Counseling 30

Yes, actually I do remember that I left off at Counseling 24. Sessions 25, 26, and 27 weren't very interesting or productive; they came along in the wake of my efforts to be more friendly to Wife, and she appreciated it, and we didn't end up with a lot to discuss. Session 28 was more interesting, but requires some back-story; with luck I may still get to it. Session 29 ...? I don't remember at the moment. Maybe if I check my old e-mails.

But yesterday, Wife and I met at Counselor's office, and she wanted to discuss my concerns about her medications. I wasn't sure she would want to discuss it, but she leapt immediately into the topic. She steered clear of discussing any of the actual events that had caused me to worry, but expressed a fair bit of outrage that I had "basically accused [her] of narcotics addiction."

Counselor tried to de-escalate the discussion by asking a couple of questions, after which he said, "You know, I don't hear Hosea using words like narcotics or addiction. And those are pretty powerful words. What I hear him asking is a straightforward question about balancing your medications -- and it's no secret that you have a lot of medications, more than anybody else I know. So I think maybe we want to be a little careful about handling this on a less intense level, rather than escalating it right away. I mean, when you talk about narcotics addiction, you get all these images in your head of criminality, and shooting people in alleyways. It turns into a discussion about bad character, rather than a much lower-key, more impersonal discussion about medicine."

We talked around this point for a little while, but Wife's basic response was, "Yes, but all this was in the context of Hosea complaining about my character, and about how I'm no longer the woman he married, and how he has no respect for me. So I think that is exactly the topic."

I demurred a little bit that the conversation she had in mind had gone the other way round. We weren't discussing her medication "in the context of" discussing her character or personality, ... in other words, we didn't start with talk about character and end up using medicine as an example. I had started by expressing my concerns over her prescriptions -- and notwithstanding some of the discussions I had earlier had with D, I phrased those concerns as impersonally as possible: "Could it be that the strengths which were prescribed for you when you were a lot heavier are no longer applicable now that you have lost so much weight ...?" It was only when she denied stoutly that she had any of the symptoms of someone abusing her medication that I tried to suggest, "Well something has changed in the last two years because you don't seem to take pleasure in any of the things you used to enjoy, and it is almost as if you are a different woman ...."

I also tried to make a distinction that had occurred to me long ago, but that I am not sure Wife sees or gets. (In retrospect, I see that I discussed it here last August.) I said there are concrete things she does that I don't respect, but that has nothing to do with who she is. A good person can sometimes do bad things; a bad person can sometimes do good things. If anything, the fact that I call her attention to things that bug me is a sign of respect, that I believe she has the power to change them. (And as I remarked to D in a phone call later yesterday afternoon, the fact that I criticize Wife a lot less than I used to may be a sign that I am giving up hope of her ever changing. But be that as it may.)

Wife didn't say much to this, but Counselor picked it up. He suggested that there were probably things in Wife's past that made it so easy and so natural for her to interpret any criticism of deeds as a rejection of her inner self, as a judgement that she is fundamentally unlovable ... and that this is something we could work on in his office. Maybe if we did, she would see things get better.

"Maybe. But I don't see why we should bother. Hosea fundamentally doesn't care about me any more. He said as much, in just those words, over the weekend."

"In every relationship, people say a lot of things in the moment that they don't mean deep down. What I have to say standing outside is that I have worked with the two of you -- you and Hosea -- for many years now. And in all that time I have never seen any evidence -- none at all -- that Hosea doesn't care for you. Quite the opposite."

And we were out of time.

How can you tell this?

Wife continues to have trouble keeping awake in the afternoons. I haven’t taken any concrete action because I don’t know what to do or if, indeed, there is anything I can do. But it continues to trouble me.

The other day, Wife called me maybe an hour before I left work. She had collected both boys from school earlier in the day, and had dropped Son 1 at an appointment before going home. She called to ask me to pick up Son 1 on my way and to get a couple of things at the store. OK, no big deal. At that point, she sounded fine.

