Maybe I'm a girl?

The lead article in the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly is called "The Confidence Gap."  It's by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, two journalists I'd never heard of before, and it's about why women don't excel in the work world in the numbers that we'd like to see.  In a nutshell, the argument is that men overestimate their abilities and women underestimate theirs; also, that self-confidence is more important than raw ability in getting ahead.  So men are more likely to apply for promotions for which they are even marginally qualified, more likely to angle for raises, more likely to keep pushing their way up.  Guess who ends up rising farther faster?

There is a lot of analysis behind this, and a lot of speculation about causes.  But one page really caught my eye.  Allow me to quote at some length:

For some clues about the role that nurture plays in the confidence gap, let's look to a few formative places: the elementary-school classroom, the playground, and the sports field.  School is where many girls are first rewarded for being good, instead of energetic, rambunctious, or even pushy.  But while being a "good girl" may pay off in the classroom, it doesn't prepare us very well for the real world....

It's easier for young girls than for young boys to behave: ....  They have longer attention spans, more-advanced verbal and fine-motor skills, and greater social adeptness....  Soon they learn that they are most valuable, and most in favor, when they do things the right way: neatly and quietly.  "Girls seem to be more easily socialized," [Stanford's Carol] Dweck says.  "They get a lot of praise for being perfect."  In turn, they begin to crave the approval they get for being good....

And yet the result is that many girls learn to avoid taking risks and making mistakes.  This is to their detriment: many psychologists now believe that risk-taking, failure, and perseverance are essential to confidence-building.  Boys, meanwhile, tend to absorb more scolding and punishment, and in the process they learn to take failure in stride....

[Then after paragraphs on the playground and on sports, the authors wind up this section with ...] What a vicious circle: girls lose confidence, so they quit competing, thereby depriving themselves of one of the best ways to regain it.  They leave school crammed full of interesting historical facts and elegant Spanish subjunctives, proud of their ability to study hard and get the best grades, and determined to please.  But somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules change and they don't realize it.  They slam into a work world that doesn't reward them for perfect spelling and exquisite manners.  The requirements for adult success are different, and their confidence takes a beating.

Do I even have to write anything else, or can I close this post right here?  Those paragraphs are, with minor exceptions, written about me.  I'm pretty sure I'm a guy.  [Just a minute – reaches hand in pants – checks for testicles – yup, they're still there! – yes, I'm a guy.]  But so much of this, from the advanced verbal skills through the praise for being perfect, to the fear of mistakes and the bewilderment at a work world that doesn't give a damn about sentence fragments or split infinitives ... so much of this is deeply, personally familiar that I can't help but think about it.  So maybe this explains why I never have anything to brag about to my alumni bulletin, no visible leadership in anything even though my high school prides itself on training leaders.  Maybe in some respects I'm really a girl, or at any rate a virtual girl.

Of course, even the girls who graduate from that school seem to have a lot to brag about, so that might not be the whole story.  Another option is that I should go back to gently wooing Sister Failure.  Still, it was an interesting idea.

Funny that I should find myself writing two posts in a row about this subject, when it's not something I've been [aware of] thinking about lately.  I wonder why that is ...?

"That thing"

As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'm currently reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, a novel set largely in the San Francisco area in the first half of the twentieth century about a young girl who stumbles into an early career as a fraudulent psychic but who then runs away from that life and ... things happen to her.  I suppose in a sense it is a modern Bildungsroman, except it covers her whole life and not just her childhood.  But hey – education (Bildung) is supposed to be lifelong if you do it right, isn't it?

Anyway, one of the things that happens to Mei-Li Murrow, the half-Chinese protagonist, is a totally unexpected mystical experience as she sits on the beach one day, an experience in which the daylight suddenly seems to shoot through her and suffuse her in orgasmic waves of energy, and in which everything she sees on the beach – the dog playing in the surf and then shaking his fur dry when he comes back to the shore, the fisherman standing there casting and reeling and casting and reeling over and over, the children intently building a sand castle – all suddenly appear intensely beautiful and deeply meaningful.  And then it passes, of course, and the world goes back to being the world.  Except it doesn't, quite, because the memory of that event sticks with her ever after, and starts affecting everything else she does (such as prompting her to bail out of the psychic racket even though she has just then reached the point where she is about to make serious money at it).

