Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 2

Continuing ....
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2.  A specific event that seems important… the morning we were going to drive from my place to visit your Aunt and Uncle. I was somewhat scattered and having trouble getting it together with my last packing to get out the door and go.  This little bit of chaotic behavior on my part triggered a full blown reactive response from you that lasted all day.  Yes, my behavior was irritating and even maddening, but your reaction seemed way out of proportion to the stimulus and seemed to be about more than just me.  In addition, you expressed that you had made a decision to just go with the flow and accommodate whatever I ended up doing, but in fact you seemed angry and reactive all day long.  The next day, you didn’t seem to remember much about what had happened and that suggests to me that you may have dissociated.
When I was little, I did this a lot: overreacted if things weren’t “right” according to how I per­ceived “right”.  Don’t know why, but I did.  Once my parents were going to divide a couple of doughnuts between me and my little brother, and I threw a big fit until they were divided exactly in half.  Then I gave him my half anyway because I wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat a doughnut.  So why did I throw the fit?  To this day I don’t know.

I’m aware of this tendency and try to control, repress, or defuse it.  That’s probably not a very Buddhist thing to do J but the habit is unattractive and causes suffering in me and others.  In any event this too has nothing to do with Wife.

In this particular case, I was thinking of how long the drive really was.  I knew it was a long drive – in fact, I had a pretty good idea how long it was, since I had made the exact same drive only a couple of months earlier.  I also remembered that when I made the trip in October I hadn’t left till noon, and I got into town about 10:00 pm.  Fortunately my other aunt and uncle [with whom I was staying that time] were still awake by then [I’m still talking about October], but it did seem to me kind of rude to show up that late [on this second trip, in January] if it were avoidable.  Besides, I knew that Aunt and Uncle were expecting you and me for dinner.  So as the clock got later and later, this is what was going through my mind.  I forgot to factor in that for the trip in October, when I left at noon, I was leaving from my place and not yours: this meant, naturally, that we had two hours more leeway than I was banking on.  On the other hand, I knew you wouldn’t want to drive the way I drove when I made the trip by myself, so already I had no idea how much extra time we would add simply by adhering to the posted speed limits.  And, as I say, I was worried about showing up late when we were expected for dinner.  An overreaction?  Yeah, sure.  But if we had been staying in a motel I wouldn’t have cared.  It wasn’t the time itself that caused me the anxiety, but what it would mean for the people who were waiting on us.  Of course I knew that they would make allowances, whatever happened.  But that’s because they are wonderful human beings, and I didn’t want to presume on their kindness because to do so would have ill repaid the hospitality they were showing us.

Then when we were finally ready and I went to move my car, I found I had gotten a parking ticket for parking on the street.  If we had left when I thought we were going to leave, I wouldn’t have.  OK, that wasn’t as big a deal as the rest of it, and by then I had already decided to accept whatever happened.  But it didn’t make me happier.

You say I felt angry during the drive out there.  From the inside that wasn’t it at all.  I felt ashamed of having made an issue of the time, and so I felt like I had to prove to you that I didn’t mean it.  I was scrupulously careful to drive no faster than the posted speed limit, and to offer you the wheel at every opportunity so you wouldn’t think I was insisting on controlling the drive.  Maybe I was angry at myself. 

More exactly, the interchange that bothered me was when I said – out of frustration, but not meaning it seriously – that we could make up the time if I did all the driving [because I drive a lot faster than Debbie does].  Then when I tried to assure you it was a joke, you wouldn’t accept the assurance and told me that you thought I really meant it.  At that point I felt trapped, because you wouldn’t let me apologize for some­thing that I really didn’t mean.  That was a behavior that Wife in particular did all the time … never allowing me to back up.  So anytime I said something stupid or clumsy or unskillful, I was stuck with it forever.  I could never just apologize and undo it.  Now we (you and I) had promised each other from the very beginning that we would always allow each other to apologize, to back up, to undo what we had said.  But it felt to me like that was exactly what you were not doing.  And that one moment – the moment where I felt that your unwillingness to forgive meant that I was forever, irredeemably guilty for something I didn’t even mean – was what poisoned the interchange for me.

