Back for another disaster

Well, this is different.  I wonder what the world is preparing me for.  Every crisis is more frightening than the one before it, every test to my resilience more strenuous.  What is next?  Never mind.  I’ll wait.

I’m writing now because I was looking for a poem that I needed and went back through “Poems for Wednesday” posts to find it.  I needed the poem because my spirit couldn’t breathe, and a poem is like an inhaler.  I can’t say ventilator now.  That word is not for joking or metaphor.   I re-read my old posts, and thought, “That’s good and I should do more.”  I hate saying it: I’m a writer and I want to be a writer.

I’m writing because on Wednesday evening I was doing one of the things I do best and have done best my whole life, which is charming the daylights out of men over 70 (it used to be over 60, but now 60 is too close to my own age).  The gentleman in question was interviewing me for a job at an organization that I believe to be nearly a cult, and that others have described to me as a cult — “a tawdry cult” in one case.  During the interview, he himself said, “My wife asks me if [organization] is a cult because there is so much jargon and it changes all the time.”  So even in this time of great duress, I’m not going to work there.  Anyway, this senior acolyte asked a typical job interview question, “what is your career like in 10 years,” and my ungoverned mind said “writing” and my governed mouth said something more respectable.   And if I want to be writing in 10 years I need to write now.

My beloved, my Will (Daniel’s gone, but not gone enough.  He lurks malevolently), says I should write a novel of the coronavirus.  Not an original idea.  But I can capture the texture of a crisis, of me in yet another crisis.

Just when I have learned, or am starting to be open to the possibility of learning, to slow down, to believe there is enough for everyone, I am faced with grocery ordering: there is not enough for everyone.  I have to act RIGHT NOW.  I am TOO LATE.  Dear God not again!  Not that fear again of too late.  Too late for a brilliant career.  Too late to save Milo from his father’s influences (WordPress wanted me to say “influenzas,” suggesting some machine learning happening in the background.  My beloved knows about machine learning.  I try to be a learning machine.). I thought I was too late for great love, and I was wrong.   I thought I had a great love early in my life, and I was wrong.   So late, not too late, has possibilities, has pleasures.  Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t publish her first book till she was 50.  I am also behind schedule on that, having neither a publisher nor a manuscript, with 50 less than 6 months away.

It’s never too late for a crisis?  Never too late for a poem.

Safety

8:00, maybe?

I use the Ink and Volt planner for work.  My friend recommended it, and I wish I felt as comfortable as he does using a professional blogs for a range of musings.  Brad Feld does that, too.   I think if you are a successful venture capitalist, you have a lot of latitude.

Each December the Ink & Volt guru sends out four worksheets, one per week, that people can use to prepare for the coming year.  I don’t pay enough attention to week 1 (looking back on successes), although I should because this was among the best years of my life.  I don’t particularly like week 2, which asks you to think about relationships and imagine the movie of your life and your legacy.  That’s probably a sign I should think harder about it.  I am just finishing several days of week 3, culminating in the theme for the year.

My theme is abundance.  As I was thinking about abundance, I associated it with expansiveness (not surprising), but also about safety.  This year I want to be safe, and I haven’t felt safe in years and years and years.  I might not even know what it really means or feels like, and I suspect I will cry for days when I find out.  But I don’t want to play it safe.  And I’m trying to work out in my head how being safe and playing it safe are opposites.  If I’m truly safe, if there’s a true place or feeling of safety and security and deep okay-ness, then I can be pretty far out there.  I can take bigger risks because not everything is riding on that outcome. I feel I’m explaining the obvious to myself.

My career is not what I would have hoped or predicted.  I look back at my 30s and most of my 40s and I see aching underperformance compared to what I know I can do now.  I was playing it safe, I was playing scared (how can those two mean the same thing?).  I would like to say that it was because I didn’t feel truly safe in my life.  Was that me, or my circumstances?  Both.  I think I have rarely felt completely safe, and a lot of my anxiety and choices derive from that.  I haven’t felt like I deserved safety and certainly didn’t feel like I could turn to others and ask them to help me feel safer.