If you know any of Dorothy Bryant's other work, this scene won't surprise you.  I think she has used that kind of experience in only one other book – The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You – but if you know any of Dorothy Bryant's work you probably know Kin of Ata.  And if you know Kin of Ata it will be no surprise to you that this experience doesn't suddenly make everything in Mei-Li's life all better.  She sees it, she knows it is there, she knows it is possible ... and she goes right on making the same ham-fisted choices in her life that she made before, with the same kinds of unexpected (and mostly unwelcome) consequences.  She even needles herself about it – "Why did I do or say this or that mean / petty / bitter / spiteful thing, when I should know better ... when I should remember that there is a glory in the world that makes all meanness and pettiness unnecessary?"  But knowing better doesn't stop her.

The same way it doesn't for most of us, come to that.

It's an interesting idea to see pursued in a story: How does this kind of experience (which any number of people must have had from time to time) get incorporated into one's life?  And it is refreshing to see Bryant not handle it simplistically, as if having the heavens open for you suddenly makes all your problems go away.  Because I assume that it never does, at any rate outside of didactic propaganda or moralizing hagiography.  So, ... what then?  Does it help you to live any better at all, or does it just help you to be dissatisfied with yourself without helping you to change?

I haven't finished the book, so I don't know Mei-Li's answer.  (Well, I've skimmed ahead the way I do impatiently in all books; but I won't say anything here because I'm sure I haven't picked up the whole picture.)  And I've never had that kind of mystical revelation myself, so I can't speak from personal experience.  I suppose the closest I've come to experiencing "that thing" (Mei-Li's name for it) is maybe two different things.  One is what I called "the Voice" in a post a couple years ago, when I talked about the quiet that I would hear in my head after I had finished shouting at God for Wife's most recent damned-foolish short-sighted betrayal (whatever it was that time), and the quiet would almost be shaped like words, or like an answer.  The other is the experience I used to have in Full Moon circles, back when Wife was a practising Wiccan priestess, when the officiating priest would call a god or goddess (usually goddess) into her body and she would go around the circle speaking to each of us in turn ... only it was plainly not Wife looking out through her eyes or speaking with her voice.  Other than those two experiences, I think my life has been pretty mundane – certainly I've felt nothing like Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light – but it's true that those have been enough for me to trust that there's Something More to the world than it looks like at first.

In fairness, I should add also that I would never have listened for the first of those if I hadn't already experienced the second.  That is, I would never have thought to yell at God over Wife's latest outrage – much less listen to the silence that came afterwards, when I finally stopped yelling – had I not earlier had the experience of speaking viva voce to Demeter or Hestia or Cerridwen (usually Cerridwen) in my living room or back yard, through the mechanism of the Wiccan ritual that allowed Her to use Wife's body.  In that respect, I owe to Wife my knowledge that the world is larger than it looks.  Like Sara Teasdale says in the poem on my sidebar, for some things you should "count many a year of strife well-lost."  Teasdale's "white shining hour of peace" is probably closer to Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light than to anything I've experienced, but I'll take what I can get.  And therefore, for all my snotty-nosed whining, my marriage to Wife may still turn out – in a very odd calculation – to have been a net positive.  Sorry, this whole paragraph has been one long parenthesis.  Where was I?

I was saying that I haven't experienced the kind of vision Mei-Li say, but I've seen something; and I was about to ask if it made any difference in my life.  The short answer is: not enough, but maybe some.  By "not enough" I mean mostly that I'm still far from wise; and wouldn't it be nice if the awareness of a reality beyond surface appearances made us all wise?  On the other hand, for one example, I think I owe to this awareness my comparative nonchalance over the concept of failure.  I wasn't always able to be relaxed about failure.  You can read plenty of posts in this blog where I've whined about failure of one kind or another.  But finally I began to think about it differently.  After all, if there is a whole layer of reality behind the one that we see every day, and if there's anything valuable about that layer (which I can tell that there is just by feeling it, when I see it), then at any rate that means that the ordinary scale of values that we are used to in the workaday world isn't the only scale.  It also makes it look a little bit more like the things we do every day are a kind of game, or a play, in which I just happen to have been assigned this role and you just happen to have been assigned that one.  Well OK then, if there are multiple scales of value I don't have to feel too bad when I get my high school alumni bulletin and hear that guys I went to school with – guys I thought I was smarter than – have just been appointed to the state superior court after many years as partner in a firm that does extensive pro bono work for the poor, or own a technology startup whose market capitalization just hit forty-nine gazillion dollars, or just sailed alone around the world.  (I made up that last one, but not the other two.)  Yes, these achievements demonstrate virtues it would be nice to have; no, I don't begrudge them their congratulations.  But one way or another it just so happens that I was dealt one hand and they were dealt others.  I got one role and they got others.  It happens.