While at the store, I suddenly wondered if we had enough pet food. Since Son 2 is responsible for feeding the pets, I called home to ask him if I needed to buy more. (This is now 90 minutes since she called me.) The conversation went like this.


Wife: Hullo?

Hosea: Hi, it's Hosea. Can you please put Son 2 on the phone?

Wife: Son 2's not here.

Hosea: What?? Where is he?

Wife: I don't know.

Hosea: What do you mean you don't know? You brought him home from school didn't you?

Wife: No. Maybe he's still at school. I never brought him home.

Hosea: What???? Why not??

Wife: I don't know.

Hosea: Look, this is not possible. Can you just put him on the phone?

Wife: He's not here. I don't know where he is. I don't know why he didn't come home from school.

I whisper to Son 1, who is standing next to me, "Was Son 2 in the car when Mom picked you up?" He said, "Yeah, of course."

Hosea: Look, can you just call out his name loudly?

Wife: Huh?

Hosea: Call "Son 2" loudly.

Wife: S - O - N - 2! [pause] OK, he's coming. He's on his way. [pause] Here he is.

Son 2: Yeah dad?

Needless to add, I lost no time paying for the stuff I had bought, and getting home. I also asked Son 1 what kind of shape Wife was in while driving. He said she was nodding, and at one stop light the boys had to announce to her that it had turned green. When I got home, she was sound asleep, and when I called her for dinner (another 90 minutes after that) she was still pretty unsteady on her feet.

The week before there was another event just like it. One of the boys had a birthday party. Wife had made a cake and bought pizza for him and his friends; after dinner they were going to sit around watching movies till all hours. The boys are at that great age where you no longer have to worry about them breaking stuff (out of not knowing any better) and you don’t yet have to worry about them breaking stuff (out of drunkenness). Besides, at this age they still think there is something intrinsically fun about staying up late at somebody else’s house. (And no, I don’t mean like that!)

Anyway, Wife called me at work to ask me to pick up a couple of odds and ends on my way home. Again, no problem. But by the time I got home she was more or less totally incoherent: she couldn't articulate words, she couldn't walk without help. She looked just like Boyfriend 4 used to look when he was totally drunk off his ass. So as I started heating up the pizzas, I asked the other boy to check her out as well; he and I agreed that we should let Wife sleep, and that she shouldn't come out to socialize. Partway through dinner, she woke up; I went back into the bedroom to tell her to stay there. Nor was I terribly kind about it. Later, after the boys had eaten and were outside playing, I brought her back a couple of pieces of pizza but still told her to stay in the bedroom, ... because honestly, it would just have been embarrassing. I mean, she's been like this a bunch of times over dinner when it is just us; we all understand and we adjust around her. What is more, the boys love her enough that they would be sure to defend her in case anybody said anything. But they shouldn't *have* to defend her, not at a birthday party! She should be willing to stay in the back of the house, if she is in the kind of shape that a normal person would feel ashamed of being seen in.

Along about midnight, Wife finally came toddling out to taste the cake she had made. After she got a slice (the boys, guests included, were all long since asleep) I shepherded her back to our room and explained some of this. (She was lucid for the first time this evening.) Wife wanted to talk a lot about how it wasn't her fault; I kept replying that "fault" doesn't matter ... the important part is that it would have been embarrassing for her to come out.

Long-term readers have seen stories like this before. It is very much like what happened here, for example. Also here and here. But what causes it? What makes her so exhausted that she regularly checks out by mid-afternoon?

Traditionally, Wife has always said this is caused by her illnesses, but lately she has been getting better. At any rate, her rheumatologist says that her tests look better than they have for a long time. So if it’s not her lupus, what then? Her depression? She suffered from depression for decades without these symptoms. What has knocked the stuffing out of her? What turned her from Bette Davis into Allison Janney?


D proposed a theory recently. D thinks Wife might be abusing – and addicted to – her pain medication.

But how can I tell for sure?

Arguing against this theory, Wife never seems to run out of pain medication before it can be refilled. But I should add (in the interests of full disclosure) that she has at least two different doctors prescribing pain medication, and she built up a stockpile over several years.