This goes back a long long long way, to my childhood.  There was some economic anxiety when I was in elementary school through middle school and into high school (wow, that’s kind of a long time).  My parents were lovely and kind and every material need was provided for, and there were piano lessons and gymnastics lessons and plenty of good stuff, even during the anxious times.  But… but… there was a gap, a slippage, maybe, where safety should have been.  Maybe I felt safe, but only just, or it was only temporary, or I was always aware that safe was taking a whole lot of work.  Yes, that’s it.  I was safe, but safe was taking a lot of work and unsafe was always right over my shoulder so I had to work harder and harder and harder.  There was no room for slippage, no ability to let down my guard.  There was no slack.  Never ever any slack.  This is not at all what my parents thought they were giving me, but it’s what they gave me.  Poor loves.  The feeling didn’t come from them per se, or it wasn’t personal between them and me.  It was how they themselves felt, moving through the world.  No slack was how life was, or how they thought it was.  So passing on that feeling was just part of socializing me, like table manners (my table manners are not robust, my feeling of precariousness is quite robust).

There was a feeling of near scarcity.  We had enough, now, but we might not have enough later.  The opposite of abundance.

So I came into adulthood this way, and carried it along, and probably misread situations and thought there was no slack when there really was.  And then got into situations in which there actually wasn’t a lot of slack when there should have been a whole lot, and in which I was absolutely not safe or cared for.  And that’s just on the professional side.  Or maybe I misread safety as boredom because I didn’t know how to create, because I couldn’t answer the question, “What do you want to do?”  And home was not safe for me, even as I devoted my considerable (even abundant) energy to making it wondrously safe for Milo and safe for Daniel, who didn’t want the kind of safety I offered because, I suspect, it made him feel vulnerable.  I’ll never know.  Life is just twisted up and sad that way.

So, I just want to be safe, and gigantic, and abundant and expansive.  A very safe giant.  A safe, cozy, risk-taking giant.  At first thinking about being safe, and not knowing what it might feel like, made me cry.  Then I got on this giant wave and I’m feeling better.  I like the idea of being that giant.  It makes everything seem funny and possible.  I can put it on  a t-shirt.  Or find a doll-sized giant (that would be a miniature giant, and aren’t words super fun that way?) on Etsy and make it my mascot.  What, exactly, would a giant doll– not a gigantic doll, but a giant in doll form–look like?  Someone on Etsy has thought this through.  (A quick search for “giant doll” reveals that the collective Etsy needs to do more thinking.)

If I can make it play, I can do it.  I always thought unsafe was adjacent, but maybe super-safe is even closer now because it’s inside of me.  Now.

8:35

Quotidian

4:27

I considered Quondam, just because I like the sound of it, and am I sure I could have made use of its meaning (“that once was; former”), but I shied away from that because quondam husband, quondam marriage… I am and am not there.

Much less outer tumult, but so much inner tumult.  Quandary, you might say! I am paying close attention to how I feel when I am around him, or when I think about him, or the future.  It changes, a lot.

Friday & Saturday, I felt enormous relief at thinking, “I don’t have to stay with him. I don’t have to stay, I don’t have to stay, I don’t have to stay.  I get to decide.  He doesn’t decide, he doesn’t decide.”  I saw him talking to an old emotional-affair flame at synagogue and my guts feel to my feet.  And then I sat next to her, which was weird.  Avoiding her would have been weirder.  Why do I do this to myself?

When we settled in to watch our new Netflix series (Luther), I noticed how much I was doing to justify the choice, and to remind him that I have chosen a lot of great TV series… so much justification… what’s that for?  I also noticed that I felt uncomfortable around him.

Today is better, or rather today is different.  We had brunch together, unexpectedly.  We thought we were meeting another couple, but Daniel got the dates wrong, so there we were. It was nice. I asked if he wanted to go to the used book store around the corner.  He said no. I said, “I’ll say it differently: Will you come with me to the used book store?” Then yes.  It was role reversal — he had felt the pressure of other things when he declined.  He noted that.  I said, see, that’s how it feels to me, too.  Then I was explaining why I was so eager to go look at books: “As you know, I treat Sundays like weekdays, but without makeup–” “I know,” he interjected, not kindly.  “So, now that I have more time than I expected,” I continued, “I am very happy to do things I don’t normally do.”  Then I suggested we watch another Luther episode when we got home, and said we could even skip the bookstore to do it.  He was committed to the bookstore by then, though, so we went.

On the way there, I said, don’t worry about walking the dog before the episode, we can get right down to watching.  I realized, in the sting of what he said, that we both do a lot to control how the other person spends time, it just manifests itself differently.  He complains I boss him around.  He is right, I do, overtly.  He bosses me around in an insidious and indirect way, through his disapproval and disdain for my choices, by questioning, by sighing, by disrespecting.  When we got home I said, “We need to –both of us– respect how the other person spends time.  It’s not nice.  What you said stung.” He said what he always does, which is that he feels left out, like I prioritize these other things over him.  I don’t know what to do about that.  I could concede. But he prioritizes sleeping all day Saturday, and late into the mornings, and not taking an interest at all in kitchen matters or talking to me while I cook, or walking with me — that is Daniel’s anti-empathy M.O.  It’s always me coming to him, or not, while he never considers moving to my realm.  And then he rails that I am not interested in the things that interest him.

