get any better.

In fact the way I framed the question to myself was this: Is it better to be good, or is it better to be great? Exactly the Oscar Diggs question. I figured that staying in school meant greatness as a scholar (though of course nobody ever promises us anything). And I defined goodness to mean the ordinary life of a householder: job, children, house in the suburbs, dog (though I've never really been a big fan of pets).

I also realized that the problem -- as phrased -- is a loaded question, not a fair one. Which is better? But better means "more good" by definition. Suppose I had asked, "Which is bluer, blue or purple?" What would that question even mean? And how could anyone possibly answer anything but "blue"? Of course blue is bluer than purple. So likewise if the question is, "Which is more good, goodness or greatness?" how can the answer possibly be anything other than "Goodness, of course." It's a glib, sophomoric answer to the question, but strictly speaking it's correct.

At the same time I also spent a lot of time thinking about Doctor Faustus -- and especially about Thomas Mann's version of the story. What I find truly distinctive in Mann's version is the Pact with Mephistopheles. Unlike every other version of the Pact scene, in which Faust conjures up the devil and asks for his service in exchange for Faust's soul, Mann has Mephistopheles initiate the meeting and his message to Faust is, in essence: You and I have already signed a pact years ago, and it is implicit in the very way you live. But it is time that we clarified the terms. If you don't like those terms you can always reject the offer, but it means giving up a way of life to which you have already become accustomed, giving up the productive genius that you are already starting to exhibit and which you can already see carrying you forward to great things in the future. If you don't like the terms of the pact you can always turn your back on your genius; you can walk away from the greatness that already stretches out in front of you. Having tasted that greatness, you can choose to be poor and simple and mediocre. Having ventured onto the high seas, you can piss away the rest of your life chugging back and forth in the shallows. But if you continue in the way that you have already started, and in the way that you are already well confirmed on -- then you are mine.

That's not the only sense in which I identified with the story of Faust (see also here) ... but it was certainly one of them.

As I write this now, I realize that the "choice between goodness and greatness" isn't really a loaded question. It's just badly worded. Because the first alternative isn't really "goodness". "Goodness" is just whatever is good. Really the choice means, "What is good? Is it found in victory and acclaim and glory? Is it found in what Homer calls κλέος ἄφθιτον -- undying fame? Or is it found in the quieter life of daily duty, kindness, honesty, and consideration for others? Is it found in the mundane disciplines of marriage, parenthood, and holding a job? (Mundane, but no less demanding for all that!)"

That's the real question.

I still think I made the right choice, even if I made it on the basis of a sophomoric argument. Partly I guess my opinion is based on my deep ambivalence about academic life: at the same time that I am convinced of my own potential for scholarly greatness, I also still harbor the reservations that I spell out at some length here. And I do think that there is a huge value in the "mundane disciplines." To be sure, scholarship also requires its own disciplines; but I mean that there is a value to the kind of discipline that doesn't simultaneously pander to the ego: that while there is some value in hearing, "In order to grasp the greatness which is rightfully yours, you have to submit to this and that first," there is far more value in hearing, "You are nobody special, and you have to submit to this and that anyway ... just because!"

Also, if I had taken that fork in the road I would always have wondered what would have happened had I only taken this fork. No matter what choice a person makes, it is possible to regret the loss of the other one.

And while I recognize now the foolishness of believing (as I did back then) that this was the only chance I had to learn how to be with other people, to learn how to be intimate, to learn how to face my feelings, ... nonetheless if I had abandoned my marriage there's a level at which it would have made it just a little easier to do the same thing the next time things got tough. And so, while nothing would have been foreordained, I would have made it a little easier to reach old age without ever growing up. Some people do exactly that. (I think my Father was one of them, although exploring that topic would take a whole post on its own.)

In the end it all works out for Oscar Diggs. He gets to be great and good, both at once. But of course the implication of that outcome is that being good doesn't have to mean falling down dead behind your plow. Somehow you can be good by using what you've got. If you are a con man, be a con man in a good cause. If you are a philosopher-manqué, write a blog. It's a nice idea. Does it work? Well it worked for Oscar, and I suppose I'm not especially discontent with where I find myself these days either. 
.

Wife wants to come to my family’s Christmas ... now!

Dear God, how did I let this happen?

