Distracted

If my boss had any idea how unproductive I have become, he'd fire my ass.

A year ago I could still think coherent thoughts in a linear fashion about how my job fits into the larger picture in my company. I could see where things needed to be expanded and improved. I could contemplate what my next career step might be. I could collaborate in useful and interesting ways with colleagues from other locations. I could contribute ideas worth listening to.

That was a year ago.

And today?

Today I can sneak in an hour-long phone call to my newly-retained attorney while she explains to me how to file for divorce. I can look up interesting books on the Internet, or research high schools that might be good for my boys once they are old enough for high school. Occasionally -- too rarely -- I can even post to my blog. And I can write to D, think about D, miss D, spend long hours fantasizing about fucking D's brains out over and over.

But my actual work? Like, ... the stuff they pay me for? The quality of my work sucks, and I am months behind on some of it. Fortunately nobody has really caught on yet; or when they do notice, they blame it on the bad economy: "Oh, poor Hosea. The company had to downsize and now look at how much work he has ... you can tell he must have a lot because he is so far behind." People shake their heads and cluck their tongues sympathetically. And they don't seem to realize that -- mentally -- I'm not even there.

If I were told tomorrow that I was being demoted to emptying the trash cans, my big worries would be about the salary and the loss of privacy. It would mean I'd have to put in eight hours of work every day for my paycheck, which would seriously cut into my time for web-browsing, letter-writing, and sexual fantasizing. Only later would I realize that I ought to have been worried about things like a career track.

Just pathetic.

I sure hope none of you is actually my boss in disguise ....

Public and private, open and closed

Just a day or two ago, I was chatting with a friend who also has a blog -- ironically enough an infidelity blog -- and who had just gone private for reasons of security. (No, this is not D. As far as I know, D doesn't blog.) Anyway, she talked about all the reasons that going private was better -- reasons with which, under the circumstances, it was hard to argue. But I objected that if we were all private all the time, we could never meet other people out there with similar interests or stories. Somehow there is an inherent risk in making any kind of connection with each other, but life without those connections gets lonely fast.

I was reminded of that conversation today, when I was talking to D. I asked her about one or another of the social networking tools out there -- I forget if it was Facebook or LinkedIn or what -- and asked her if she ever used it. She was horrified, and I realized right away that it was a stupid question. D is in many ways an intensely private woman -- the thought of putting facts about herself (even the most innocuous facts) out where the world can read them is something she finds almost impossible to imagine. When I told her (almost a year ago now) that I blog, it took her a very long time to wrap her mind around the fact.

What seems so odd to me is that there can never have been a woman alive more devoted to what she calls "community-building": making friends, keeping in touch with friends, connecting with people regularly throughout the day or the week. And I have to wonder if there is something a little strange in this picture: ceaselessly keeping in touch with friends around the world, tirelessly keeping the lines of communication open ... and yet building and guarding high walls so that the wrong things can't be seen by the wrong eyes.

Is that strange? Is it paradoxical? Or is it like the "paradox" of a free society, that it actually takes a strong government to ensure enough safety that people can afford to live freely? Is it no more than the old adage that "Good fences make good neighbors"?

I don't know the answer, and I'd be interested in hearing other people's thoughts. But I do know that without some openness -- some publicity, some risk -- we would all sit huddled behind our own walls and never meet each other at all. And that would be really lonely.

Sex therapist says to snoop online

OK, this is a bit of fluff but it caught my eye. When I log out of Hotmail -- yes, that's the account you see on the sidebar of this blog -- I get dumped on the msn.com home page. This morning that page advertised an article by some popular sex therapist named Ian Kerner called "Why you should snoop on your spouse online." I don't know if Kerner is well-known, or if I should have heard of him before. (It will come as no surprise that in some ways I really need to get out more.) But it piqued my interest to see this published ... all the more so because I know several people in the infidelity blogosphere who have been through exactly this experience in the past year ... or who at any rate have been on the receiving end of some assiduous spousal snooping. And here we have a cultural avatar urging other spouses to do the same.

Of course, maybe I should be glad to see this -- after all, I was snooping on Wife long before I was doing anything snoop-worthy myself. I was never proud of it (and Kerner actually says that snoopers cannot claim the moral high ground); all I can say in my own defense is that whenever I got suspicious, there was always something behind it. He gives seven questions you should ask before you start checking e-mail accounts, and -- again, by the time I got suspicious that anything was up -- I could always answer every single one of them Yes. For what that's worth. Probably not much.

Anyway, the voice of the popular culture now appears to be in favor of snooping on your spouse online. Be warned.