But I said nothing when it was clear to me that he would not have nearly enough time to do his errands before his 5pm meeting today.  That’s on him, he’s a grownup.  It felt good not to care, to leave it entirely to him, not to try to perfect him.

I usually don’t write in such detail. Maybe it’s because I am writing now only for myself.  The small matters (quotidian!) seem important, because I am looking for change and not-change in me.  Not change: justifying, appeasing.  Change: observing my reactions without judging them, holding off decisions, observing ways that it might feel good for me to behave differently, observing when I reach for Daniel’s medicine (metaphorically) to take it myself because it SO CLEARLY NEEDS TO BE TAKEN, and if he won’t, then I will, to model the behavior.

And now I feel exhausted.  Insufficient sleep.  Observing is tiring.  Holding myself at a distance, seeing it, explaining it to myself and mentally to him — even though I don’t owe him an explanation or anyone an explanation.

A realization as I re-read, briefly, about Daniel being a grownup.  Subtly but unmistakably… and in a way that is deafeningly loud to me… Daniel refuses to be a grownup in a million ways.  That is another significant issue. He refuses to take care of himself, physically. Okay, that can also be a choice and lots of people make it. But he also refuses to take responsibility in a serious way for his actions.  It is always someone else’s fault, usually mine. His demise is complicated, but he never has said, “I’m sorry for what I’m putting you through.” He has explicitly said that he can’t be held accountable for his behavior when he is angry or in the first two months (two months!) after his fall.  He has never considered that he was both a prince and an asshole, to the same people, at almost the same time. He refuses to be wrong, for anything.  The number of times he has shouted “My conscience is clear!” when he has lied or hurt me.  If your conscience is clear, why the lying and the sneaking?  “Because I know how you get, how you are, you are suspicious of things.”  Translation: Because I know it hurts you, because I want to keep these things secret, because (maybe) I love them because they are secret and because they hurt you and I kind of want to hurt you because you love me so much and I can’t bear it,

That last one is purely hypothetical, but it makes me cry. I do know, I do indeed, how it feels to be unable to bear that someone loves me so much. I know how it feels to want to hide.  The agreement I thought we made on our wedding day was not to hide.  I stopped feeling it was unbearable when I realized Daniel loved me a lot less than I thought.  And he has done a lot of work pushing my love away and steering me towards the nagging and bossing and away from how much I love him.  I take responsibility for my own business, and at the same time, I recognize when I’m being manipulated.

The not taking responsibility is old & deep and familial — his sister has it just as bad. He used to rail, “There is no music in the house!” So put on a CD! Or “they stole my day from me,” so tell people no, or quit spending half the daylight hours in bed, or do something. He has weird one-way boundaries (towards himself, but insufficient respect for those of others), and his sense of agency is like airport free wi-fi — maddeningly inconsistent. And when he has no agency, I am called upon to do the magic of reading his mind and doing all the salving.

He takes very little emotional responsibility.  Yesterday all was going well enough, and he asked me a question about work.  I said I can’t be sure, there were promising signs, I’d know more in a week, and I can’t attach myself to a good outcome because I’ve been so disappointed, but I’m sure something good will happen — I just don’t know what it will be.  Daniel sank. He got very low and said, “I wish we could have a conversation that wasn’t heavy all the time.” BUT HE ASKED!  To be fair, and scrupulous, and even handed, and the eternal keeper of the good girl flame, we had had a difficult conversation at lunch that he handled reasonably well (why he wasn’t mad at L, who caused it all, with an added does of H alerting him to trouble ahead. He tolerated my “thinking forensically”).

So: lack of trust; lies; not taking responsibility for actions, emotions, well-being — not just in a physical sense but in a grown up emotional sense, sending out these demands for care and attention, so that being with him does become meeting need after need after need; emotional distancing.  That is a lot to overcome.  Did I just write an indictment?  That’s absolutely what he would say.  What I say is: I can indict if I want to; it’s helpful to see all the pieces together in one place; clarity is good, and I think seeing him clearly is essential for seeing myself and my own changes and choices more clearly.  Why do I boss him around? Because I see him not acting like an adult in so many ways — or like I believe adults should act — and I can’t stand it, so I take over. What happens if I give up the bossing, let him bear the stress of it, if I put it on him?  Will he take it up, or will I further give up things, and how do I feel about all of that. Today at least I can see more clearly the “we both did it” aspects of our marriage, and that seems important.

