Rielle Hunter, role model?

I didn't really pay too much attention to the John Edwards meltdown back when it was happening, but several weeks ago (one evening that I was wasting time poking aimlessly around the Internet) I found the story luridly excerpted here from Heilemann and Helperin's Game Change. After reading the story compulsively, I began wondering what to make of it, and whether there was anything in the story relevant to larger themes of marriage and infidelity. Is the story a case study of some kind, or just weird? I also mentioned it to D.

This was somewhere around the time of our ninth date. After we had parted and D had gotten back home, she wrote me, "I knew I would be stuck on the runway for a while, so I picked up Game Change and read about half the book while waiting to fly out. The part about John Edwards and his affair was truly awful. I wonder if Wife and the boys see me as your vapid and destructive mistress. It greatly bothers me to learn from you that the boys dislike me and see me as someone who throws their mother's treasures away, consumed by mindless cleaning projects. Wife's feelings of betrayal and her hatred of me also cause me anxiety; like Elizabeth with John, I fear Wife will never forgive either of us. I realize Wife shares many of the unattractive traits Elizabeth seemed to inflict upon John and his staff, but her despair was justified. That scene at the airport after learning about his affair, where Elizabeth cries helplessly and tears apart her blouse, exposing her scarred beast area, was too dreadful; I could see Wife doing something similar in front of you. Somehow, knowing the pain I may be inflicting on her and the boys causes me grief, embarrassment and pause; are we doing anything that could conceivably be called moral? Or are we simply being indulgent and selfish? My heart stops at such a portrait; I would not be Rielle Hunter in your life."

Oh dear. OK, well I couldn't let that stand. I hadn't really decided what I thought about the topic, but I started typing a reply and trusted that I would figure out what I wanted to say some time before I hit "Send". Solvitur ambulando!

What I wrote back to D ran, in part, as follows: "Mulling the questions you asked about what the story of John Edwards has to do with us .... Well, I think there is more to our love than sheer indulgence, but I am not sure quite how to prove that it is in any sense moral. Maybe that is the wrong way for me to think about it....

"More concretely, what damage are we doing? I think we are not really tearing apart our homes, either of us. Our homes had already been shredded to greater or lesser degree long before, in other ways. It is true that our love has given me a courage I lacked otherwise, to envision a future for myself outside that home. I cannot rule out that it might have helped encourage you in a similar direction, at any rate at some level. But if this rises to the level of 'damage' it is only to those who suffer collaterally -- our children. That's not trivial, but in another sense it is just the final twist to break off a limb that had cracked almost all the way through long before.

"There is more in the Edwards-Rielle story that makes it particularly horrible. The monstrous egoes of both John and Elizabeth Edwards contributed to the train wreck. While hardly impartial, I think my faults lie in a different direction, not that one. (If you turn out to have any faults -- of course I was teasing her to say it that way -- the same is probably true of them.) I don't know your husband very well, but the stories you have told don't make him sound like Elizabeth Edwards either. There were times that I thought that Elizabeth sounded a lot like Wife, honestly, except that Wife has a lot less energy. And this means that I have to face the potential that my situation could unravel at a bad time in a very bad way. But even this is not news to me; I had to face that possibility long ago.

"Short answer: our love may not be 'provably moral'; but whatever destructive risks we run were already part of the picture before we began to love each other. That being the case, perhaps it is not out of line for us to seek out -- and hold onto -- a love that could help us through the storm."

Now, it is not exactly clear to me that I have drawn much of a contrast between us and the Edwardses. I have said I think my affair with D won't do much harm, because there is not much more harm left to be done. But were the Edwardses really that much better off? They are more famous than we are, and significantly richer, but somehow their unhappy marriage sounds kind of like ours. And if that is true, then I would have to conclude that John's affair with Rielle Hunter was't all that wrong -- at any rate not in comparison with some of the other features of the Edwards marriage. Of course, it is simple common sense not to engage in an affair while also running for the Presidency, but that is a different issue.