That’s amazing: I didn’t think of it in terms of the promise you and I had made to each other until just now, as I was typing this.  When I discussed this with my therapist, the only part that I saw was the hyper-reactivity, which is as old as I am and which truly has nothing to do with Wife.  Only now do I see that the specific poisonous moment was the one I describe in the immediately preceding paragraph … and what made that moment so incredibly painful was indeed that it was exactly something she used to do all the time.

These two things seem to me to be related to living so many years with a person whose behavior was chaotic, unpredictable, often threatening and sometimes actually violent. Anyone would develop similar coping behaviors in the same circumstances, but they make me feel cautious.

How to be happy when you don't really exist

Several times today I found myself wondering what I would write about tonight [Tuesday] ... if indeed I could maintain the self-discipline to write something.  Maybe I would just talk about my day.  Maybe I would troll through my old notebooks looking for another alarming story.  Maybe I would take the advice I quoted in yesterday evening's post and use one of those topics ... an element of my autobiography, say (as if you haven't already heard way too much of that), or a word I don't know (not too many of those, comparatively speaking).

But at this point the only thing on my mind – besides that it's late, I'm tired, and I'm really enjoying my third drink of the evening – is a conversation I had in the parking lot after attending sangha this evening.  This is the sangha (meditation group) that I go to every Tuesday, the one that meets in the Unitarian church and that Debbie founded years ago.  I should probably refer to it as the UU (Unitarian Universalist) Sangha, when I need to give it a name.  Anyway, on the way out to the parking lot this evening I was making polite chit-chat with an Asian woman who is a member of the sangha.  She's a grandmother and still speaks with a thick accent; while I gather she has been in this country for many years, I gather also that she wasn't born here.

Anyway, we were talking about her car, and how something is wrong with her catalytic converter that is going to cost her a lot of money to fix.  And then suddenly I found myself listening to a long and intense speech about all the things that are going wrong in her life these days.  She doesn't like living here because she can't find a place she can afford, and besides everything is too spread out.  When she lived in San Francisco, things were a lot more compact, or at any rate she could get anywhere she needed to go quickly and by public transportation.  Here, not so much.  Also things are too expensive here: in San Francisco she could dine out cheaply, but here she has to pay more for lower quality food and can't find decent dim sum anywhere.  (Wait, ... what? Things cost less in San Francisco? Did I hear that right?)  Also, ... oh hell, the list went on and on.  I don't remember it all.  Some of it I could sympathize with.  But at other times I felt like saying, "Yes, and your point would be ...?"  Sure, this and that facet of living in this town are imperfect, but that's just how it is.  Not much anybody can do about it.

She laughed at herself that this was a very un-Buddhist attitude she was showing, because we're always hearing the advice (during dharma study) to let things be what they are and not to cling to our desires for them to be something else.  She's right, of course, but I figured it would be in bad taste to say so.  Instead I asked why she ever left San Francisco.  She told me it's because her son lives here, and so this way she can be closer to her son and see him regularly.  But then she added, a little wistfully, that of course he has his own life and isn't free to see her all that often.  So why doesn't she give up trying to live near her son, and move back to a city she likes better?  No, she can't do that because in the time she's been gone San Francisco has become too expensive.  (Aha, so in fact there are other reasons for staying here besides being close to her son ... viz., that this is what she can afford.)

After a while she wound down, and I was able to disconnect politely and drive home.  But I found myself thinking, God I hope I never become like that as I get older.  Of course there is something pharasiacal about saying "I'm glad I'm not like that poor beggar" and stopping there.  Also, I really did find a measure of compassion for her in the fact that she is in a situation she has no idea how to adapt to.  All the same, by about the third time that she said she finds it really hard to hold onto her identity these days – when she doesn't live in an Asian community and can't do any of the fun things she used to do – I found myself thinking, Wow, you're right, that really is an un-Buddhist thing to say.  Surely the Buddhist teaching would be that there is no such thing as your identity in the first place, that in fact you yourself as an independent entity don't really exist at all (strictly speaking), that what claims to be your independent self is just a temporary ripple on the surface of Consciousness like the splash when you throw a rock into the waves at the beach – a momentary configuration that will dissolve soon enough (since we all die) and reconfigure into something else.  If you believe in reincarnation then the argument is that you'll be reborn; but even if you don't, the molecules of your body will disperse into the world and become part of something else.  Great Caesar may be plugging a bung hole, for all we know.