Sorry, I realize on re-reading that last paragraph that it drips with envy.  That wasn't how I meant to write it.  That it came out so makes me think there is still a level in which my emotions haven't moved beyond envying my classmates, beyond thinking that I "really shoulda done something better with my life."  Fair enough, but my emotions can be stupid.  My mind understands that my classmates and I really were carrying around different virtues from the get-go.  I got a lot of praise in high school for being smart and doing well in my classes.  But success in the real world requires other virtues far more than it requires intelligence – virtues like energy, determination, vision, and a knack for making good decisions.  Me?  Sure, I'm smart.  But depression saps my energy (even when the depression is medicated, which it long wasn't), I dither over things, and I have (like one of our ex-Presidents) trouble with "the vision thing".  As for good decisions, ... well, I married Wife didn't I?  You tell me.

This post has evolved in a direction totally different from anywhere I thought it was going to go when I started writing it.  And actually, it is starting to bleed into another one that I got the idea for Friday night, as I read the latest Atlantic Monthly over dinner.  So maybe it's time to end this one and start that one.  Then I'd better get dinner going, if I expect to eat it tonight, because it's going to take a couple of hours.  Either that or go do my laundry ....

Happy Easter!

It's been a beautiful Sunday of doing very little.  The day has been clear and blue and warm, and I was careful to get all my bill-paying and apartment-cleaning and grocery-shopping done yesterday – didn't get to the laundry, but that can wait.  So this morning I got up, put together an Easter pie for breakfast, popped it in the overn to bake, meditated for half an hour or so, made some coffee, ... and then ate pie and drank coffee in a lazy way while reading and watching the sun and breeze play with the trees outside my window. 

After a couple of hours I changed books, picked up a hat and a walking stick, and ventured out.  A short walk brought me to a little blink-and-you-miss-it enclave of urban woodland, an enclave I discovered only within the last year on one of my walks around my new neighborhood.  The spot is so well hidden that I never knew it before, even though for the first four years we lived in this city Wife and I had an apartment no more than a mile away.  But we never had any idea.

So I sat reading in the shade of a couple large trees, for – oh gosh, I suppose it must have been another couple of hours – feeling the breeze and waving once when a young family strolled past.  When I came to the end of a major section in my book – I'm reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche and just got to the point in 1930 where she is evicted from the campground in the woods where she had tried to establish a commune – I picked up my book and my stick and went walking some more, down past some of the better-known scenic spots in town where I sat and contentedly watched the day go past.  Then I strolled back to my apartment, rested some more, and finally decided it was time to write a couple of posts for the blog.  But I'll break off in another hour and a half or so to make dinner ... I've found a recipie that looks tasty on the page so I want to see how it comes off in reality.  

Actually after a few weeks of eating very simply – I was trying to savce money in the aftermath of my trip to Peru – I've been cooking a lot lately.  I probably could have gotten by this week on leftovers and salad without needing to cook still more.  But hell – it's Easter, right?  I'll cook some more, for the sheer fun of it as much as for the food, and then I'll have lots to hold me for the week without having to allocate time in the evenings to do anything more than re-heat.  It would be nice to have somebody to cook for, but even if it's just me I'd rather cook than not cook.  Not every night, perhaps, because my love of cooking vies with my laziness or poor planning to see who will win out on any given night.  But it's a gift I give myself on hplidays.

Happy Easter, all.