In any event, my letter seemed to be about what D needed to hear. Her next post back again was much more temperate: "You are right; whatever our faults -- and mine are many -- a huge ego is probably not one of them. The idea of being unkind to those who work for you is difficult to imagine. They both sound so empty...John, sure that he could strike a deal with the Obama campaign and become vice-president, her mindless shopping on the internet and that huge, bloated home. How is it possible to lose sight of everything that matters? I was reminded too, that Barack's deep and abiding love for Michelle kept him far more thoughtful and generous than he would have been otherwise. May our love create the same concern for others and encourage self-assessment.

"You are also right about our marriages. And, unlike your children, mine are well aware that their parents are mis-matched and have been for years. I hope that Son 1 and Son 2 reach that understanding about you and Wife. Actually, Son 1 already has; Son 2 will take longer, in part because he so wants to rescue his mother and provide her all the love and care she demands. Son 2 will gradually realize that he is unable to do either, and one day, he will understand that both are inappropriate for a child. Only then will he be able to see me clearly and to accept our relationship and love. One of my virtues is patience; I can wait. Meanwhile, I will love you and support you as a father, and I'm honored to be able to do both."

Happy ending? Sure, at any rate for D and me (maybe not for the Edwardses). Profoundly insightful? Maybe not. But interesting anyway, in a lurid sort of manner. Hmmm ....

Hosea's biopsy

Gosh, it hardly seems fair posting any health information about myself; that topic has always been Wife's monopoly. And in the end it all turned out to be pretty much of a non-event, let me say that part up front. Still, the light it sheds on the dynamics of the marriage could be interesting ....

For the past -- gosh, I guess it has been at least fifteen months, probably somewhat longer -- I have had this lump in my neck. It doesn't hurt and it's not really in the way, so I tend not to think about it. But I mentioned it during a routine physical a while ago, so my doctor gave me the name of an E.N.T. he knows and told me to have it looked at.

What with one thing and another, it took me a few months to get around to calling the other doctor, but I finally saw him Tuesday. He looked at me, and poked and prodded for a bit, and then asked if the lump was painful. No, I said, not at all. He looked some more and made a few notes, and then he took out a huge needle and said he was going to take a biopsy. Basically, he could think of several things right off the bat which might cause such a lump -- the thing is that all but one of the obvious choices ought to have been very painful. That there was no pain at all with this one suggested to him that it might be a tumor of some kind.

The story gets pretty boring from there. His office called me Wednesday afternoon to say the lab had already come back with the results and whatever-it-is looks completely benign. It might even be no more than some kind of fat deposit. Of course it is still good to keep an eye on it and all, but he doesn't need me to come back for another six months. OK fine, I can deal with that.

The interesting part, however, is that they called home before calling my cell phone. Wife answered the phone; and when the office said who they were, Wife demanded to know the test results. Now, when I was filling out the patient confidentiality paperwork, I had not checked the box allowing them to talk to her. I think I had several reasons here. One is that I was afraid they would give her some important information and she would forget it. Another -- I am reasonably sure of this one -- is that I was being a prick by doing something I knew would antagonize her. But also lurking in the back of my mind was the thought that just in case there was something terrible and ugly in the news, I wanted to manage the dissemination of the information myself. I trust myself to be a lot calmer and stabler than Wife when it comes to bad news, even if I'm the one that the bad news is about. And I had visions of her calling people -- my parents, or the boys' school, or one of her friends (if she still has any) -- and recklessly announcing "Hosea's going to die in six months!" or something else equally irresponsible. And what crazy things might she start telling the children? No, I didn't think I could risk it. Better to have her angry at me than spreading irresponsible rumors.

Anyway, as I say the office called my home first, and Wife demanded to know the test results. The poor woman making the call had to say she wasn't allowed to give out that information, and Wife got really pissy with her. In fact, when the same woman called me right afterwards, she said, "I hope I haven't gotten you in trouble at home." I told her not to worry about it.