It was just about a year ago that Wife emailed me saying she wanted to come to my family's Christmas celebration. [https://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2018/12/wife-wants-to-come-to-my-familys.html] At the time I didn't try to dissuade her too hard because I assumed the idea would be a complete non-starter. But nobody in the family likes to make a fuss. People put up with shit rather than to rock the boat. So Wife was over at my mother's house one evening several months ago — she was in town for a doctor's appointment and couldn't drive all the way home yet that night — and apparently broached the issue. My mother apparently did not say "No" or at any rate didn't say it loudly enough. And so Wife decided she had an invitation and it was a done deal.

Son 2 flew back to town from college on Sunday. Since Son 1 is living in my apartment, there's not a lot of room for Son 2 as well, and so the two boys agreed that Son 2 would spend some time with Wife. So I drove him there Monday night. And while I was trying to make pleasant chit-chat as I dropped him off, Wife said something about "when we go to your mother's house for Christmas." 

"We"???

I asked her what she meant. She said she had been invited by my mother, and she was sure nobody had a problem with it. I hadn't voiced an objection a year ago. I told her this was news to me. Why hadn't I heard anything about it before? I don't remember what else I said. There must have been something. I got out of there as quickly as I could. I went straight home and started drinking. 

The next day I called my mother from work to ask her, "Did you invite Wife to Christmas?" Her answer right away was, "No! Umm ... why do you ask?" I explained. And that's when I got the story about a few months ago. But my mother also said she'd be willing to go along with any plans that made everybody happy. I told her I couldn't have Wife there, so I also undertook to tell Wife not to come. I sent her a short email to that effect, and then notified both boys that I had done so (because I knew she would take it out on them and I wanted to prepare them). 

Later that day, Son 2 called me. We had a long talk. First he tried to sell me on letting her come. Then he asked me why not. I explained that I wasn't trying to control her, but that I couldn't be around her. It was emotional self-defense on my part, pure and simple. So then he asked, well what if I visit my mother for December 25, and maybe 26 or 27, and then go home and Wife visits after that? "It's fine that you don't want to be around her, because honestly she doesn't want to be around you either." (Music to my ears.) I said that would be OK and we agreed to work out the details later. 

This evening I talked with Son 1. Even though he lives in my apartment, what with one thing and another we hadn't seen each other for several days. He explained that he had been really angry with me for the last 24 hours, because of the emotional firestorm that Wife had apparently unleashed. He said my note to them that I had told Wife not to come felt like I had pulled the pin on a live grenade and tossed it into their laps. I asked, "Why are you mad at me and not at your mom who is the one dumping all the fiery emotions on you?" He answered, "Oh I can be mad at more than one person at the same time, don't worry! There's plenty of anger on that side too. I can be mad at both Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un at the same time if I have to." I smiled and told him I was glad he could multitask. But then as we talked some more it developed that he wanted to know the same thing Son 2 had, namely Why? When I explained that I just couldn't be around her for Christmas, he relaxed. OK, that he could understand as a motive. His bottom line was that he wished, when I had told him and his brother that I had told Wife not to come, that I had added the words "because I just can't spend the holiday around her." He said that would have given the two of them more to work with in managing her. I replied that it never occurred to me that would be helpful to them, and so it was really easy for me to apologize for not having done so. That seemed to resolve that, and we started talking about dinner. 

But I think nobody understands how terrified I am of Wife. That's probably because I have never admitted it to anyone, never discussed how abusive she was, never clarified that in retrospect I now look back and call myself an abused spouse (though I never used that terminology at the time). The behaviors were all there: covering for her, making excuses, cleaning up the damage, and being afraid to come home from work every single night because I didn't know what I was going to face. But I never confided in anyone at the time — anyone! And so I assume that if I try to say something now people will just assume that I am lying to garner sympathy. I assume no one will believe me ... partly because I never said anything then, partly because Wife has probably prepared the ground with stories about how awful I am (so that any stories from either of us about the other will be written off), and partly for the same reason I never thought to use the term at the time: because the archetype of an abused spouse is a battered housewife. Wife's abuse of me was mostly non-physical (emotional, financial, social, but not physical) and of course I'm a man while she's a woman. How could she be the abuser? How could I be weak enough to let it happen?