[Somewhere in the middle of the preceding paragraph I stopped typing Tuesday night. Tiredness from the day and my third glass of wine collaborated to send me crashing into bed. I'm writing the rest of this over breakfast Wednesday morning, with the result that I'm going to be late to work. (sigh)]

Of course this is all fine as intellectual theory, or if you are committed to being a doctrinaire Buddhist.  I'm certainly not the latter – I enjoy the practice of meditation and I find the philosophy very consistent with directions my mind had already started walking down years ago, but I'm hardly a doctrinaire anything.  Considering how often I look at myself and just shake my head, I'm probably not even a doctrinarire Hosea-ist, whatever that might be.  So why do I care about this teaching of impermanence?  Why was I using it to justify my mentally criticizing or even judging this poor woman (also a pretty un-Buddhist thing to do!), even while I was nodding sympathetically on the outside and trying to say helpful things about the really unfortunate pickle she feels herself in?  Is it just that I've gotten allergic to hearing people complain (except myself, of course), and any excuse is good enough for dismissing somebody else's suffering?

Anything's possible, but I hope not.  More exactly, I'm singularly aware these days of just how impermanent this or that element of our identities can be.  Two years ago my identity had a lot to do with being a husband and father and homeowner; now, not so much.  What's more, there's something valuable in the ability to be happy regardless what is going on.  Even when things were truly miserable with Wife, there was a level on which I would have said I was happy.  It wasn't the whole story, by a long shot; but it wasn't just self-delusion or happy-talk, either.  It was more like ... ummm ... gosh, now that I try to put it into words I'm not quite sure how to do so without sounding glib or simplistic and it wasn't really any of those things either.  But let me say this.  There were times in the past when depression would get hold of me and I would wish I had never been born.  In the last decade or two, that never really happened.  There were times of anguish, times of hopelessness.  There were times I was furious at God or Providence or my own damned stupidity for landing me in what seemed an impossible situation.  There were times that I stared vacantly straight ahead, with no more idea what I was going to do next or how I was going to face tomorrow than I had of how to fly to the moon.  And yet, with all that – if you had asked me "Do you want to kill yourself?" there were only a small handful of moments (that left almost as soon as they had arrived) when I would have said Yes.  My considered opinion was always No.  If you had asked me the great George Bailey question from "It's a Wonderful Life" – would it have been bettter if I had never been born? – the answer would have been No.  And indeed I took a lot of comfort from George Bailey's exultant exclamation near the end of that movie, "I'm alive! Yippee! Hooray! I'm going to jail!"  I looked at George Bailey in the movie and conceded that yes, it was better for him to be alive even at the cost of being sent unjustly to jail.  Then I turned around to look at my own predicament and conceded that if he could be happy – and rightly so – even while being sent unjustly to jail, then I could be happy in my circumstances too.  If asked whether I would be willing to live my life over I could have honestly said, with Friedrich Nietzsche, that Yes I would be willing even if every single thing worked out the same way as it did before.  I don't think much of the Doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same as a philosophical doctrine; but as a moral aspiration (I mean, the aspiration to love the world so much that you can will the eternal return of your life, even if large parts of that life turn out horrifying, miserable, or just deeply regrettable) ... it's a good one.

I have no idea how to explain this to anybody else without sounding smug and self-satisfied and preachy.  I certainly won't try to explain it to my friend from sangha.  But I wish I could, because truly it might help her feel better.

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 1

Yesterday I explained about Debbie's farewell letter, and about the reply that I wrote a couple days later but never, ever intend to show her.  (It's easy enough to keep that resolution because she doesn't want to hear from me again.)  So here is part 1.  It's probably already cringe-worthy, but I have to start somewhere and this is what I actually wrote when I sat down to the exercise.
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To Debbie, 03-29-2014

Dear Debbie:

I am writing this reply at the suggestion of my therapist.  I have no intention of sending it – now or ever.  But her idea is that it could be worthwhile to capture what I think today (she and I discussed this in our session a couple days ago), and then compare it with what I think in a few months.  Will it be the same?  Will it have changed?  There’s no way to know except to wait and see.