Other times Wife lost it

In digging out the last few stories I posted recently (here and here and here) I found some others as well.  I'll post a few of them here just to get them out and online; some of the others might take a bit more time to put in readable form.  And in some cases I start to wonder if these are stories I have already told: after six years and some of posts, it's easy to lose track.
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Hosea's log. Stardate January 13, 2005.  Wife had an attack that I described in an e-mail to Boyfriend 4 as follows:

…. Wife had an attack where she started snarling like an animal, making not-very-veiled threats to damage herself and/or the children, and insisting that nobody loved her or would care if anything happened to her; when I tried to hold her to tell her this wasn't true she began to struggle violently with me. I held her still on the bed by holding her wrists and pinning her legs, because I was at this point genuinely concerned about the consequences (to herself or others) if I let her go. Her response was to shriek as if possessed.

Actually that's not a bad image, because her voice got deeper and huskier and the look in her eyes was not anything she normally has. Her reason also left her; I told her more than once that if she stopped fighting with me I wouldn't pin her down, but her response to that was to fight harder ... the way an animal might. (The sounds coming out of her mouth were feral and inarticulate as well.) I don't know if she was actually bruised, but her skin is so sensitive that she bruises if she bumps into a table. So I bet she was….

She finally settled down, after shrieking incoherently for many minutes. (…I think it helped that the boys came in the room to see what was going on.) When she stopped fighting and snarling, she settled down into sobbing, at which point I concluded that there was no further danger and let her go. I think this has been building for a while. I believe it is the depression coming to a peak. ….

I tried calling you but got your answering machine. Anyway, here is the story of the evening. I have left out all the story building up to it, because I still need to feed the boys and get them to bed; but there was a long trail of anger and frustration leading to this moment….

Oh, she did ask me to call Boyfriend 3. … I gave him basically the same description. He said that one of his ex-wives used to experience the same thing on rare occasions; also that he would pray for her and put her on his church's prayer line, but then after a few minutes Wife was willing to talk to him. That seems to have helped her collect herself, too.

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Hosea's log.  Stardate spring 2002.

During the spring of 2002, Wife had an extended bad spell. One Sunday in March, I took the boys down to visit my parents; I worked on taxes with my mother, while the boys played. Later that evening we had dinner and a small birthday party for my father. Wife stayed home because she wasn’t feeling well; also, at that point, she and my father got on badly and I thought they would each be happier without the other. But the next day, while Son 1 was at baseball practice, she became very angry with me. She began to accuse me of trying to take the children away from her permanently, and nothing I could say would shake this belief from her – even though there was no rational connection between anything I had done and that conclusion.

In early May of that year, she called me at the office one afternoon and insisted I come home immediately. She had just gotten off the phone with the hospital trying to arrange something about her upcoming gastric bypass surgery, and something had gone wrong. As a result she threw a tantrum, barricading herself in the bedroom and throwing clocks and other things into the bathroom and out the window. Her niece was staying with us at that time, and so she shepherded the kids into another room and tried to look after Wife. When I got home, I tried to calm Wife down; when that didn’t work, I held her wrists and held her down onto the bed to restrain her forcibly from doing more damage. She snarled and fought and shouted, but finally the fit passed and I let her up. Later I called the hospital and worked out whatever the problem was. I also cleaned up the mess.

__________

Hosea's log.  Stardate spring 1996.

 

She went into a similar downward spiral while pregnant with Son 1, our oldest. She had been taken off her medication (then Prozac) because of her pregnancy, and one evening I came home from work to find the kitchen a complete disaster. She had thrown food and dishes across it, smashing glass jars and spilling molasses, soy sauce, and many other foods all across the floor. She was sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and all this other stuff, playing with the broken glass by tracing it along her arms. When I asked her what had happened, her voice sounded almost serene (but crazy); she said that she was fine and that she was just playing with broken glass. I got her out of there and cleaned up; I cleaned up the kitchen; I called her OB/GYN to say that if she couldn’t get her Prozac she was going to have to have an abortion so that she could have her medicines again; and finally I got a hold of a psychiatrist who had seen her years before (when she was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons). I made an appointment, and at that appointment he told her that after the first trimester Prozac is completely safe for pregnant mothers. She went back on her medicines and things got better.