That last one is easy. I've always been weak. But the rest of it? I don't have high hopes. And so I'll probably still not say anything.

God, but she scares me though. 

Sent from my iPhone

Wife wants to come to my family's Christmas

I got an email from Wife a couple days ago, as follows:

Dear Hosea,

I still very much love and miss our family -- which is how I think of [your relatives]. The greatest Christmas gift you could ever give me would be to include me in family festivities, not because I'm depressed and lonely up here,or I'm not getting my fair share of time with the boys (that's really entirely up to them at this point) but because they're good people, and I enjoy their company. I would enjoy sharing the holidays with them, including you. I guarantee I can be civil,and better than that, and I think we mutually proved that at Son 1's thesis defense, for which I thank you again. [Looks like I haven't posted that story yet and it ain't gonna happen tonight.] The only time you rebuked me, you were right -- and I did remember my question and ask Son 1 later.

Please just consider it -- maybe not this year, but maybe for the future. If you think you could ever entertain the idea,maybe you could run it up the flagpole this year. I honestly think the rest of the family would be fine with my being there..

Wife

 

Wow, is she just completely  tone deaf? Does she not realize that the only reason the rest of the family put up with her so long was for my sake? Apparently not. In any event I replied like this:

 

Hi there!

 

Sorry I didn't reply to this right away, but I wanted to give it some thought rather than just replying off the cuff.

 

I will admit that my very first reaction when I read your letter was that I thought it would feel a little weird. [Imagine her coming to Thanksgiving some year that Marie is there too.] But then my second reaction was that you are absolutely right when you say [my family] are good people. And we all want good people in our lives. Don't we? That's when I decided to think about it more carefully.

 

Here's what I came up with.

 

It's not strange that you contacted me first to ask about this, but in the long run I think that's not your best strategy. If you approach the family through me, then it's going to look to everyone like you are there as my guest, or like you are somehow under my wing. But that's not really true any more (except where it concerns medical insurance!) and in your email below you take care to make a point that is different in subtle but important ways. Specifically, you make it clear that it's really not about me at all: you want to spend time with these people for your own reasons, on your own initiative, because they are good people. It's about you and them. I am sort of an afterthought -- maybe not literally, but for these purposes and in a manner of speaking.

 

But in that case I think your best strategy is not to wait until Christmas rolls around again a year from now. Work on your own independent relationship with these people during the year. You may not be able to get out to [my mom's city] very often, and my mother doesn't drive as much as she used to. But Brother and SIL are peripatetic, because SIL's work takes her all over. Maybe you could drop her a note about fashion, or invite them over to tea the next time they drive up the coast. Or maybe those are bad ideas but you'll think of something better. But the core point is this: if what you want is a relationship with these people that is independent of your relationship with me, then the way to get it is to work on developing the relationship with them directly without using me as an intermediary.

 

Once you've laid that groundwork successfully, then I think next Christmas should take care of itself. At least, that's the way it looks to me.

 

I don't know if this is helpful, but it is the best I have come up with.

 

Merry Christmas,
 H.

 

I'm a little afraid she'll do it. but on the whole I think that's a risk I'm willing to run. I don't think anyone else will accept her invitations.

 

It's really late and I'm going to bed. Night-night, all!

Banking

Met with Wife at the bank today: to take my name of our joint checking account, to close our joint savings accounts (both of them), to close some other miscellaneous accounts we don’t need any more, and to take my name off the safe deposit box. We checked it first: the only stuff in it is hers: her family Bible, some negatives of photos of her ancestors, and a few other ancient keepsakes.

 

Two accounts we can’t close right now. One is a line of credit in both our names; the only way to take my name off it is to close it completely and then let Wife reapply for a new one. They are going to get her some information about which credit products are available. The other is a savings account for Son 1 that really should be changed into an adult account (since he’s no longer a minor) but that requires him to be there. Some time this summer.

 

It was a “long lunch” … I guess I was gone from the office a couple hours. But it sure wasn’t hard work. We got to sit down the whole time, in a nice, air-conditioned office. We were pleasant to each other. Distant, of course, but pleasant.

 

Why am I so tired?

 

Must be getting old ….

 

 

12,004 days

I got an e-mail this morning from my attorney’s paralegal. Attached was a scanned copy of the Separation Decree, signed and dated by the Court. As of last Saturday, the State officially recognizes our separation. From that day, counting backwards to the wedding, was twelve thousand and four days exactly.