Let me say right at the beginning, though, that I am immeasurably grateful that you sent me this letter.  Some of our emotional discussions in the past have frustrated me because they seemed long on portent and short on data.  I haven’t always known what exactly we were talking about.  But this letter is clear and exact.  I recognize perfectly the phenomena you describe, even though in several cases I understand them differently than you do.  But at least I know exactly what we are talking about, and for this I am very grateful.  So to begin ….

A couple of things I have noticed:

1.       You seem to compartmentalize different parts of your life and keep them very separate.  When one person strays from one part of your life into another, it seems to make you feel extremely anxious, even if you have planned the crossover and want it to happen.  In general, you seem to put a lot of effort into planning, orchestrating and managing your life and events in it in order for things to go as smoothly as possible and to not have anything unexpected happen.

There are two points here: one about compartmentalization, and one about managing my life to make it smooth.

It is absolutely true that I compartmentalize different parts of my life, and that I’m good at it.  What is not really true is the thought that this behavior has anything special to do with Wife, although I certainly deployed the skill to isolate Wife from other parts of my life when she began to become socially intolerable.  But I had developed this skill long before I met her, probably in response to living with my father.  (He even encouraged it – not in those words of course – when from time to time, as far back as grade school, he would encourage me not to let my friends at school know that he and my mother smoked pot.)  Certainly by the time I was in high school I understood viscerally that I wanted my father to know nothing about my life at school, and I didn’t really want my friends at school to meet my family.  School and home were different places; I was a different person in each; it took me time every day to morph from one person into the other (so that sometimes I dawdled quite a bit coming home, until I was really ready to be that person again); and so I didn’t want them to mix.  And for the most part, they didn’t.

When I first got together with Wife, I was very much in love and wanted to integrate her into all the other parts of my life.  I usually feel that way when I’m in love.  My first rude shock on this front was our first year in graduate school, when we had several of my friends from my program over to our apartment for some kind of party or dinner and she started making a string of shockingly racist remarks about Mexicans.  I had never known before that she was so racist.  It shocked me, it shocked my friends, and I made sure never ever to repeat the experience.

Even so, when we left graduate school and I started working I wanted her to meet my friends from work: M, RC, and RH.  And B, of course, because they were both witches.  It didn’t occur to me to keep her separate from work.  Even in the early days at the company where you and I first met [I mean my early days there, back in 1993] I was happy to have her come to company events.  I always brought her to Christmas parties, to summer picnics, … everything.  Ten years later, by the time the company shut down, I was less sanguine about it and brought her mostly out of habit or duty.  At my current company I used to bring her to Christmas parties because I figured I had to, and then tried to spend much of the parties somewhere else.  The last several years I just didn’t go.  But all that was much later.

Anyway, my original point was just that this was a skill I learned as a kid living with my father, not as an adult living with Wife.  I also tend to think of it as a useful skill.  Isn’t this, in fact, what we want of people in the business environment?  If you ask why your employee was late to work, do you really want to hear the details of his hangover, his fights with his wife, and that he had to bail his teenaged son out of jail?  Or is it enough to hear that there were some unex­pected issues that came up at home, but they were exceptions and won’t become the rule?

Do I become nervous when someone strays from one part of my life into another part?  It depends.  I was nervous having you visit me in my office a year ago, when I hadn’t moved out yet … when so far as the office knew, I was still peaceably married at home.  But I expected to invite you to the recent Christmas party, except that it conflicted with our silent retreat.  I was nervous about you meeting Son1 and Son2.  But that’s because I had read so much about how you have to be careful introducing your children to your new girlfriend … and even my therapist said that the timing of the introduction was awfully soon.  She asked, in fact, what was the rush?  Why so early?  And I was a little bit nervous having you meet my folks, just because I’m ill at ease around my father in general … with or without anybody else.  I was worried how he would act around you, and I was trying to guess what he would say to me afterwards … or to anybody else.  My father is a loose cannon, and everything about him makes me nervous.

The point is that most of these issues would have faded with time.  As I say, I expected to take you to my Christmas party, and to dance with you there just the way we had danced at your Christmas party.  I figured the boys would relax around you with time.  And you showed yourself able to take my father admirably in stride.  He still acted a little forced around you – the waiting for you to show up around Christmas got to be a real strain on every­body because my parents were both treating it as such a big deal – but again I figured that would wear off with time.

