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Counselor lent Wife a book he thinks we should both read before we tell the boys about the divorce. It's called The truth about children and divorce: Dealing with the emotions so you and your children can thrive, by Robert E. Emery. I started it today and a lot of what he says makes sense: a lot of it is about adopting a businesslike attitude towards your ex so that your children don't become a dumping ground for your negative emotions.
But to set the stage, right at the beginning he says that divorce involves grieving: even if you are sick of each other, you are both losing something that was a big part of your lives up till now. And so yes, grief is part of the package.
He also says that the "grief cycle of divorce" is a little different from the famous "Five stages of grief" when somebody dies. Specifically, he says it involves cycling in rotation from love to anger, from anger to sadness, and from sadness back to love.
Cycling through love, anger, and sadness? Shit, that sounds like a summary of my whole marriage. It got me to thinking that in some ways our entire marriage -- or at least most of it (and it's 28 years old at this point) -- has been one long divorce. Or it looks that way from my side. Every time Wife took a new lover, every time she spent outrageously on something pointless, every time ... hell, I can't make a list. Every time she did something crazy, it was like one more twist of the knife, or one more rip in the fabric. And every time, I would plunge into crazy anger, followed by deep listless sadness, followed finally by a new (if battered and rueful) level of love. Maybe that's why now I can be so calm about it all ... because I have already spent decades grieving the loss of the marriage, and so now I can focus on the mundane business of burying it.
Wife has something new to worry about: Why hasn't anybody in my family contacted her by e-mail or phone to talk about our impending divorce? This evening over dinner she finally asked me if, in the e-mail I sent out telling the family, I had requested that they not talk to her?
Certainly not, nothing of the kind. I asked that they not tell the boys until we did, but that's all.
Well then, she wondered, how much have I heard back? She added a rueful comment to the effect that I was probably carrying on a long conversation with everyone in the family about how rotten she is.
I told her I have heard very little back, not much more than "We got your e-mail." (And from Brother and his girlfriend I have not heard even that much.) In reality I've gotten a little more than that (such as this note from my aunt), but really not much. But I also thought there's not much value in telling her that I think it is crazy for her to expect sympathy from my family. Whose side does she think they are going to be on?
But apparently what she is hoping for is that she will still be welcomed in my parents' home as part of the family, that she can still expect to come and sleep over for a couple of nights at Christmastime, ... really, that nothing will have changed in how people see her or treat her. And she actually got a little choked up this evening in saying, "For thirty years your family has been the only family I have; so I guess if I'm going to be kicked out of it now, I'd like to know."
Her timeline is a bit off -- we were still visiting her sister's house at Christmastime when the boys were toddlers, to say nothing of the twelve years we were married before either boy was born. But it is true that she has had almost no contact with the rest of her family in the last decade, at any rate. I have to ask, though, why is that? No, I've been in no hurry to visit her family because on the whole I don't have anything to say to them; but I've generally acquiesced when she made plans to visit. I wasn't the one who encouraged her to jump in the middle of a big, ugly argument between her sister and that sister's oldest daughter (Wife's niece), with the result that Wife's sister (and all her children) stopped speaking to Wife. And with each passing year, as the boys spent more time with my parents and less time with Wife's relatives, it became easier and easier to keep spending holidays that way again and again. If Wife has almost no contact with her own family, it's because she hasn't troubled to make it happen, and because a lot of them don't want to see her. Not much I can do about either of those.
Nor is it like she has really ingratiated herself with my family. Her fights with my father are legendary ... so much so that the boys just roll their eyes at any mention of the two of them and look for the first opportunity to be somewhere else whenever she and my dad are in the same room. My mother finds Wife's constant complaining so oppressive that she has to flee to another room rather than endure it. I'm not so sure about Brother and his girlfriend ... of all the family they seem the most solicitous toward her. But I don't know how far that is genuine affection, and how far it is my brother's principled desire to be kind to everyone.
Does she really not understand how uncomfortable she makes the people around her? No, I think she really does not understand.
But this means that she must also not understand how far she has been tolerated by my family specifically for my sake. Maybe it's just because she can't see herself, or maybe people didn't do things that way in her family. But she has expressed bafflement many times at the way that members of my family instinctively side with each other in any dispute regardless of "the facts of the case." And I, for my part, can't understand how she would ever expect anything else. Isn't that what families do?
Hell, I don't know. Maybe hers didn't.
In any event, I have told her I can't speak for my parents -- which is true. I have told her that I haven't heard much back from anyone either -- which is nearly true. And I have told her that nobody has said a word about whether she will be welcome in my parents' house at Christmas, because Christmas is more than three months away and none of us ever plans that far ahead. And that is pretty much true at a literal level. Nobody has discussed the question with me. Now I can't imagine her actually being welcome there for more than a few awkward hours at a time on special occasions few and far between, but strictly speaking that is just an opinion and I haven't voiced it. I haven't seen any profit to anybody in spelling that out right now, because all it would do is make her more miserable. And I suppose I might be wrong. But I don't think so.
When all this business is over, I think Wife is going to be very lonely. She will have her friends, except that she tends to drive away friends over time except for a select few. She may get in touch with the one remaining non-alienated branch of her family, many of whom live out of state but a few of whom live only a couple of hours from here. Maybe Brother and his girlfriend will take pity on her. She'll see the boys rarely and the rest of my family even more rarely. But I think that leaves a lot of hours when she will be alone.
It's sad. What is even sadder is that in very large part this is something she has done to herself. Will she ever understand that? Anything's possible, but that's not the number where I'm putting my bet ....