Not five minutes later, Wife called me at work, demanding to know the results of the test and also demanding to know why I hadn't given permission for them to talk to her. "You know every little thing about my health conditions!" I suggested this was something to discuss at home. She insisted on knowing my motives; I suggested this was something to discuss at home. She insisted on knowing a few other things; I suggested ... well, you get the drift. Finally I got her off the phone.

I am trying to decide what I want to say when I actually do get home. (I am writing this Wednesday afternoon at work.) I guess it depends on just how mean I want to be. I have been thinking of saying something like, "Listen to yourself. You have known for over a year that I have this lump in my neck, but you have never once asked about it. You knew that I went to the doctor yesterday, but yesterday evening you never even mentioned it. And right now, you aren't expressing the slightest concern or fear that it might be something ugly that is going to kill me in 6 months ... no, your biggest concern is that you have been deprived of some kind of right or authority that you think you ought to have. Which is to say that your only motive for being so upset is all about you, not me. So why on earth would I let them discuss my condition with you when you so obviously don't care?"

But maybe that would count as whining and self-pity, and on the whole I'm not a big fan of either of those things. It's a conundrum.

On lying, part 7. Truth as intimacy

Guildenstern: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured.

-- from Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

I had a thought one night a month or so ago. (That’s how long it has taken me to write this.) I have written a lot here about truth and lying. I have expressed the wish that Wife had been willing to tell me the truth about her affairs -- indeed, about pretty much anything -- over all the long years. I have said that I think Wife does more harm to herself than to anybody else by her lies. And I have even gone so far as to say that none of us can survive without knowing the truth about what is going on around us.

At the same time, I have been trying to reconcile this pretty absolutist notion of the value of truth with the fact that I have not told Wife about my affair with D, and have no intention of doing so. Wife knows that I keep in touch with D, but she doesn't appear to know about the sexual side of the affair, nor that we have seen each other several times besides when D has come out to spend time with the family (Dates 2 and 6) – although in the last week I have come to question this last part. And I have been trying to figure out how I can make sense of this, other than by admitting simply hypocrisy.

There is a practical explanation, of course. While I wouldn't so much mind Wife herself finding out – it would hurt her, but I no longer care a lot about that – I don't want her telling the boys or using it as a tool to pry them away from me. But there has to be more to it than that. To say that something works one way in theory and a totally different way in practice is just to say that your theory isn't sophisticated enough. So what gives?

And then one night I realized that my earlier (extreme) position was wrong. It is simply not true to say that we have to know the truth (by which I mean the whole truth and nothing but the truth) in order to survive. Not quite. Perhaps not even close.

I don't mean we can live in fantasyland. That way, madness lies. But we don't need every last little detail, and often we don't even want it. What we really need to be able to live and function in the world is not The Truth, but a Close-Enough Truth. We need to know enough about reality that we don't step in mud puddles or wander in front of speeding cars. And we need to know enough about other people to be able to treat them appropriately (whatever that is) and to know what to expect back from them.

Have you ever asked somebody "How are you today?" and gotten an inventory of every little ache and pain and petty disappointment that person has endured from sunrise till now? Then you already know what I mean. When we ask "How are you?" we aren't looking for 100% accuracy. Even when the phrase is not a pure formality, what we want is enough that we know how to proceed, no more.

The same principle applies in more serious situations, ones which are not merely social fluff. Once, years ago, I had a woman work for me whose idea of how to explain something was to explain everything. I’d ask her how she was coming along on some project I had given her earlier in the week, and she would tell me every single thing she had done since Monday. I’m sure it was all true, but I could never make heads or tails of it; and in the end I would always have to stop her to rephrase the question. “All I really want to know,” I’d explain, “is whether you are going to be done by Friday. I don’t need more information than that, I can’t follow more information than that, and if you tell me a lot more than that I will get so confused that I’ll never be able to figure out the one part I really want to know. Please make it easy on both of us and don’t bother telling me the rest.” I’m sure she thought I was stupid; to this day she probably thinks I was afflicted with an abnormally stunted attention span. But this is normal. Most information we exchange is filtered to give others just what they need, and often we do the filtering without even thinking about it.