What a funny number … so close to something so round. Let’s see … that’s 1714 weeks and six days. (That’s right, we were married on a Sunday. I’d forgotten.) It’s a little over 394 months. Or it’s just seven weeks exactly shy of thirty-three years.

Thirty-three years. Starting back when I was twenty-two. (See if you can figure out how old I am now!) People told us we were too young to get married. Even my parents told us that, though they were 25 and 21 when they tied the knot. I was the first of my college friends to get married, as Wife was the first of hers. 

What in God’s name were we thinking?

Of course I’ve long said that without the marriage I would never have gotten any older. Without it I would have stayed the same immature prat I was back then. Is that true? Who knows? Maybe there would have been something else that would have grown me up. There’s never any way to tell this kind of thing.

As I’ve been typing this, I’ve been thinking about my life in eleven-year blocks … all because of the conjunction of 33 and 22 a couple paragraphs ago.

When I was 11, my family moved back to the USA from living abroad.
When I was 22, I married Wife.
When I was 33, we bought a house and (a few months later) I got my first managerial job.
When I was 44, Wife started her affair with Boyfriend 4. A few months later was the night she was arrested. A few months after that, Boyfriend 4 came to live with us. Son 1 was nine years old at that point. Son 2 was seven.
When I was 55, … well, that’s today. The separation is signed and filed.

It’s been four years since I moved out of the house – almost five years since I told Wife I wanted a divorce. Eight years since I decided it for myself, and made her agree to separate our money.

Nine and a half years since I started this blog.

Big milestone.
__________

I learned some years ago not to make major decisions for a while after having to make one big emotional decision. Well I didn’t have to make any decisions today (big or small), and this is a day I’ve been awaiting for a long time. It should be no big deal, and in some ways it’s not.

But I still better not make any big decisions for the rest of the day.

Hope you all are doing well.

Friend from high school

It's late so I'll keep this short.

As part of Working Out Loud, I joined Twitter. When I joined Twitter, I had to follow somebody. One of the people I chose was a fellow who works in tech now (in a whole different city from me) but who was my best friend in high school. I have mentioned him briefly in passing twice before: here and here. I'll call him Dale. Since I haven't been in touch with Dale much lately, I snooped around on Google to find out what's going on with him. And I found out he's divorced.

Now, I would never have expected Dale to divorce. He's a born-again Christian, and I always assumed that he would consider divorce unthinkable. But then, once upon a time I considered it unthinkable. You folks remember that from the earliest posts in this blog. Opinions change.

So I wrote him an e-mail to ask about it. And I got a reply in which he said that the marriage had been dead for a long time but he finally last year took the steps to end it for good. (Dale got married the year after I did. When he said "It's been dead since ..." the year he mentioned was the year before Son 1 was born. That's a long time.)

It actually looks like there are a lot of similarities between his story and mine. We've been married about the same length of time. We began to end it around similar times. Each marriage generated two sons. And ... this is what really struck me ... Dale's wife suffers from fibromyalgia and depression, just like Wife does. When I joked to Dale that Wife and I had picked "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" as "our play" he answered that the similarities between my marriage and his were so significant they were creepy. He couldn't stay to discuss it any more because he was about to leave on a trip to take one of his sons to Japan for a week. But I hope to talk to him more later.

I wonder if he ever had an affair? Or if she did?
     

Dream

The Greeks used to consider the very last dream before you wake up in the morning the most likely to be prophetic. Here's mine from last night.

I am at my desk, at home in some house ... not sure it was ever a real one. My father is leaning over my shoulder picking up scraps of paper off my desk to read them, and I am pulling the scraps out of his hand trying to shoo him away. And then he starts asking me why I haven't finished up the paperwork separating from Wife. I make some kind of noises that I'll get around to it, but I'm not too concerned. He gets agitated and tells me he is very concerned. Also he has been paying a lot of money to make this happen, and why am I not pulling my weight? A lot of money? Yes, he's been paying a private detective to ... not sure what. Collect dirt on Wife, or make sure she doesn't do something dangerous, or something like that. [In reality, he hasn't done anything of the kind.] I comment that I don't think she can do much damage (most of my money is in accounts she can't touch) so I don't see a need to worry. And he answers, "Well nobody under the age of twenty-five agrees with you!" [I think this must have been the equivalent of a typographical error in the dream and that he meant to say "over the age of twenty-five" ... i.e., all my relatives except maybe the boys disagree with me.]