Counseling 33

I got an e-mail from Counselor the other day, asking if I could come by and talk to him privately. So I did. Since I haven't been there for the last couple of months, he wanted to check my perspective on a few things.

What follows is written as a conversation, but the real conversation didn't go like this. What I am trying to do it to capture some of the themes we discussed, and this seems like the easiest way to do it.

Hosea: So, what's up? You asked me to come in ...?

Counselor: Yes. Where should I start? You know I have been beginning to try to get Wife to start the first steps of beginning the CBT work that I proposed to her. But she keeps telling me that she is so wrapped up in the conflict with you that she can't focus on it. What's your perspective?

Hosea: What conflict? The house is quieter than it has ever been. Of course that's because we never speak to each other except strictly functionally. But then, we really have nothing to say to each other. Also, what does the CBT have to do with me? I agree it is a great thing for her to do, but surely it is in order to benefit herself, isn;t it? I would assume that any benefit to our relationship is purely incidental.

Counselor: What is it you actually want from the relationship at this point? Wife talks like she really wants to turn the clock back, and recover some of what you had before.

Hosea: Frankly I don't think it is possible to turn the clock back. What is more, it wouldn't be the same -- if you could magically send us back 10 years, I think I would respond to things that I saw then the way I respond today; in other words, I would know that this behavior is going to end up leading to that so I would be less likely to engage with it (trying to make things better) and more likely to walk away in disgust. And really, part of the fundamental problem is that neither of us has ever understood what the other wants from a marriage, which means that turning the clock back wouldn't help. Or at any rate, Wife has never understood what I mean by "marriage"; I have to assume it is the same in reverse, just because these things usually are.

Counselor: She also says she feels very cut off from you, and very alone.

Hosea: She is very alone. She has basically no interaction with me -- which means she is right about feeling cut off from me, because I have basically disengaged all those parts of my emotional system that used to be plugged into her. The boys are both of an age where they are outward-looking and not inward-looking; plus, they now both attend a school that is five minutes' walk from my office, which means that they leave with me in the morning and return with me in the evening. On the weekends they have their own interests and don't spend much time with her. (Well, Son 2 will take his book and sit down on the bed next to her if she is spending the day in bed.) She has no friends or family. More exactly, she is on speaking terms with exactly one sister who lives far away, but with no other members of her (very large) family. And she has no friends in town (although we have lived here for almost twenty years) because her social skills have degenerated from marginal (where they were when I married her) to downright counterproductive. The only social life she does have is to spend hours on the phone with Friend and his cohorts, and I think this does her no good at all. In the first place, I think these people are fictional, and even Wife has started to have doubts; in the second place, I think they tell her exactly what they want to hear, which does nothing to break through the isolation and insularity that are such problems for her; and in the third place, they seem to be drawing her into a very dark place mentally or spiritually, from which it will become harder and harder for her to escape into reality.

Counselor: So what are you seeing her do?

Hosea: Most of the time, when I am home at least, she spends sitting in bed staring at the walls. Sometimes she sleeps. Often she just sits there. I don't know if it is the lupus, or the depression, or her headaches, or if she is just avoiding me, or what ... but she will sit there for hours upon hours, and often all day long. It's like she is just a dry husk of a woman, like somehow the outer shell is still there but the woman herself is missing. I often feel, in fact, like the woman you met when we first started coming to see you years ago has gone.

Counselor: Do the boys see it the same way?

Hosea: I have never discussed it with them. If Wife is sitting in bed staring, Son 2 will pick up a book and go sit next to her while he reads his book ... so he still tries to connect with her that way. But not Son 1. If Wife calls to Son 1 to do something for her, he doesn't even blink. He just doesn't hear her at all.

Counselor: He has tuned her out completely?

Hosea: Yes.

Counselor: One thing Wife has told me is that she feels very controlled, very afraid, over the issue of money. How is that being handled?

Hosea: Gosh, I thought the agreement we had to separate our finances would make things easier, not harder. As it is, I pay for any expenses that are just mine; she pays for anything that is just hers; and we split common expenses 80/20. From my perspective this has been great, because I no longer have to peer over her shoulder every time she goes shopping. She can buy whatever she wants, so long as she can pay for it. As for common expenses, either of us has the right to challenge something that the other one bought as a "common expense." She has never challenged me, because when I buy anything questionable I just pay for it all by myself and don't even submit it to her to share. She has submitted everything she has bought to me, and so there have been a few things I have challenged. But in general I think it has made life a lot calmer and quieter.

Counselor: Of course you realize that what you have just described is more like living as roommates than it is like a marriage.

Hosea: I realize that. Let me ask you, though: what does it say about a marriage when the shift to living like roommates creates so much more peace and harmony in the house?