But notice that this filtering depends on where we are and who is talking to us. If your boss asks why you got to work late, it might be enough to say you had to drive your teenager to an appointment; but to your best friend (or on your blog) you might add that the appointment was with the kid’s therapist, or parole officer. Notice also that if you did tell this extra information to your boss, or if you didn’t tell your best friend (or your blog), a person could reasonably wonder why. In other words, while we are (in practice) very rarely called on to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – while the world, in other words, demands from us only a Close-Enough Truth as the essential currency of communication – nonetheless the degree or amount of truth which is expected from us is a function of how close we are to the other person in the conversation. The ability to tell someone the unvarnished truth about your own life is a sign or symptom of a certain level of intimacy between the two of you.

And it is more than just a symptom. Telling a sensitive truth creates an intimacy if there wasn’t one before. In this respect, truth functions on a mental or spiritual level much the way that sex functions on a physical level. Of course, everything has to be just right for it to work out in the best way. You have to be talking to the right person, it has to be the right time, you have to have prepared the ground in the right way ... a lot like sex, in fact. But when everything is in place, can anyone doubt that a well-placed, well-chosen sensitive truth can serve to bring friends closer together? Of course not. We all know this implicitly. It is a basic part of how we live. (Adrienne Rich has an absolutely brilliant essay which touches on this subject, called “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” It can be found in her collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, and I find myself re-reading it about once a decade ... finding something new in it every time.)

This idea, that there is something fundamentally intimate about the truth, also makes some sense of why we feel a little awkward around people who tell too much of the truth at the wrong times – who talk about their divorces or addictions to people they have just met at dinner parties, or who share the details of their spiritual struggles during PTA meetings. The problem is just a breach of boundaries, making the private public in an unasked and unilateral way. In a sense, we feel exactly the same kind of discomfort we would feel around someone masturbating in public, and for exactly the same reason. There may indeed be philosophical arguments in favor of either public truth or public masturbation (Diogenes was a well-known advocate of both. For the story about his masturbating in public, Wikipedia cites in particular the biography by Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Cahpter 46.), but the fact is unavoidable that this is not how most of us live.

I have wandered somewhat far afield, but let me come back to discussing my marriage. For a quarter century I insisted – to Wife and to myself – that Wife’s chronic lies were far more damaging than her affairs, and that she should in all events tell me the truth about what she was doing even if it reflected poorly on her. But was I right to ask this? Given what I have said here, given how I now think that I previously misunderstood the real meaning and value of the truth, was my insistence also mistaken? Was I out of line?

Maybe not, but the reasons are different from what I thought they were. I felt then, and still feel today, that she owed it to me and to herself to tell me the truth. And one part of my opinion hasn’t changed – I think she owed it to herself because lying does harm the liar more than it harms the lied-to. But if you had asked me back then why she owed the truth to me, I wouldn’t have been able to say much more than that, ... well gosh, it’s the Truth! What more do you need? And now I would give a more nuanced explanation. I wanted the truth from her, and was disappointed in her for withholding it, for the same reason I would have been disappointed at marrying a woman who refused to fuck me: because at some less-than-conscious level I understood that without the truth we could never be intimate. Without the truth we could never share a life. Without the truth we could never truly be married.

And I really did want that marriage, that intimacy, that life together – Lord, how I wanted it!

Times change.