He hasn't really been paying for a detective. And Wife has no ownership on the accounts where my money is kept. So for the most part I really don't think there is much to worry about. But probably I should get my shit together anyway ....

The future of marriage

It's been a while since I sat down to make any dogmatic pronouncements about what marriage is or isn't … about what it should be or shouldn't be.  Maybe I lost interest once I finally started to get my own marriage sorted out.  Also, now that I think about it, I realize that I am a little more skeptical than I once was of one-size-fits-all solutions.  If you can find a modus vivendi that works for you and the people around you, that's probably all you need.

But I have started reading Pamela Druckerman's book Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee (2007).  And I find that there is a little voice in the back of my head commenting on what I read.  So after reading one interview my little voice says, "Yeah, that's about right"; while after reading another it might say, "That person doesn't begin to understand what marriage is really about."  So maybe I have arrived at a new dogmatic position after all, without realizing it.  Maybe if I open up this post and just start typing, I can figure out 

what it is that I've come to believe.

Marriage is a school for character.

I first argued that on some Internet discussion list twenty years ago, I argued it more recently than that on the Patio site, and I still believe it.  Living with another person, making your plans around another person, having to consider the other person in everything you do … these things bring you face to face with your own selfish impulses, and you have to conquer them or you are lost.  So it's a good thing (from this perspective) that marriage is so cumbersome to get out of.  That cumbersomeness forces you to go back and try again and again before just moving out.

Marriage provides a home for raising children.

I argued this on the same Internet discussion list, I still believe it, and I am convinced it is the single most important thing marriage can do.  If you have children, and if your marriage provides a good home for them to grow up in, I can excuse a lot of other dysfunctions.  Of course I'm not talking about the kinds of dysfunctions that make the marriage a bad place to grow up, nor the kind that will teach the children bad ways to behave as adults.  But if somehow you can manage to provide a genuinely wholesome environment in which your children can grow into kind, considerate, responsible, and mindful adults, then your other failures – though they may tarnish your life in other respects – are pretty much excusable from the perspective of your marriage.  This actually deserves to be set up as a principle of its own.

Marriage must be practical, not idealistic.

Marriage doesn't have to fulfill you, and probably won't.  It doesn't have to make you happy, and possibly won't – some days it is sure to make you unhappy, and for some people that's how it works out in the long run too.  You don't have any right to expect or demand fulfillment or happiness from the world; and – if you did – marriage isn't the tool to get you there.  By the same token, you shouldn't expect perfect transparency, where the two of you can peer clearly into each other's souls.  (This is another big change in my opinions, because perfect transparency in marriage is something I used to long for.)  If by some miracle this or that person really is fulfilled or made happy by marriage, that's great.  Of course.  But it is only a happy accident and the rest of us shouldn't get our hopes up.  Your mileage may vary.

Adultery happens. Get over it.

I don't mean adultery is inevitable, because it's not.  I don't mean that it happens in a majority of cases, because it doesn't.  But I do want to argue that it doesn't have to be a big deal, and that most married couples would probably be happier if they were willing to treat adultery (or even the threat of adultery) as no big deal.

This is a big change from what I believed back when I started this blog seven years ago.  Back then I was torn between my intellectual conviction (based largely on the arguments of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land) that there was nothing logical in jealousy, and the heart-rending anguish I felt at Wife's affairs.  I wrote a lot of posts trying to explain (to myself as much as anyone) why I felt the way I did.  And maybe I didn't have to go to so much trouble, because feelings are feelings.  They don't have to be explained or justified … they are what they are.  But partly they are fueled by expectations: if you expect absolute monogamy, then adultery feels like betrayal; and that's a very nasty feeling indeed.  Even if your intellectual expectations about monogamy as such are confused or inchoate (as mine were), if you nonetheless expect marriage to make you happy or fulfilled (as I did) then adultery pulls the ground out from under you so that you tumble disoriented into free-fall.  So it is important to understand that marriage has to be practical, that it can't meet all your earthly desires.  That may not be enough by itself to stop you from hurting the first time your spouse fucks somebody else, but maybe it is a starting-point from which you can begin to work on yourself.  After all, marriage is a school for character, right?