Counselor: From what Wife tells me, I think she really misses you.

Hosea: What, because I don't yell any more? I guess even that is a kind of togetherness, even if it is a bad kind.

Counselor: Maybe. But seriously, I think she misses the connection. It's almost as if she feels really bereft without you.

Hosea: She hides it well.

Counselor: I guess ultimately the question is, What do you really want? Where do you want to go from here?

Hosea: [I had to think a minute. I wasn't about to tell him that I am already working with an attorney, because I see no reason to give any kind of advance notice for that sort of thing until I am closer to being ready. So instead I said, ...] I don't know. I do know that I have tried to imagine what the future looks like, based on the status quo right now, and I can't for the life of me picture it. I just can't create any kind of scene or image in my mind of a future.

Counselor: Does that mean it's all over? Because that would be one alternative ....

Hosea: [I thought to myself, Yes you've got that right. But all I said was, ...] I don't know.

A grumbler or a grumble

This morning I took Son 2 to an athletics class he has attended for years. He was sour and grumbling about it before we left, but often that's just a sign of waking up slowly on the weekends. Only he persisted in being sour and grumbling about it afterwards, which is not so common.

As I write this, I realize that maybe there is just something else wrong right now, something outside the class. Maybe, as D has suggested, Son 2 has picked up on the very shut-down dynamic between Wife and me, and is responding emotionally to what must be a very threatening situation.

But what worries me is that Son 2 may be learning Wife's habit of complaining about everything.

There are plenty of times he is still chipper and happy. He's bright and has a delightful and zany sense of humor. And there are times that he reminds me so forcibly of myself at that age that the resemblance is uncanny. His voice even sounds like mine did; and the long, drawn-out bizarre ideas are familiar too.

But when he starts his long tired whinings he sounds just exactly like Wife.

Less viscerally, it is just that I think I see the possibilities for depression (not surprising since both of his parents suffer from it), and I think he sometimes assists the growth of a depressive outlook by focussing on what he hates about a situation instead of what he likes about it. And this focus is in some ways a choice. Yes, of course depression has a biological and chemical aspect as well. There is no doubt about that. But it is also true that you can choose to talk yourself into a depressive state when you weren't feeling bad before, just by what you choose to focus on. I've done it myself, and I've watched Wife do it, so I know it is a risk. And I bring it up now, not by way of criticizing Son 2, but because I wish I knew some way to teach him how to find the nuggets of joy in even very bleak situations; or more practically (since "bleak" may be a little extreme to describe our lives most of the time), how to find a way to get through even situations that he doesn't much care for, and how to see the things in them that can be pleasant.

This is a survival skill. I honestly believe that one of the reasons Wife has decayed into the merest shell of a woman these days is that she has chosen so resolutely to focus on what makes her miserable. She may not have been able to help being born with a depressive genetic pattern, but she has also done nothing to struggle against it -- nothing to prepare her to see unexpected grace when it flits by, nor even to strengthen a kind of stoical doggedness. The story that she tells herself about her life is a story of passive victimization by one bad thing after another, to the point that she can't see anything else. It is a hell of a way to live. And I don't want it for Son 2.

The whole direction where this kind of life leads is captured nicely in a scene from C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, and I think one does not need any kind of religious faith whatever to play along with the story and see where it goes. The spirit of a grumpy old woman -- for the time being assigned to Hell -- is visiting Heaven on a vacation (it's a story) and can't leave off griping. The narrator (himself only a visitor) and one of the denizens of Heaven are discussing her:

"I am troubled, Sir, because that unhappy creature doesn't seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn't wicked: she's only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling ...."

"That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she will certainly be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler."

"I should have thought there was no doubt about that!"

"Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman - even the least trace of one - still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there's one wee spark under all those ashes, we'll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there's nothing but ashes we'll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up."

"But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?"

"The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences ... it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, may embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, not even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine...."

As I say, it's a hell of a way to live.

Parental love as manipulation

The other day, D sent me a link to this article about parenting in the Times on-line. She commented that it was pretty much obvious, common-sense stuff, and that she couldn't imagine anybody thinking anything different. But somehow that sounded to me like an oversimplification.

In one respect the article poses a big challenge: explaining each situation and imagining it from the child's point of view work well enough much of the time with some children, but there are other children for whom they work less well and even the most cooperative children have occasional bouts of misplaced stubbornness. What is a parent then to do? Well, there are still a variety of options open, but I expect that the "experts" who recommend the withdrawal of affection do so in order thereby to avoid having to recommend a swat on the tuchus. And for what it is worth, I expect that when Albert Bandura said (as the article quotes him) that unconditional love would make a child unlovable, what he must have meant is "unconditional pampering" -- which is quite a different thing.