As for managing my life to make it smooth – I wonder about this.  It’s true that a lot of my life has been uneventful and boring: I attribute this partly to the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, and partly to my excessive timidity.  But I am trying to widen my circle, now that it’s just me.  I went to Peru, for example.  I’ve been going to more museums and so forth.  I drove out to another state to spend the weekend with my relatives for my cousin’s wedding.  OK, none of this is really adventurous, except maybe the trip to Peru.  But I am trying to break out of the routines I have caged myself in. 

Or maybe this is not what you meant.  Maybe you meant the stuff above, about compart­mentalization.  But in that case, … where is the dividing line between over-managing my life (on the one hand) and striving for simple courtesy to guests or friends (on the other)?  There probably is one, but I’m not sure where it is.  In the case of trying to cushion my relationship with Son1 and Son2, if I haven’t already done too much damage, the reason there is simple: that relationship is more important to me than my relationship with you, or than my relation­ship with any other new romantic interest ever could be.  Girlfriends, after all, come and go; but I hope to be connected to my sons as long as I and they are alive.  The relationship will take different forms over the years, to be sure.  But it is still primary.

Blast from the past -- "My mother would have beaten me bloody"

Hosea's log, star date November 11, 2006. 

Location: home ... the house we sold last summer.

Boyfriend 4 is living with us.  Son 1 is ten years old.  Son 2 is eight.

It is a full year – no, it's more than thirteen months – before I even start this blog.  Even back then, life was sometimes far too exciting and far too tough.

This account will be pretty close to what I wrote down at the time, with only minor alterations for clarity.

This evening at dinner, Wife exploded at the boys in a potentially violent rage like the one she was in the night she was arrested.  [Gosh, that's yet another story I've been meaning to post and never have!]  What led up to it?  I don't know – she didn't take her lunchtime meds until 6pm, and we'd been talking about money (which always agitates her), and Son 1 was being difficult today because he spent last night at a sleepover with a couple of friends ... so he didn't do all his chores and he was cranky and out of sorts because he stayed up way too late last night.  But none of these things should be enough by itself – it's just that her disease is getting worse.

Anyway, she and I came out (from talking about money) after Boyfriend 4 and the boys had started eating already.  And Son 1 wasn't eating any of his corn chowder, which Wife had spent "all afternoon" making.  This was "all afternoon" a week or so ago – and even so she'd invested way too much anxiety in it and started it way too late.  But it was still a week or so ago.  Anyway, she went on to say that when she was Son1's age she was glad to have any food on the table at all, and her mother would have beaten her bloody for wasting food, and ... and ... and ...!

Boyfriend 4 and I got her to go back to the bedroom, and after a couple minutes I left her with Boyfriend 4 to go check on the boys.  They were both crying heavily.  I sat down on a chair next to Son 1, who had been the target of her fury (and she could still be heard declaiming against him in the next room), and I pulled him onto my lap.  But Son 2 was crying even harder than Son 1, so I called him over to my lap too.  I hugged them both close, and asked Son 1 to put an arm around Son 2 – partly for balance on my lap, and partly to comfort Son 2 who was sobbing profoundly.  And I talked to them.  I explained that when Mommy's depression is bad, it means that her emotions aren't right – and so when she yells at them in this kind of way, it's not because they are bad and they mustn't take it personally.  I explained this a couple of times and asked if they understood.  They both nodded feebly through the tears.  Then I asked if this was something they already knew before I told them ... and they both shook their heads No.  So it's a damned good thing I told them.  Maybe this will inoculate them against Wife's rages having the same effect on them that Wife's mother's rages had on Wife.  Or maybe not, but at least they needed to know.  For some time I've been hoping that this is something they had figured out on their own, but I guess not.