It is pretty clear to me now, and has been for some months, that the marriage is over – as dead as Jacob Marley, as dead as a doornail – in all spiritual senses of the word. We still have the legal status of husband and wife. We still live in the same house and drive the boys to their various commitments. The medical insurance we get through my work still pays for most of Wife’s medical care. But any hope for a union of hearts and minds is long gone, and I have given up wishing for it. And so I really can’t see that it does any harm, any longer, to lie to Wife about my affair with D. Does it close off the possibility of intimacy? Yes, absolutely. But that was already closed off. Does it build a barrier in the way of any life we could have together? Yes, naturally. But I no longer want a life together with her. And so on.

Is it a good way to live? No it’s not. I hope that at this point it will be only temporary.

Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t think that lovers living a life in truth have to know everything about each other all at once in order to be a couple. Nothing can ever be that absolute in real life, and it is always a process – a Becoming, not a Being. It’s just that living in truth means being open to the process. Rich says much the same thing when she closes her essay as follows:

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand
everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand,
everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling
you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me.
That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That I know
we are both trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibility of life between us.

What's been happening lately?

I realize I have been out of touch for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that I just recently got a private e-mail asking, "Dear Hosea: Have you decided to proceed with a divorce? What has happened with D's? Did she put it off because of her husband's illness?" So yes, I realize it has been a while and maybe a quick summary of the last couple of months would be in order.

With minor smoothing out, here is how I replied.

D has indeed put off any steps towards divorce because of her husband's stroke. He is rebounding pretty well -- and is showing a lot more dedication to eating right and exercise than he ever did before -- but he has memory troubles and there are slight personality shifts. She says his sense of humor is almost completely gone, and he will forget to pay the bills for weeks at a time. This means that she pretty much has to go back to their (his) house every weekend, to check for bills that need paying, to check that there is food in the house, and stuff like that. She still says that she doesn't expect ever to live with him again on a full-time basis, but for the near term it is at any rate very convenient that she can sign checks and other forms with the title "Mrs."

On my side, ... well, I have put the divorce on a mental stack of things that I need to get back to but haven't yet. The last couple of months, Son 1 has been applying to high schools, and the process blows me away. Actually our local public high school isn't bad; but we at least want to consider a couple of private options as well, to see what might work out. (Among other things, a smaller school would give him less chance to fall through the cracks; and until he learns better self-organizational skills, that might be a good thing.) Only, ... I look at the application materials these schools sent out, and they require practically as much as I had to fill out to apply to college.

What does this have to do with me? Well, part of what they all want are statements (read: essays!) from the parents. Also, while of course Son 1 has to write all his own answers, I am not above reminding him that today would be an excellent time to sit down and work on them. (Time management is a skill he still needs to improve.) And there have been campus visits to coordinate, etc. What is more, I want to keep Wife as far away from the schools as possible, because honestly her social skills have deteriorated significantly in the last few years. So I worry that she could alienate Admissions officers.

Anyway, the result is that I haven't gotten back to my draft Parenting Plan document, my draft Financial Plan, and the rest of it. Meanwhile Wife and I have been living with separate money (more or less) and we don't talk or interact all that much. But we are in the same house with both boys, and we are both available to drive them places and spend time with them. It is kind of a temporary stasis. I don't think it can stay that way forever, but maybe by the time we push ahead we will have gotten a better idea of what "ahead" should look like. I am coming to believe that Wife will always have trouble living on her own, because she seems to have trouble with simple things like managing her money and time. D has remarked that it is very likely I'll have to live nearby in the long term, just so I can stop in every so often and make sure she has gotten out of bed and eaten recently. Or opened her bills. In some ways, D and I have both noticed that our situations are becoming more and more alike.

I have other things I want to write about -- I am maybe 2/3 of the way through another installment in the "On lying" series for instance. But this is just a thumbnail sketch which I hope can do duty for weeks and weeks of posting I haven't done. With luck and a little perseverance I'll be back before another month has gone by ....