Lessons learned

Yesterday I posted some fragments of a journal that I kept very briefly back in 1987, and I paged through a lot more of it figuring out what to post.  When I decided to drag it out, I remembered it as mostly an itemization of the things Wife did that made me so frustrated; and I figured it would be interesting to see how many of them continued into more recent times.  What I found is that I spent a lot more time talking about myself (too bad blogging technology hadn't been invented yet!) and trying to sort through my own thoughts and feelings.  But this meant I had an opportunity to compare how I thought then to how I think now.  Have I learned anything?  Do I do anything different?  Or has the time just been one long dreary round of repetition, a maze where I never find the cheese?

I think I see a few things I've learned.  There may be more.  And of course there are probably things I should have learned but haven't ... but that's a different post.  So, in no particular order, here's a list:

• Back then I tried to guess what Wife meant and what she wanted by listening to her tone of voice and interpolating ... reading between the lines.  Now I'm more likely to ask.
• Back then I tried to give the answer I thought she wanted to hear, which of course made it important to read between the lines so I could figure out what she wanted but wasn't saying.  Now I'm less likely to do that and more likely to give a straight-up answer.
• Back then I would not -- seemingly could not! -- talk openly about sensitive emotional issues.  Or sex.  All I could do was hint at what I meant in elegant, roundabout ways.  It's no surprise that the other person (typically Wife) never understood what I meant.  I've gotten better about this, but not what I would call good.  That is to say, I'm blunt enough with you, and that's a benefit because it gives me practice saying what I mean so that I can say it to other people ... people I talk to in person.  But a few days ago I looked back at some e-mails I exchanged with Debbie back in September -- maybe half a year ago -- where she was bringing up some of the very same issues she brought up when she broke it off.  And my replies had the same brittle elegance about them.  I got to the point after a while, but I should have rewritten them before hitting "Send" to take out the first few paragraphs and go straight to the meat of the subject.  And in four years with D, I never told her most of what I thought about the things she did and said.
• Back then I tried to solve Wife's problems, rather than letting her solve them herself.  I am a lot better at this now.  I realize that I have enough trouble solving my own problems [wan smile] that the last thing I need is to take on others as well.
• Back then I was tied up in knots from not knowing what I wanted in even simple, mundane situations.  Wife used to needle me by saying, "Chocolate or vanilla, Hosea, pick one."  I look at the very same dilemmas now, or ones just like them, and I think "How is it even possible not to know what you want here? How is it possible not to know what you like and value?"  To me nowadays, making those kinds of decisions seems a lot easier ... something like breathing.  The explanation is that back then I was afraid of what I wanted.  Part of the reason I dithered for so many years about Wife's infidelities is that one part of me wanted her to be a free-loving free spirit, because I felt my own life to be too pinched, narrow, and constrained.  I wanted her to be a breath of fresh air.  But at the same time I knew from experience (She started fucking Boyfriend 1 a scant two years after we were married.) that dealing with the emotional turbulence of an affair was painful, and I knew I was too shy and fearful to reciprocate by finding a girlfriend of my own.  (I had been married twenty-four years before I started the affair with D.)  Anyway, the point is that I knew what I wanted but I was afraid of getting it, and afraid even of admitting it to myself.  So I took refuge in telling myself that these situations were "complicated" (they weren't) and in hiding behind a wall of words.
            There's one irony in my bringing up the whole question of not knowing what I want ... namely that in career-planning I still have the same basic problem.  I believe the root cause to be different, however.  I believe that in the case of career-planning the issue is that I can identify things I like doing and things I don't like doing, but I can't figure out how to piece together a dream job that's any different from the lackluster job I have now.  Also I figure that if I were actually to change careers, it would mean making a lot less money, which in turn means I should wait another six years until Son 2 is out of college.  And by then I'll be 59 years old.  Hmmm.  Maybe the problem is partly a lack of courage, but I'm going to keep telling myself it's a lack of imagination.  You remember that line I quoted recently from the movie The Big Chill?  "Rationalizations are more important than sex ...." 
• Back then I spent a lot of energy worrying about Who I Was.  You know ... my identity, my Self, my True Will, my destiny ... all that happy horseshit.  I wrote, several times, of working hard to kill off my Old Self (the Identity I had developed growing up, and deployed all through college and graduate school); and I fretted over what New Self would take his place.  This is related to the point I just made above, about wanting Wife precisely because she was so different from me, so that by being married to her I could be forced to change instead of settling into a rut.  I don't spend my energy on that kind of worry any more, or not much.  I suppose I haven't completely gotten over it -- I'm thinking of deeply embarrassing posts like this two-part one here and here.  But I think these days that's the exception and not the rule.  At least consciously I think I'm more likely to say that it's not very helpful to think about my Identity or Destiny, ... maybe it's more practical just to think about the choices I happen to make today, and later on the choices I happen to make tomorrow.  (Compare the argument here.)  In my more metaphysical moods, I can even argue that the Self or the Identity don't exist at all.  But I sure did worry about this sort of thing years ago.
• Back then I thought it really mattered what perfect strangers thought about me.  I had forgotten all about it, but apparently Wife had talked about going to Pagan Spirit Gathering some time around then, and had suggested I come with her.  (You remember that back then she was Wiccan, right?)  And it seems I had a huge amount of anxiety about this.  Part of it was related to the free-love atmosphere of the place: it had been at an earlier Pagan Spirit gathering that she met Boyfriend 1.  But part of it was wrapped around mental pictures of myself there, feeling that I had to explain to everyone that I wasn't really a Pagan but I was there because my wife was, and at the same time realizing perfectly well how really dorky that would have sounded.  And honestly, in real life, who the hell could possibly have cared?  Last year I joined Debbie on at least three Buddhist retreats without ever once feeling I had to explain to anybody that I'm not a Buddhist.  (And in reality I'm not sure I can tell whether I'm a Buddhist or not.)  So maybe I've made a little progress on that front.         