Of course, if you are the spouse left sitting home alone, you are within your rights to ask for help.  It's not like you should be forced to deal with the pain all by yourself, when maybe the two of you can figure out an accommodation which makes things smoother for both of you.  On the other hand, as noted above, it's unrealistic to ask for perfect transparency as the "accommodation" you need.

Another consequence of everything I have said so far is that – if you've got children in the house – adultery is not grounds for divorce.  Period.  In fact, if you've got children in the house then I think divorce-on-demand has to be wrong.  Children don't need their parents to be happy and fulfilled, but they do need stability.  So as long as they are living at home, divorce should be allowed only for causes which endanger that stability in one way or another.  Such causes exist – incest, addiction, abuse, and abandonment are a few that come to mind.  But claiming "irreconcilable differences" cannot be good enough, any more than arguing that your wife burned your soup.  Suck it up, bubbeleh.  For the sake of the children.

On the other hand, going starry-eyed romantic over your lover-du-jour is no excuse for abandoning your responsibilities as a parent, any more than your boss will accept it as an excuse for abandoning your responsibilities on the job.  If you want to spend a long lunch fucking like bunnies and coming in waves, that's great – but you still have to make goddamned sure that Junior gets to Little League practice on time, that you are there to applaud at Sister's ballet recital, and that dinner is ready at a suitable hour when the whole family can sit down at once and eat together.  These things are a given, one way or another.  If you can find some clever way to plan a creative sex life around these constraints, more power to you.

But this consideration leads ineluctably to another one.

Marriage does not have to be between one man and one woman.

This phrase is used as a political slogan in the fight over gay marriage, and of course (as I have already explained in another Patio article) I agree with the implication there.  There is nothing in the nature of marriage that restricts it to heterosexual unions.  But I want to make another point that is just as important but a lot more radical:  there is nothing in the nature of marriage that confines it to dyadic pairs.  In fact, raising children is so much work that there is a good argument for spreading the burden among more than two people.

I speak here from experience.  You may remember that Boyfriend 4 lived with us for two years.  There were tensions and problems, but the really bad ones – the insuperable ones – were all related to his alcoholism.  The other tensions we could handle.  And honestly, as long as Boyfriend 4 was sober, it was a huge relief knowing that there was one more competent adult in the house.  Partly this is because Wife was often sick, or tired, or crazy.  But that wasn't all of it.  We found we could each take over certain areas of responsibility because we didn't have to worry about the others.  Wife volunteered in the boys's classroom.  Boyfriend 4 kept the boys on task in the evenings till they finished their homework, and fixed dinners.  I earned an income that could support all of us – not lavishly, and certainly not to the levels Wife was hoping for.  So after a while we asked Boyfriend 4 to get a part-time job to pay for his cigarettes and other vices (booze excluded) … also to pay off some long-term debts that had followed him around for years because he was irresponsible with money.  (Ironically, even though he was admittedly bad at managing money, he was able to put a brake on Wife's spending by chaperoning her most of the day.)

Even if it had been legal, it would have been a bad idea to "marry" Boyfriend 4: his alcoholism and his history of bad debts would have made the idea a non-starter.  But that means somebody else in the same position – maybe as part of a different family than ours – could have a place.  If a third adult helps make the family a more stable, nurturing environment for the kids to grow up in – and Boyfriend 4 certainly did that, as long as he was sober – then why not?

Once the kids are out of the house, it might be time to call it quits.

That doesn't have to be true for everybody, of course.  But it was true for us.  And some marriages really aren't made to last forever.  I used to think that all marriages should last forever, until mine didn't.  Now I understand that this is something nobody can dogmatize over, and in my dour and depressive moods I think marriage laws ought to be reformed to allow separation at a moment's notice.  But not really.  Because children require stability, marriage should be stable as long as the children are at home.  But after that, you've done your job.  Anything extra is gravy.  Of course some couples stay together happily until death.  Others don't.  For those that don't – provided they managed to raise healthy, happy, well-adjusted children before going their separate ways – there's no room for blame.  These things happen, and sometimes they are right.