Ninth date

Another business trip -- a legitimate trip, this time -- and of course D joined me. I flew out the weekend before my first meeting, so we met Friday night at the airport in the faraway city. And at this point we are settling into enough of a pattern during these trips that I'm not sure how much there is to report. D herself commented that we haven't had any major emotional blowups in half a year or more; I think she is right, and I attribute this to our getting to know each other better, and to each of us getting more secure in the relationship. (I am now, as Robert Benchley once wrote, knocking wood so hard that the man in the next room just said, "Come in.") She also commented -- and here too I have to agree -- that the sex continues to get better and better. I credit her with how good it is; she credits me. It's a pleasant combination.

So what did we do with our time, besides fuck? Not a lot. Walked around downtown checking out used book stores, went to a matinee performance of a new play (and not a terribly successful one, I think), ate, talked. Always talked. She stayed over Monday, so we had one more night together after my day at work. And then it was over, all too soon. It is getting harder to see these trips end ....

And of course as soon as she left our correspondence picked right up again. I went to another play the night before I flew home, packed my bag, and then heard -- just as I was settling into bed -- someone out in the hall pound loudly on the door next to mine and bellow "Does anybody want to party?!!!" I stuck my head out of my room (clad only in my underwear, as I had packed most everything else) and asked if they could keep it down. I got a brief "Sorry" from a kid in sweats and no shirt holding a bottle of beer, as a similarly-beer-laden young lady walked between us into the room. (The young lady had a shirt, however.) I wrote D with some amusement that it would have been really practical to have her there, because her grey hair commands instant attention in a setting like that; anyone under the age of about 30 seems to think suddenly that he is talking to his grandmother. I was even more amused by her reply: "Loud neighbors in a hotel can be difficult, but I suppose we should realize that we may have been that couple who caused others close to us to lose some sleep on a couple occasions. A bit of shame-faced laughter here." OK, true enough. (smile)

When I got home, the boys both assured me that everything had gone on an even keel in my absence. I sat down to check in with Wife, and she asked me how my trip had been. I said it was fine and sketched out the parts that didn't involve D.

And then sure enough, Wife's very next question was: "How is D?"

Hosea: [Pause.] I don't know, why don't you call her and ask?

Wife: Well I know you are in touch with her a lot, so I thought you could tell me how she is. I know she texts you a lot, and I assume you talk to her on your phone when you go out for those long walks on the weekends.

I wasn't going to deny anything, but neither did I really feel I needed to volunteer anything; so I acknowledged "We talk," and then asked, "What are you getting at?"

Wife: I don't know. It just seems to me that D is behind a lot of the changes in the house since she was here.

Hosea: Like what?

Wife: Well, like all the vegetarian cooking, and the looking for local free-range meat instead of the cheaper factory-raised meat. In all the years we were together before, you never ever cooked like that. But I know those things are big priorities for D, and you started cooking that way after she visited here. [Then, in a much smaller voice, she added:] And before her visits you still used to tell me you loved me, too.

From there Wife rapidly shifted the topic to a (louder and more self-confident) denunciation of D's throwing away so much of the accumulated stuff in our house (see, e.g., Second Date), and I told her this was ancient history by now. But for a brief moment I found myself wondering whether the reason Wife rehashes so strenuously her resentment over the discarded things might be that the personal side of the changes D has brought about -- most pointedly, losing our marriage* -- is too painful and frightening to look at squarely. In other words, ironically, she might emphasize the things not because she thinks they are more important than the human side, but because they are less important.

I don't know, of course. It is just a thought.


* I should clarify that I have never told Wife openly about my relationship with D, and she has never made any overt accusations. But obviously she can read a calendar, and she has been able to watch the climate at home change. I suspect she may blame D for being a cause and not merely a trigger, but that is a discussion for another time.

"The Man (er, Wife) Who Came to Dinner"

Every Saturday evening we have something fun for dinner and watch a movie. Tonight it was pizza and "The Man Who Came to Dinner." And I think I have found a fictional character who adequately captures Wife's total self-absorption. Surely there is no better match (along that dimension) than Sheridan Whiteside. I'll grant that the comparison isn't perfect in other respects -- Sheridan Whiteside is rich and famous and witty and endlessly entertaining besides being an egocentric baby. But in this one respect, ... well, you could pick worse.