Time to sign off.  Maybe I'll think of more later. 

Blast from the past -- Back in 1987

Posting stories from the past got me thinking about one that's really old, but that may date from the first time I ever wrote down any account of my troubled marriage with Wife.  So I rummaged around a bit and dug out the journal that I started keeping back then ... and kept up for three weeks before abandoning it.  (sigh)  Still, there's a lot in there reflecting about me and my marriage, about how things went and why I reacted in a certain way.  I don't know how much of this I'll end up posting, but at any rate some of it ....
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Hosea's log, star date October 23, 1987.
Location: a city we haven't lived in for a quarter century now.  The time is a full twenty years before I started this blog.  Dear God but that's a long stretch of time ....
What follows is what I wrote then, with minor edits for readability, etc.  Every so often I intrude editorial comments in a different type face, between square brackets. 

I tried to hit Wife last night.  We tussled for a minute and then I broke off and went back into the bedroom.  The issue was seemingly immaterial, but managed to be more frustrating than I could handle ... apparently.  Wife's friend Laguna was working late, at a company a few blocks away from here; and Wife was going to take her some of our leftovers to microwave for dinner.  A simple question: should she take some of this or some of that?  I didn't much care which, but she kept pursuing the question; worse, each time she said or asked something, I thought she was suggesting the other option from the one she had suggested a minute before.  I suppose I was involved at all because I was in the kitchen at the time and she wanted me to put something on a plastic plate and wrap it up.  But I got frustrated enough with her rapid-fire changes of tack that I left the kitchen, went to sit down, kibbitzed briefly, and let her do it.  A lot of our decisions seem to go like this.  I don't even remember -- after she had that mostly taken care of -- what she said that made me so mad.  I think she said something about not understanding why I was making such a big deal over something so tiny.  My impression was precisely the opposite -- that she was the one making it difficult by constantly sending mixed signals about what she wanted to do.  [Let me break in from today to point out what should be obvious -- viz., that another problem is I was trying to read her mind instead of just asking her, "I dunno Babe, what do you want?"]  As usual the real problem was that we weren't understanding each other; but this particular accusation -- that the problem was my doing -- infuriated me.  It's similar to the last time I tried to hit her, when we were trying to go somewhere and I kept waiting for her before we could, and she later bitched about our late start and about her having to wait for me.  Of course we were waiting for each other.  I wouldn't have gotten so angry that time either, except that (a) this is another longstanding problem, and (b) I was accused of being -- all by myself -- the party at fault.  This feeling, compounded with the sense that this was part of an endless cycle (since it has happened so many times between us) resulted in a combination of pain and despair that distilled briefly into murderous fury.  I say this with only minimal exaggeration: for a brief moment -- both times -- I really wanted to kill her.