And the theory would account for a lot of data.

• Wife is frequently unconscious, staggering, or drooling, at hours of the day when she used to be awake and alert. [But see the Postscript below.]


• Wife talks about her pain a lot more than she used to, but in a very business-like way. “Well, I’m in pain again, so I’m going to lie down and take something for it.” You would never know from the conversational tone of voice that we were talking about something that hurts.


• Wife never leaves the house without making sure she has a bottle of pain medication with her.


• Wife seeks out the company of addicts – in this case, Boyfriend 4, Boyfriend 5 [also here], and probably B5’s Friend.


• Wife chronically thinks I am her enemy, that I am plotting against her somehow. When D was here over New Year’s, she thought I was plotting with D to throw away her stuff. (And I suppose she wasn’t far wrong, honestly. See here and here, for example.) Other times, I am plotting to keep her chained to the housework, to trap her at home somehow. (See for example here and here and here and here.)


• Wife has a progressively weaker and weaker grasp of reality. Appointments, schedules, responsibilities ... she used to be fanatical about these things, and now she can hardly remember them from morning to afternoon. At the same time she is willing to invest totally in the ever more preposterous fantasies spun by Boyfriend 5 and Friend.


• Wife no longer seems to get pleasure from the things she used to enjoy.
  

But there might be a lot of other ways to explain this too. So how do I tell for sure?


Postscript: In the time since I started to write this post, Wife and I have actually talked about this somewhat. She was really, really offended at the suggestion that there might be any hint of addiction or abuse going on here. I tried to put it in the least accusatory possible light, urging that I am really concerned for her because she has changed so much in just the last two years. And it is true that the bulk of the change has been pretty recent. Two years ago she had been weakened by her diseases; she didn’t have the energy she had had twenty years before that. But she was still recognizably a Bette Davis-type. Not today.

So I told her I was concerned, and she told me she was insulted. But in the next few days, from then till now, I have noticed something. On the one hand, she has been pretty pushy about telling me “Just so you know, I haven’t had any painkillers today; so if I’m sluggish, it is just tiredness.” On the other hand, she has been awake and clear-headed at 8:30, when a couple weeks ago she regularly caved in at 7:00. So what does this mean? Could it be that our conversation cued her to look inside for danger signs, and that she is trying to correct course without ever admitting it? Maybe so ... and if that is true, then it is a good thing. If she can pull herself back to a more clear-headed state, then maybe it is OK for her to insist that there never was a problem.

Or maybe there never was a problem – I mean, not a problem with addiction or substance abuse – and D and I have just been mis-reading the signs. I really, really don’t know which it is.

It never rains but it pours ....

I just got a call at work from Boyfriend 4, who was leaving his oncologist's office. His oncologist wants to put him on another round of chemotherapy, and also gave him a prognosis:

18-24 months.

That's with the chemo ... more like 6 months without. And his question to me was, "Do we tell Wife?" (It was in order to ask that question that he called me first and not her.)

I said obviously she will have to know some time; but the question is when. (Jokingly, I told him "She should be told some time in the next 5 years." And he laughed.) I added that I'm not really sure of the answer; but I'll think about it and he and I should talk some more.

He also bought an RV, so he can drive around visiting people -- his family, us, other friends -- and stop paying for his apartment.

So the plot of our little soap opera has another wrinkle to it, I guess ....
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A sonnet for D

I don't do this often, but I figure somebody has to offer Apollo a little competition in the Bad Poetry category. It's an attempt to capture in meter and rhyme some of what I think about a conundrum that has always hovered somewhere in D's peripheral vision. The conundrum is this: How can she hold together, simultaneously, her very deep Christian faith and her overpowering sexuality?

At a very theoretical level this should be no problem: anyone who believes that God created the world must also believe that God created sex. And, after all, "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." (Genesis 1:31) On the other hand, too many Christian clergymen turn pink and make strangling noises at any serious discussion of sex; you don't hear many sermons compare the Beatific Vision to the ecstasy of orgasm; and D's sexuality is so intense and so ever-present that it can seem a bit incongruous coming from a grey-haired, Catholic professional woman. It looks even more incongruous that she is now totally committed to an extra-marital affair (with me), without making the slightest attempt to justify it in any terms outside the affair itself.