In fact, she threw a fit over dinner this evening that exemplified this Whiteside-like self-absorption perfectly. Candor requires me to admit that I probably triggered it, and I certainly fueled it by refusing to take her seriously. But it's not often that she gets on such a roll that the boys both tell her to chill out and relax because it's all going to be OK, and they did tonight.

Let me back up and try to describe what happened.

I was out and about, doing the week's grocery shopping. Wife suggested that I pick up a pizza for dinner -- one of the places that we shop sells pre-made, uncooked pizzas that you can take home and bake yourself. Now, for as long as I have known her, Wife has railed against pizza as a food that she loathes. No surprise, the boys love it. So when Saturday rolls around and we are going to have "something fun" for dinner, they always lobby for pizza and Wife generally nixes it. The few times she actually recommends it herself, I notice because it is pretty remarkable.

So I got to the store, picked up a few other things we needed, and wandered over to the counter where they keep the pizzas. How many do we need? Hmm, good question. For myself, I knew that I had been eating rather too much bread lately and needed something like a salad instead, to kind of scrub things out. (Sorry, too much information.) And I figured that Wife might not really be that excited about pizza either. So I called home and asked her, "How many pizzas do you think we need? Will one large be enough? I think I am just going to have salad." Wife answered, "Well if you get sausage and pepperoni then I sure don't want any! I hate sausage and pepperoni! If you get that then I'm just having a salad too!" I looked at the shelf, and -- sure enough -- sausage and pepperoni was the only variety they had there. So I got one. I figured we didn't need two, because one large pizza should feed two boys and it sounded like neither adult was planning to have any.

But I also realized just how bad it has always made me feel to listen, day in and day out, to Wife's steady stream of hatred. She hates this, she hates that; nothing is ever right or good enough, and everything is somebody else's fault. It is always up to somebody else to make things right for her, and then she hates what they did for her and are forcing her to put up with. It is just incredibly demoralizing. And the longer I thought about this, as I shopped, the more I disliked the idea of going out of my way to feed her something special. Fortunately, I had never offered to make her a salad. When she started ranting about how much she hates sausage-and-pepperoni pizzas, I said quickly "OK, I'll just get one," and hung up on her. So I figured I would bake the pizza for the boys; I would make a salad for me; and then I would let her make whatever she liked for herself.

And that is more or less how it went. When I got home from shopping, she had (very belatedly) cleaned up the kitchen so I had room to put away the groceries, and she was back in bed lying down avoiding the world. I put away the food, put the pizza in the oven, made myself a salad, and then came and told her she should probably make hers because we'd be eating in a few minutes.

Wife: What do you mean?

Hosea: You said you wanted a salad for dinner, so you should probably go make it.

Wife: Why do I have to make it?

Hosea: To make sure you get exactly what you want in it.

Wife: How hard can it be for you to make me a salad?

Hosea: Well I have already made mine, but I only made it for one because I didn't know what you wanted in it.

My God, you would have thought I had told her she was going to be boiled alive and served up in a pudding. How could I possibly single her out like this? What did I mean by making dinner for everybody else in the house but not her? How would I like it if she made dinner for everybody else in the house except me? Didn't I realize that she had cooked dinner all last week and all the week before? Didn't I realize that she had done laundry those weeks too? And now, when it was my night to cook [huh? It's Saturday -- we have fun food, nobody cooks.] I made a point of singling her out by not feeding her? What on earth could I be thinking? What could I possibly be punishing her for? How could I possibly be so thoughtless and inconsiderate?

Here I interjected a comment. "Actually it wasn't thoughtless or inconsiderate at all. I gave it a lot of thought and consideration before deciding that this was the best thing to do. If you ask me at a more convenient time, I'll be happy to explain it to you -- but not now. You can't ruin Saturday night over this. Ask me tomorrow morning when you are all calmed down and the boys aren't waiting for dinner, and I'll explain exactly what I had in mind."