After a while I asked them if there was somewhere they wanted to go that they would feel safer.  Son 1 stammered "room" almost inaudibly, and Son 2 chimed in, "Anywhere with a door we can close so no-one can hurt us."  So we went into their room.  There (after closing the door) we cuddled on the floor, with Son 1's big blanket around us.  Son 1 explained that it was really scary when Mommy was like that.  And Son 2 said something that really struck me, which is the reason I wrote all this down.  [In other words, without this next point I would have let it slide into oblivion ... presumably because it wasn't extraordinary enough to record otherwise. It amazes me to look back and realize that I didn't record the tantrum for its own sake. I must have taken them too much for granted. Sorry, I'll go on.]  Anyway, Son 2 told Son 1, "It's way scarier for me than for you because I know what this can lead to!"  And then he told Son 1 about the night Wife got arrested, when she was smashing plates on the kitchen floor and "throwing pots and pans."  He explained that he had been awakened by the noise and had come out to see what was going on ... and he had seen Wife do all this destruction.  (And in fact I remember that he had come out afterwards, as I was cleaning up and when the social worker came to check in with me.)  Then Son 2 told Son 1, "You're lucky you're a sound sleeper, because you slept through it. But I saw!"  And this explains why he was so much more upset than Son 1, at whom the rage was ostensibly aimed.  (Although don't get me wrong – Son 1 was really, really  upset too.)  

Finally I got them to settle down.  They agreed to go brush their teeth and go straight to bed, and they both slept together in Son 1's bunk (the upper bunk).I told them a funny story, about a cat we had owned before they were born and how she had befriended a rabbit during a couple months that we were rabbit-sitting for a friend.  Then I turned their light low but kept it a little on, and closed the door.  Son 2 asked that it be open because he doesn't like a closed door when he sleeps. But I said I didn't know if everything was settled yet, and I'd open the door later when all was OK.  And they slept.

When I got back to Wife, Boyfriend 4 had calmed her (thank God for Boyfriend 4!) and she had taken the rest of her meds.  I took over while Boyfriend 4 cleared the table and emptied his cat box.  (When he came to live with us, he brought his cats who joined the house along with ours. His three shared one box, while our two shared another.)  I talked with her and held her until she fell asleep, reassuring her that we all love her.  She talked a lot in terms of the kids retracting their love, or at any rate never trusting her again.  I dismissed the question of trust and assured her (truly) that the boys still love her.  As for trust ... now that I stop to think about it, I am even more amazed at Son 2's willingness to throw his arms around Wife and kiss her to cheer her up when she is depressed – because obviously he has not forgotten the night she came fully unglued.  So what does it mean, that he can show so much love and affection for a mommy whom he knows capable of such destruction?  I know he loves her, but how does he reconcile that with what he has seen?

This child – Son 2 – is going to grow a very deep soul somewhere along the line .... 

Monday evening

Already today I've posted about Debbie's farewell letter.  Also, I took my reply, broke it into four pieces, and posted all those ... with a delay so that they appear one after another on subsequent days.  But I've also said that none of that should count as writing anything today, not in a "journal" sense, because it was all written days ago.  The thinking all happened back then; only the formatting happened today.

So where do I start?  I thought maybe this evening I would copy out of Ella Price's Journal the instructions that the main character is given on the first page.  Also, if I feel energetic enough, I might rummage through lists I've made in the past of things I intend to write some day and tally those up as well.  Not that I ever run out of things to say, God knows ... just out of the self-discipline, enthusiasm, or gumption to bother saying any of it.

Anyway, the book starts off as follows:

__________

Use a 6x8 notebook. Paste these instructions on the inside cover. Fill at least one page a day, every day. Date each entry and concentrate on one incident or idea that is important to you that day. Don't worry too much about grammar and spelling but about clarity and honesty. I'll cllect and check journals at least twice during the semester, and I'll grade solely on your persistence.

Suggestions for people who need priming:

1. Your honest reaction to something that happened in class.
2. Your reaction to something you read.
3. A quotation – copy it and comment on it.
4. A problem you are struggling with.
5. A new word. Copy a definition from a big dictionary. Try some sentences using the new word.
6. Description of an interesting sight or incident.
7. Suggestions for improving the college.
8. A summary of something you read.
9. A mistake or failure from which you learned something.
10. An idea you disagree with – tell why.
11. A question you can't or won't ask in class – leave room and I'll try to answer it.
12. A dream.
13. A favorite fantasy.
14. A description of a person.
15. An important experience.
16. When all else fails, a bit of your autobiography.

__________

Also, I've got a collection of little notebooks that I carry around with me to jot ideas in.  I may go for months without jotting anything at all, and then have a streak of several ideas in a day.  I started keeping these after reading an article by Peter Drucker about how executives should keep track of their own performance, watch where they do well and badly, and then follow up these realizations so that they can place themselves more often in the situations where they perform well.  My first entry was towards the end of October 2006, and filled several pages trying to evaluate myself at work.