So how is she to make sense of all this? What's a girl to do?

Honestly, I think the incongruity is more apparent than real. I think God's perspective on things is so different from our own that it is a bit presumptuous for us to think He cares a whole lot about legal formalities of one kind or another. And my own religious sense is nebulous enough that I don't have to be very consistent about these opinions. It's convenient.

Anyway, as I say, I tried to take a few of my thoughts on the subject and distill them for her. I'll send this to her soon, and I hope she likes it.

Is this a Christian? Watch her through the door,
Conducting class with tender, tireless care,
Who gave up all she knew to teach the poor,
Whose love her students breathe in with the air.

“But are not Christians chaste?” So asks the scold.
“Where comes this passion, burning like wildfire?
“She should be meek and timid, never bold.
“Do not such driving lusts provoke God’s ire?”

But nay! The God who rolled back Timeless Night
With boundless pow’r, from flesh won’t hide His face.
In energy He takes His keen delight,
And casts on lovers gladness as His grace.

And so I think I’m not far wrong to say,
Amica sancta, ora nunc pro me.

D is losing her job

This isn't really infidelity-type news, and it is only tangentially a relationship issue; but D found out today that she will lose her job at the end of the month. Nobody denies she has been doing an excellent job, but she costs her employers a lot and she has some fundamental philosophical differences with them. In any event, she has been afraid for a while that this would happen, and now it has.

She has also been told that she can't let any of her colleagues know about it, or her employers will withhold her last paycheck. (sigh)

I talked with her on the phone and tried to reassure her. (Although I don't know how reassuring she found it for me to tell her that my last period of unemployment lasted way longer than I ever thought it would.) Intellectually she knows that this has nothing to do with her ability or performance, but emotionally it feels like a major failure to her. Nor is she really sure where to turn next. In the short run, she is likely to move back in with her husband, just to have a roof over her head.

By coincidence, she was going to be attending a prayer retreat in a couple of weeks; and she now thinks the timing looks almost (excuse the term) providential. Not that she has any idea what to pray, really, except to ask, "Where am I going now?"

Of course, it's not like it's just her. Stuff like this is happening all over. But that doesn't make it any easier. I did remind her that I love her, and she said that helped.
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Fifth date

I have two or three posts that I'm planning to write, that come before this one chronologically. But I haven't been able to get them written yet, and I want to write this one while it is still comparatively fresh in my mind. Besides, you guys are smart ... you can figure it out.

Last week I had to travel to another city on business. I was going to be gone the whole week, and in past years I would have planned to arrive Sunday night, thus maximizing the amount of the weekend I could spend at home. But that was before D. This time, we agreed that it would be great to have an uninterrupted weekend together; so I arrived Friday night instead, just a few minutes before she arrived at the same airport. (Ironically, this was even a cost-savings to my company; the Friday flight was so much cheaper than the Sunday flight that the savings fully covered the two extra nights in the hotel, and then some.)

Whenever we are apart for long periods, I forget how much I miss being with her; then we meet again, and we can't stop holding each other, and kissing. I'm sure the airport staff was thinking "For Pete's sake, get a room!" And so we did.

Saturday and Sunday, we stayed in bed late -- talking, fucking, and eating breakfast -- until somewhere around noon. Then we went out, strolled around town for a while, found a place to eat, and then strolled some more -- still talking all the while. Monday, I went to work while D visited a childhood friend of hers who lives in the town where we were. And Tuesday she left.

A couple of stories.

The whole weekend long, there were large groups in the hotel. They might have been graduation parties, though they were more likely wedding parties since we often saw bunches of young guys together wearing (for example) identical formal clothes and pink ties. So when we left our room Saturday morning, there was a group of young guys (looking like frat boys) in pink ties congregating in the hallway just across from us. As D and I got into the elevator, she started laughing. She laughed all the way to the car, when I finally got her to tell me what was so funny.