Of course the real answer is that it all depends: on the child, on the age, on the circumstances, on how often this or that technique is used, etc. A rare and well-timed swat delivered during the early years only will have a different psychological effect from interminable physical abuse up to the age the child leaves home; likewise, I assume that Mom stalking off once or twice in a huff will have a different effect from long-term emotional manipulation. (My own parents used both of these techniques at one time or another, but I never once doubted that they loved me and my brother unconditionally.) One thing I have had to remind myself over and over again is that child-rearing may be the hardest job in the world, but it is very rarely a "one-strike-and-you're-out" endeavor. There is often (maybe not always) room to pick yourself up and try to be better next time.

I also spent some time thinking about Wife's mother, and how she raised Wife and her sisters. The thing is that Wife's mother certainly used affection as a tool; but she was also highly inconsistent in giving rewards. She once told ... somebody, I forget who related this story ... that it was almost physically impossible for her to say anything nice about anybody while that person could hear her; but she could praise to the skies somebody who was safely out of the room, ending her encomia with "Why can't you be more like that?" This meant, for example, that each sister thought that she alone was uniquely despised and the other two were the spoiled apples of their mother's eye. On the other hand, Wife's mother would also confide little secrets to each daughter and make her swear not to tell the others. The message seemed to be, "You are a singular disappointment to me and I wish you had been more like your sisters; but in spite of all that we share a special bond that means I can trust you with this secret when I can't trust the others." I have to add that when those secrets (some of them) finally saw the light of day, they contradicted each other: she told this daughter one thing and the other the exact opposite with no apparent qualms. But by then the damage had long since been done. It made for some difficult family dynamics.

Now it has also been documented that inconsistent reward is often more motivating than consistent reward: the child (or rewardee) will work double and triple hard to force a reward. So I wonder if this could account for Wife's strong beliefs about, e.g., housework (that it is a moral imperative, that it has to be done exactly like this) ... combined with a bitterness (because of the inconsistency, and because of the withdrawal of affection) that whispers to her "You may know this has to be done, but you'll be damned if you're going to do it." And I wonder, come to that, if it could account for much of the resentment and distrust that Wife seems to feel in any long-term close relationship.

Maybe not. Maybe I am just making this a one-size-fits-all theory.

I sent some of these musings to D. She had a number of comments on the general issue of parenting -- unlike me, she does not think it is the hardest job in the world -- but then she went on as follows: "I don't know quite how to react to Wife's stories about her mother. You just have to break free from people who are irredeemably evil, and it always seemed to me that Wife almost enjoyed the uncertainty and constant criticism she received from her mother. Perhaps if she had sought out loving parents, people like your mother, to learn from and emulate, she might be very different today. A powerful teacher and model can truly shape a life, even one as broken and damaged as Wife's. She was given so many chances... a good mind, a great college education, a loving and true husband, beautiful and gifted children, and financial resources beyond anything she dreamed of as a child. It has all been seed on rocky soil, or thrown into weeds. No genuine compassion or sacrifice or love for God or others has developed to improve the world and bring joy to herself. It seems unbelievably sad, and a genuine tragedy."

A genuine tragedy, indeed.

I think I've been hacked

I went to sign into my blog this evening and couldn't. My password didn't work.

Ulp?

I started to go through the "reset password" steps, and so I had to log into my e-mail. As I was doing that, I paused to realize that the last couple of days I have gotten an odd message from Hotmail in the middle of reading my mail, asking me to refresh my screen because I was logged in on two different computers at the same time. I knew this was impossible and therefore just refreshed my screen and forgot about it. But now I remembered.

A few minutes after that, I remembered that a couple of days ago I saw a remark on Wife's blog, to the effect that se had just recently learned ... "never mind how" ... that I have been in constant touch with D for months. Here I had assumed that she had gotten one of the boys to peek over my shoulder while I was writing an e-mail to D, and then had surmised that if I was writing once I must be writing a lot.

But it is also possible that she hacked me.

I really don't think she has the computer skills to do a sophisticated job of it. Far more likely is that she found some scrap of paper from back in 2007 when I first started the blog ... a scrap of paper that I thought I had destroyed, with my userid and password. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Maybe that's not the right explanation, but better safe than sorry. Her remarks in her blog did not sound like she understood that D and I are lovers ... but at the moment I am not sure of anything. As I say, better safe than sorry.

I have changed passwords (obviously!) on both the e-mail and the blog. And the blog is now private. Maybe later I can go public again, ... but not right away, I think.