The second entry is kind of interesting, especially in view of my remarks – was it yesterday? – about wanting to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.  It starts off as follows:

Drucker also talks about the importance of planning for the "second half" of your life, because an executive will probably be peaked out by 45. (How depressing!) But part of what he alludes to is the importance of starting the second career early – if someone hasn't started volunteering before he is 40, he probably won't do so after 65.

I trust the ages are a little approximate – after all, I'm not going to start a second career when I still have kids at home [Remember this was six years ago.] and I may not have peaked because I started comparatively late. But clearly it is still something I should be aware of. And equally clearly, if this "second career" is going to be something based in what I'm already doingI can tell what it is. Not, e.g., volunteering or anything related to schools or church or whatever – but writing ideas. This has one way or another been my sideline all along ....  

Then there's a multi-page mini-essay on the meaning of the word "liberalism", some speculations about Nietzsche and the New Testament, a lengthy discussion of some problems at work, and ... oh good heavens.  Here we are less than three weeks into the first of these little notebooks, and I've got a detailed account of one of Wife's violent rages, back when Son 1 was ten years old and Son 2 was eight.  Have you heard enough of these by now?  Or are you game for another?  It doesn't meet the criterion of new writing or new thinking, but I realize it's something I meant to post before this.  I'll write it up tonight ... in a new post (not stretching this one out) and then call it a night and go to bed.  I can pick up the thread of the rest of this later.

Debbie's farewell

In my post yesterday I promised I'd say something about a farewell letter I got from Debbie just about two weeks ago.  The background is that way back in January when she left, she suggested that we get together in April and again in the summer, just to test the waters.  So at the end of March she wrote me to say that here it was almost April, and she thought it was too soon.  I thought so too, but it didn't stop me from being really sad when I get her letter.  Then I pushed a bit to ask if we were really delaying or really saying Goodbye, and she said that yes this was probably Goodbye, ... unless things changed suddenly.  I asked her for one favor:  she had said over and over that she thought I had psychological damage to work through after years with Wife, but she'd never given me any specifics.  Could she now send me a list?  Something I could take to my current therapist?

I didn't expect her to follow through, because I had come to believe that her reservations were all just a smoke screen for inchoate fears that she couldn't articulate ... all because up till now she had not articulated them in a way I could understand.  But I was wrong, and glad to be so.  She sent me a letter and then asked me not to contact her again.

I'll post the letter here.  My therapist suggested that I write a reply (with no intention of ever sending it!) just to capture where my head is at today; then in a few months I can check to see whether I am in the same place.  Usually when I post something really long that I've written elsewhere, I look back on it later and wonder what I could possibly have been thinking to inflict it all on you.  But in the spirit of yesterday's post -- in the spirit of getting content out there -- I will post it.  Not all in a lump: I'll break it into pieces and scatter it over a couple of days.  No, I don't think this gets me off the hook of writing something every single day.  It just breaks up the monotony of my whiny self-justifications.  Or I hope it will.

Anyway, here is her letter:
__________

For Hosea 03-25-2014

A couple of things I have noticed:

1.       You seem to compartmentalize different parts of your life and keep them very separate.  When one person strays from one part of your life into another, it seems to make you feel extremely anxious, even if you have planned the crossover and want it to happen.  In general, you seem to put a lot of effort into planning, orchestrating and managing your life and events in it in order for things to go as smoothly as possible and to not have anything unexpected happen.

2.       A specific event that seems important… the morning we were going to drive from my place to visit your Aunt and Uncle.  [I talk about this trip briefly here. -H.]  I was somewhat scattered and having trouble getting it together with my last packing to get out the door and go.  This little bit of chaotic behavior on my part triggered a full blown reactive response from you that lasted all day.  Yes, my behavior was irritating and even maddening, but your reaction seemed way out of proportion to the stimulus and seemed to be about more than just me.  In addition, you expressed that you had made a decision to just go with the flow and accommodate whatever I ended up doing, but in fact you seemed angry and reactive all day long.  The next day, you didn’t seem to remember much about what had happened and that suggests to me that you may have dissociated.