Every conversation with Wife these days takes way longer than it needs to. I asked her today for some numbers on bills she had paid so that I could reimburse my share of them, and we must have talked for ... I don't know, three hours? ... before she collected them. So many changes rung on "What's going to happen ...?" and "If you said this why did you do that ...?" and "It's totally not fair that ...." I wanted to say, "The reason I did all those things is that I'm an asshole and you will be well rid of me." Hell, might even be true ....
But she made one comment in that whole barrel-full that stuck with me. Almost as a side-comment to something else, Wife said, ...
"This whole last week has been like that nightmare where something is chasing you and you can't move your feet."
For all her hostile talk in Lawyer's office, she may be petrified. Lawyer did say she thinks Wife will try to maintain the status quo .... Maybe it's not even on purpose, but just from not being able to make herself do anything else.
Wife seems to have a lot of trouble with the financial planning aspect of the divorce. I suppose this is no surprise ... part of why I am leaving her is that she has no sense of financial reality. But the other night she was complaining that I had offered her far too little money to live on (that being the exact amount that our state's standard formula calculated). So I asked her to make a counter-proposal, and we could negotiate it. "How much do you need?"
"Well, I don't know that because I don't have all the figures."
Silly me, at this point I think she's talking about figures like what I earn and what we pay for the mortgage, so I say, "Gosh, I'm pretty sure that's all in there. Go through it with a pencil in hand, and if you find something missing just jot it down and I'l get the number for you."
"But I can't do that because I don't have all the information I need."
Ummm, ... what? Didn't I just answer that? "Right, but that's why I say to jot down whatever it is you don't have and I'll get it; meanwhile you can replace those with X and Y in your calculation and just say that whatever you need is so much a week plus X and Y. But you have to start somewhere. Don't make a huge project out of it. I'm just looking for a rough draft. You should be able to sketch it out in a day or two. If you are spending longer than that then you are going into more detail than you need for a first draft."
"But I can't do that because I don't know what I'm going to need!!!"
At this point she was getting pretty upset, and I was completely clueless why.
"Huh?"
"Well, the house needs all this work and there's absolutely no way I can save up enough money to have it done on what you are offering me. So I have to get quotes on all of that. And I have no idea how much it will cost to hire a gardener, so I have to get quotes on that. And getting quotes on all these things is going to take months! There's no way I can do all that in the 48 hour deadline you are giving me! And what if I have to rush through it so much in those 48 hours that forget one little thing that I really need? I can't come back to you later and ask for more -- you'll just smirk and say I should have thought of that before. And so whatever happens I'll end up losing the house and all of my possessions and I'll be homeless!"
Wow.
I don't remember quite what I said. I'm sure it was ineffectual -- something on the order of, "Look, just get started and I'm sure you can get most of it. It can't be that hard." But I started thinking about what she had said.
I have to admit the part that struck me first was the gardener. We don't have a gardener now ... so why does she think that she "needs" a gardener? All I can figure is that she means she won't have me to mow the lawn any more. Or maybe she means that the garden is all overgrown and the yard is a wreck and she "can't" do any of it herself because of her illnesses and allergies and trick knee, and so "of course" she "needs" a gardener to bring it into minimally-acceptable shape, that being better shape than any of it is in right now.
Except that spousal support is meant only to maintain your existing standard of living, not improve it. If your current standard of living sucks, spousal support won't change that.
The second thing that struck me was the intensity of the panic. She is clearly feeling enormous fear, and therefore feels compelled to know that every possibility is covered and accounted for. But when does any of us ever get that? Isn't life inherently uncertain? Isn't the future always unknown? It is, but that kind of uncertainty has always been "unacceptable" to Wife. It's part of why she is never able to trust anything or anyone, and therefore (out of a desire to protect herself against the betrayal she "knows" is coming) behaves in ways that make her untrustworthy. That's another reason I am leaving.
She cannot distinguish between needs and wants -- I mean that not in a frivolous way, as if I were merely trying to say that she indulges herself too much, but really deep down. She does not have the intellectual tools, whatever they are, to make that distinction. And I think that somehow she really has no idea how to get started. She has no idea what she needs or how much it costs.
She also can't listen, because her fear is so great that she is always interrupting. "No, I can't do this because ...." "No, that's impossible because ...." "I'm completely trapped because ...." Some of this might even be true, but I can't tell. There is so much of it that I tune it all out completely. I can't listen to it, can't digest it, therefore can't evaluate it or try to help her disentangle reality from fantasy. In the back of my mind I think I used to try to do that, but whenever the issue touched one of her deep fears -- and money is a very, very deep fear for her -- it never worked. She could never hear me. She could never bring herself to let go of the fear long enough to see that there was a world beyond it. That's another reason I am leaving.
One side of me thinks that divorce is going to bring an end to the craziness I have lived with for so long, at least as far as I am concerned because I will be out of here. But I'm also starting to suspect that it will bring to the surface every last scrap of craziness that I have been avoiding for so long. That one last bonfire is going to be a big one.
I know what she has been telling me ("You don't believe this but I still love you"). I know what Lawyer picked up from her ("She really wants to preserve the staus quo.") But this evening, as in the past (from time to time), Wife was sloppy about not logging out of her e-mail. So what is she telling her friends?
Well, a fair bit of it is about what a monster I am. A typical paragraph starts off like this: "I took it as a body blow that Hosea chose to tell me he's divorcing me the day after Son 2 left, when I was still very much grieving over being an empty nester. I also think that he is telling me that he only wants what is best for me, but is not dealing at all fairly with me...."
But then, after the harangue, comes this little gem:
"[Anyway the upshot is he is planning to move out.] Honestly, that is a great relief to me. I can't help but be stressed by the uncertainty, but the sooner he leaves, the happier I'll be."
Glad to hear it.
Win-win.