I don’t have to leave, I don’t have to stay, I don’t have to choose right now. I can even enjoy the Luther episodes.  I can feel uncomfortable and eager to be away from him on Saturday, and happy to have his company on Sunday.  I can have all that because I am a person. Because it matters a lot to me right now to stake out this ground.   Because I matter most.  I do.  I do  I do I do.

A few other things I remembered after I published:

My family are great at not-seeing. I was thinking of my beloved grandmother who has passed away, and how little I really knew her.  She was so lovely and dear, and yet my dad is kind of noodled up.  How did that happen?  My dad was never really seen, not like he needed to be. And then he didn’t see my brother. And my mom is a champion not-seer, or if she sees she doesn’t tell.  And I was an olympian (Olympian! as in Mount) not-seer of myself, entirely, or sometimes at all, and certainly not of many things about Daniel. So a lot of not-seeing.  Now I am trying to see both of us, entirely.  And I can see (ha!) that my not-seeing was damaging to both of us.  But Daniel also likes to hide, yet he craves being seen, until it might actually happen, then he hides again.  So much to untangle.

The Zoe character in Luther is admirable, or was — now she’s backsliding.  I wonder if Daniel saw how much I admire her and was fearful, whether or not he knew what was happening. She loves Luther, but can’t live with him.  But, as I said, now backsliding.  I strongly disapprove.

Perception

9:11

I thought I had something to say… I think I feel better, physically, when I write, also when I exercise a lot.  I’ve had a stomach ache for days. I kept trying to tell myself it was purely physical, purely about the dietary whiplash of Passover, or too much chewing gum with  artificial sweetener, or harsh unfiltered water (which actually does hurt my stomach — I’m unusually sensitive to water).  But once I considered that it might be emotional, that my body might be having the very hard time that my mind refuses to acknowledge, then I felt better.

Sometimes pain just wants to be noticed and acknowledged, a delivery signed for, even if you don’t open the package just yet.  I suppose.

I am so fearful of feeling worse.  I am so fearful of the devastation I’m trying not to recognize.  My therapist (now a 3 day a week part of my life because if not now, really, when?) suggests that the devastation might not be so bad.  What has gotten into her these days?  Per my previous post, we are considering whether I’ve actually been quietly and unacknowledgedly (where’s the adverbial form when you need it?), devastated for years, and am just now… now that it’s fucking undeniable on these important and long-fragile fronts (I had typed most important, but most important is my relationship with Milo and with my body… so many parentheticals.  I’m baaack.).  Anyway, devastated for years and just now have the external wreckage to match the long-standing internal wreckage.  And am finding it’s both worse and not as bad as I thought.  Worse, in that my stomach hurts all the time, or did.  Worse in that… what if there is not another job that’s good, and not another life that is good.  Not as bad in that I can conceive that it’s not my fault, entirely, that sometimes things happen and all the good-behavior-as-incantation-and-magic-spell doesn’t ward it off.  Not as bad in that there is still breath and yoga and laughter and sleep and friends now more than ever.  Not as bad in that I see how strong I am, so I can also be weak.  Not even sure what I mean by that last part but it makes sense, even though it sounds like something you’d find on an inspirational pinterest board.

I had something else to say… not sure where it went.  I’ll come back tomorrow for it.  Good to write again, even badly.

9:25

Exploration

7:13

Or perhaps, empathy.

What if Daniel is never sorry enough, by my standards?  What if he never repents to the degree I think he should?  Today, that became an interesting question.  Before today, that was a final status determiner: if he wasn’t sorry enough, I wasn’t going to be married to him.  But I’m kind of curious about that now, because there are things that I’m not as sorry about as Daniel wants me to be.  I’m rather defiantly not sorry a lot of the time.  (Okay, like 1% of the time.  Anything other than zero feels radically large.)

I often do a false and corrosive equivalence: I won’t give Daniel what he wants –for lots of good reasons that have to do with my dignity, integrity, and independence — so, I guess it’s reasonable that he won’t give me what I want.  I’m trying not to do that now.  I’m getting curious about what it means not to leave something up to Daniel’s behavior or emotions, which I absolutely can’t control.