These two things seem to me to be related to living so many years with a person whose behavior was chaotic, unpredictable, often threatening and sometimes actually violent.   Anyone would develop similar coping behaviors in the same circumstances, but they make me feel cautious.

3.       This is something we have not talked about.  I see a pattern in your Mom’s relationship with your Dad and Wife’s relationship with you that worries me.  Your mother is very, very passive in her relationship with your Dad, and remains super-calm and non-reactive in response to him.  While Wife is not passive – she acts out- over the years she became helpless.  I really don’t want to step into this pattern of women who do not function to their full capacity. 

 I suggest that you tell your therapist the whole story of your relationship with Wife.  Tell her about how you met, what the early years were like, how Wife’s behavior changed over the years.  Tell her about the incident with the kitchen knife when Son1 and Son2 were little.  Tell about the many affairs and about Boyfriend4.  Tell about Wife’s many episodes of taking her medications and drinking and passing out.  Tell about Son2 coping for and “parenting” Wife.  Tell about the many threats and accusations and about the dramatic suicide attempts.  Tell her about how you behaved in reaction to all this and about measures you took to protect yourself and the boys and to get free.  Tell your therapist everything from beginning to end.  This will be difficult and you won’t want to do it, so start with what you are able to tell her and go from there.

  [And as I post this I stop to wonder ... have I told you folks all of these stories? I've told so many it's hard for me to remember, and my indexing system isn't the greatest. Hmmm ... this could give me a lot to write about, I suppose. -H.] 

Hosea meets Ella Price

A week ago I griped about how I don't like work, and about how updating this blog looks and feels like work.  Sounds like the logical place to go from there would be to stop updating, wouldn't it?

But maybe I need to think about it a little longer before I let myself do that.

A couple weeks ago, ... or something like that, I don't quite remember when ... I went on-line impulsively and ordered a bunch of books by Dorothy Bryant. (Incidentally, if you don't recognize the name you should run, not walk, to your favorite place for ordering books -- be it an on-line site or a real-live store -- and get anything you can find by her.)  For years I had read only two of her books: Miss Giardino and The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You.  I kept telling myself that "some day" I would buy some of the others, and so a couple weeks ago I ordered a bunch of them.  They have started dribbling in, and while I am well into one of the novels (Confessions of Madame Psyche) I have been riffling through the other books as they arrive.

One of these is her very first book, Ella Price's Journal.  It purports to be the daily journal of a middle-aged woman who goes back to school and takes a writing class which requires that the students write something every day.  She does it because she is supposed to, and of course the journal records how she changes as she pursues her education.

But the whole point of keeping the journal, in the context of the story, is that it's a vehicle to help you think.  By writing down whatever happens to be going through your head, you unfold it and see things in it you didn't see before.

This is hardly a surprise.  In some ways it is just what I said when I first started this blog back in December of 2007.  It is similar to the explanation I have often heard for why to meditate, viz., that just by sitting still and being quiet you allow yourself to hear the ranting going on in your head that you'd been ignoring up till now.  And it's borne out by an exercise my current therapist had me try recently, in response to a good-bye letter I got from Debbie.  (More on that in my next post, I guess.)

The only thing is that these reflections make my whining about "work" sound a little childish.  If the whole point is to help you think, then choosing not to write means ... what, choosing not to think?  Sure, I can do that.  Booze would help too, come to that.  Only somehow I have to wonder if that's really the direction I want to go.  Have I done all the thinking I need to do these days?  Do I understand everything I need to understand?  Well, I don't so much care about understanding my relationship with Wife any more, because I don't really have one (or not much of one).  That's why I started writing in the first place.  But I do have to admit there are things I don't understand yet.  I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, for one.  And the prospect of never knowing is kind of unattractive.  My father has never figured out what he wants to be, and he's 78.  He has spent the last two or three decades dithering unproductively, and at this time he spends most of his time either trading jokes online with his old Army buddies or attending seminars on how to get rich quick by selling insurance.  It's a little pathetic.  So maybe that's not where I want to end up.

And this leaves me with the thought that maybe, just maybe, I should get my ass back in gear and start posting regularly.  Not necessarily about this or that -- not necessarily about anything -- but just forcing my mind to push my thoughts through my fingertips and out onto the screen. 

It would be a lot more restful to kick back and forget it all, but it's probably not a good idea.  Well, hell.