[It goes on for several more paragraphs, as I talk about my depression, about my fanatical need to be clearly understood (I hope I've eased up a little on that in the interim), and so on.  Several days later I pick up the story, after Wife and I made time to "talk about the incident."  I relate that she said I must have a lot of repressed, pent-up anger in me towards her, to be able to explode like that. Mulling this, I write ...]

It is true that I can get awfully angry at her, and that in many ways she is quite a burden.  The simple fact that my time at home is not my own is painful enough for someone like me who cherishes privacy and solitude.  I would happily do less housework and fix less elaborate and less regular meals, and so forth, to have time to read or think or write or enjoy the silence.  But if Wife is home too there is none of that -- I feel that I should be busy doing something domestic, or else I will hear later about the problems when it is not done.

Then there are the ways in which she is dependent on me.  Weekdays I fix three meals a day.  She says that she prefers homemade lunches to school lunches [in those days, Wife was a schoolteacher], but if I don't have time to make her a lunch she certainly won't do it.  In fact she lies abed late enough that if I didn't make breakfast and iron her clothes I doubt she would ever get to work on time -- or at any rate fed and pressed.  If she needs to go somewhere new, I have to write out directions for her and go over them as with a child -- she found her way around well enough when job hunting the last time we were apart, but if she can palm the job off on me so much the better.  [The invention of the GPS was one of the high points of our marriage. No joke.]  Ditto with finding her keys when they get lost.  Ditto with balancing the bank statement.  I see why her mother drags her feet about sewing for Wife -- she wants Wife to learn to do it herself.  But she won't learn while her mother is alive, if ever: this I can guarantee.

Then there are the things she does that are irritating in themselves, like leaving her clothes and shoes strewn about the house.  Like preaching doom to herself so convincingly that she concludes nothing can improve her situation ... and then telling me at great length all about how hopeless everything is, in tones that suggest she wants my advice on how -- miraculously -- to make everything all better.  Like the sheer complexity and busy-ness that attends life with Wife: the constant scheduling around doctor's appointments, the train of friends calling or showing up, the fact that into every block of free time she schedules three or four mutually conflicting projects and then gets upset when she is perpetually behind....  It's all very draining, which is why it would be such a relief if she did leave me.  [Wife always said she would leave me if I ever struck her, so part of the "talk" a couple days before was about whether my almost striking her "counted" or not.] 

[Then the next day I picked it up again right where I left off, with ...]

On the other hand, I would also be crushed by it.  First of course would be the recurrence of all the loneliness and depression that I felt as a bachelor, the sense of permanent exclusion from the world of social relationships....  The cold, abandoned loneliness that I used to feel so often is not something I have felt since meeting Wife and it would surely return.  Plus there is enormous comfort in living with someone.  I need solitude too, but to be totally cut off from others is vertiginous and disorienting, and life too easily loses its beauty or meaning....  In a real sense, Wife is my hearth.  It is her presence that makes my dwelling a Home, ... that gives the place warmth and light.  Then there is sex .... [And so it goes, on and on, at very great length.]      

Blast from the past -- The weekend that Wife was arrested

So after much promising, I have finally posted this story ... as a separate page linked to this blog, because it is so damned long.  You can find it here:

http://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/p/the-weekend-that-wife-was-arrested.html

Any sane person would ask, after reading all this, "Hosea why in God's name did you spring her from jail? Why did you pay thousands of dollars in bail? If you'd played your cards right you could have kept her in jail for a long time after a weekend like this, and think how much pain and heartache you would have saved yourself!"

I've thought about it over and over, and I can come up with only one plausible answer to the question why I acted as I did.  That's how abused spouses act.  Over and over, that's how they act.

Which means I have to identify myself as an abused spouse.  Although, all things considered, the identification might not be that far off.  Read for yourself and decide what you think.