At this point, you or I or anybody else would have shelved it until tomorrow morning ... maybe seething, maybe bitter, maybe resentful, but every one of us would have realized we'd be gettng nowhere tonight and would have dropped it. But not Wife. She went back to the top of her litany of complaints about me and started them all over again, pretty much without variation.

By this time the pizza was done and I was telling the boys to wash up. And of course if Wife had spent all this time throwing together a salad instead of complaining, she'd be done too. But she hadn't, so now there was one more element to the complaining -- viz., that we were all ready to eat and she still had to start making her dinner! In great bad humor, she pulled things out of the refrigerator and began throwing them together. She sat down with a thump, then immediately got up again to get a drink. Then: "Where is the wine bottle?"

Hosea: Which wine bottle did you have in mind?

Wife: The pinot grigio that I opened earlier this evening, that was sitting in the door of the refrigerator right here.

Son 1: Mom, it's on the table right in front of your place. Come on, sit down, it's OK.

(I should add that we have trained the boys that nobody starts eating till everyone is at the table.)

Wife: What about salad dressing?

Huh? Salad dressing? Well personally I had put oil and vinegar on the table; and while she had been tearing up her lettuce, I had poured them both over my salad and added some salt and pepper. Wife came back to the table again, saw that my salad was all dressed, and commented bitterly, "So you made up some dressing too, but only enough for one? You even have to be that snotty over the dressing?"

Son 1: Mom, he just put some oil and vinegar on it. Come on, sit down. Relax, it's OK.

Wife went back into the kitchen yet again to make up some "Italian" dressing from a mix she keeps in the pantry. And finally, only after that -- and after commenting acidly, "I'm not sure I even want to share your table" -- did she sit down to eat with us.

Nor did she stop commenting even then. The comments were all the same as before, just repeated in a different order. Whenever she got to the part about not understanding why on earth I would do anything so despicable, I would add in, "Yes, I know you don't understand. Ask me tomorrow morning, but meanwhile let it go." But this was like asking a starving dog to let go a beef bone, and she kept gnawing at the subject all the way through dinner.

The boys and I built a conversation around her -- something light and airy, with lots of laughter and silliness in it. Son 2, who normally sits next to Wife, surreptitiously scooted his chair over till he was almost at the far end of the table, to put room between himself and her. Finally everybody was done eating -- Wife had made too much salad for herself and had to throw out about half of it -- so we all got down from the table. Wife made a point of stopping me in the kitchen to tell me in detail how despicable she thought I was being; I added a little more than I had before but basically told her to leave it alone. And why should I get to tell her what to do?

Hosea: I shouldn't. Feel free to go find an apartment somewhere, so that you can run your own life exactly the way you see fit.

Wife: Oh right, on the money I get from Social Security. That's rich.

Hosea: Fine, don't. But make a choice. Do you want independence, or do you want me to pay your bills? You have to pick one, but not both.

I added that I never wanted to have to make her decisions for her, and that I would be very relieved when I no longer had any obligation to. But in the meantime ....

She kept grumbling, all the way until we started our movie -- grousing about our marriage far more openly to the boys than she has done before (at least when I have been there). The boys more or less ignored her; and I noticed that Son 2, who usually cuddles with Wife during movies, made a big point of cuddling with me instead before he got tired and toddled off to bed.

At least I don't have to worry about whether the boys know there are problems in our marriage. (Ya think?) And I don't think Wife is winning hearts and minds quite the way she probably wants to. It's sad, in a way.

Bicker, bicker ....

Last night as we sat down to dinner, Wife and I were bickering over something trivial -- I don't even remember what, any more. And the boys asked, "Have you two ever sat down to dinner without bickering?"

I answered, "Sure, lots of times."

And they shot back, "Yeah -- when you are travelling for work and Mom is here."