Well, it's like this. We had woken up a little after six that morning, and we left the room something like 11:30. Part of that time had gone to eating breakfast, but most of it ... er, well ... hadn't. And during most of that time, D had been pretty ... ummm, ... vocal. Her sighing and moaning had gotten quite loud on occasion, and we had actually wondered if anybody could hear us. We also wondered if anybody who could hear us had noticed that the sound had gone on, with interruptions, for something close to five hours.

Apparently one of the frat boys in the pink ties had noticed. And so when our door opened, he stole a quick look in our direction to see who was the sexpot who had been moaning all morning. D tells me that when he saw her -- with demure clothes, silver hair, and lines on her face befitting her 55 years -- Frat Boy's jaw dropped almost to the floor. Not to be outdone, she stared at the case of light beer he was lugging behind him, shook her head, and gave him her most matronly look of disapproving scorn. And she held that look all the way to the elevator ... whereupon she dissolved into helpless giggles.

Monday, as I mentioned, D went to visit a dear friend she has known since she was 12. She had a great time, but found that it was impossible to preserve her silence about me and our affair. In fact, when she called the night before to see if her friend was going to be available, she had to say, "I know you are a friend of my husband too, but you cannot let him know I am in town. If he ever asks, you have got to say that as far as you know, I'm in the same town where I live and work." Of course the very first question after a warning like that is always Why? And that is how D, who has been scrupulously careful about not telling anybody about us, came to tell her friend.

Her friend was very supportive, but she did have some questions:

Why exactly are you cheating on your husband? Has he cheated on you?

No.

Has he mistreated you in some other way?

No.

Well does he know about it, then? Is this something he is OK with?

Certainly not.

What about Hosea? You tell me that you and your husband will be divorcing ... is Hosea leaving his wife?

No, never.

Well then, does his wife know about it?

I'm sure she doesn't.

How do you know?

I talk to her on the phone almost every day. I'm one of her best friends.

But she doesn't know?

No.

If Hosea isn't leaving his wife, and if she doesn't know about your affair and therefore isn't making time for him to see you, then where does this leave you?

It leaves me seeing him a few times a year, when he can get away from the house and make a plausible excuse.

That's all?

That's all.

And that's OK with you?

No, but it's worth it.

D? You know I'm your friend, and you know I'll stand by you through anything. But I guess I'm having trouble understanding this. After everything you've told me, I just don't see how you justify this affair ....

I don't. Honestly, there is nothing that can make it right. I could sit here and tell you all about Hosea, and it still wouldn't make it right. But I am so in love with him that I have to make do without insisting on being right ....
__________

And you know? That's kind of flattering to hear ....

It was wonderful to see D for a few days; the talk was insightful and the sex was fantastic. And every date makes me fall farther in love with her. Now if only I knew when we will manage number six.

The incredible shrinking boyfriend, cont'd

D was on the phone with Wife the other day, and got the latest installment in the saga.

Friend (who knows everything there is to know about Boyfriend 5) told Wife that Boyfriend 5 has been having a lot of trouble with pain lately (because of his various illnesses), so he has gotten re-addicted to opiates. He knows that Wife would never accept this in him, so he secretly checked himself into a methadone clinic where he will be totally incommunicado for eight years. (I don't make this stuff up, I just write it down.) Wife told D this means she'll have to postpone eloping with Boyfriend 5 until he is out, eight years from now. Then she mused, "I guess it wouldn't really be fair to Hosea ... taking the best years of his life and then leaving him completely bereft and desolated by running off with Boyfriend 5." D, for her part, was wondering, "Why would you make plans to run off with somebody that you don't even know is real?"

Wife also told D that Friend has trouble keeping his stories straight. Wife is starting to wonder (so she says) whether Friend could be delusional. "He tells me he suffres from Asperger's Syndrome ... could that make him hallucinate some of this stuff?" (No it couldn't, D thinks to herself. Asperger's is a whole different thing.) Apparently she has not considered the idea that this is all fiction. That's just one of these rotten ideas that Hosea suggests.