This is muddled, because I’m muddled about it.  But what happens if, rather than waiting and hoping and yearning and piling so much anxiety onto Daniel about what he will or won’t do, I detach from it?  This feels like putting myself at the center, and also moving away from the reckoning about the past that I have so deeply wanted, but know won’t really get me anything but yelling.  It felt like a big advance to go from wanting to know what, exactly, Daniel has done to wanting to know why he did it — and it still does because 1) asking “what” will just trigger the same soul-crushing argument it always does and I won’t believe him anyway; and 2) the why — the spirit, the intention, the energy — is what matters.  Caveat: it may be that asking why is as useless and avalanche-inducing as asking what, and we just happen not to have had that corrosive fight yet.

I had thought that Daniel not being sorry enough would give me grounds — solid, authoritative, unquestionable grounds –for leaving him.  But now it feels irrelevant, somehow.  I’m not sure if I’ll stick with this feeling or view.  I’m just curious, just exploring.  I thought our marriage would like this:  If I _________, then Daniel will __________.  But that calculation never worked to my advantage.  I ended up feeling cringing, confused, manipulative, exhausted, sad, misunderstood, misunderstanding, powerless, nothing good.  So I went to, If Daniel __________, then I will ___________, in an effort to get back the power I’d ceded, but that’s still reactive, still too much about him.  My best feeling, my strongest place is “I _______ because I want/need/have to.”  End.

Oh dear.  Empathy is inconvenient.  I bet it wasn’t too nice for Daniel to live on the back end of, “If I ________, then Daniel will _________.”  Indeed.  But it wasn’t nice at all for me to live that way, either.  It looked like the only choice at the time, it really did.  It was my modus operandi, my self-protection, developed over the course of years, despite the fact that IT NEVER WORKED: If I can be nice enough, compliant enough, ______ enough, then the people who hurt me or who I fear will hurt me will not anymore. They might even be nice right back.  It was a good dream, but as a practice it rotted me inside.  And did I mention it absolutely never worked?  Seriously, I tested it over 40 years, maybe more– it was locked in before I met Daniel.  It never worked.   I’m sorry.  I am so sorry to my past self for this.  And to Daniel a little, but mostly to me.  It would have been nice if he had saved me, and us, from this dynamic, but it would have taken a degree of empathy and self-knowledge that he doesn’t have — that very few people have.

The answer is to _________ because I want to for myself.  End. Come along or don’t.  There’s a huge amount of space in that construct for love and sacrifice and generosity, and, happily, no space for martyrdom (side note, there’s a line of political and economic theory that talks about how actions that appear altruistic are in fact self-interested.  I don’t remember the details, but I think it boiled down to, sometimes doing things for others makes a person happier than being selfish. It’s sweet when social scientists come up with a fancy way to tell the truth about people).  It’s glorious to say, “I’m here because I want to be here.”

Hmm. That sounds good.  It also reminds me that Daniel is far from this mindset.  There’s a lot of talk from Daniel about how I “made him” feel or act in a certain way– often a way that involves yelling and anger directed intensely at me.  Not a lot solid self-ownership.  Whatever.  But also, there has to be some interaction with Daniel’s agency.  His actions are relevant to whether I can trust him again.  His actions are relevant to whether I stay — well, that might not be true.  I might be beyond staying.  His actions might be relevant to whether I change my mind.

Maybe it’s deciding which actions of Daniel’s are relevant.  If he’s truly sorry, but continues to treat me poorly in other ways, then the sorry doesn’t matter.  What is essential, and can I stay focused on it? (Turns out, the correct phrase is “home in on” and not “hone in on” Go ahead, google it.  One hones a thing or a skill, but one does not hone in on.  I thought I was a grammar ninja, but there is still so much to learn.)

Excavation

9:15

I almost titled this “excavating” but that’s the ominous, then monotonous, pounding of the gerund, so I resisted.

Oh dear.  Like beloved (yes, I still love him.  I might not stay married to him, but my love for him will endure.  My life would be infinitely easier if I had loved him less and myself more, which is what this post is about.)  Anyway, like beloved Daniel, I would like to skip a difficult, wrenching, terrifying, uncomfortable, brutal process of internal excavation.  Daniel might actually pull it off.  Daniel might avoid it.  He might find the escape route or secret passage and escape his current state with the emotional sediment undisturbed.

That’s what I wanted for myself.  Divorce looked like a really nice way to pole vault (forgive the mixed metaphor.  I always loved the look of pole vaulting.  It looked like flying.  I would love to take wing right now.) … anyway, to pole vault over a whole mess of feelings.  To ice skate into a new life, rather than ice fish in the present one.  Daniel was incorrigible, Daniel was bad to and for me, and, so, boing!  I land in a new life.  Today my therapist took away the pole and handed me a shovel.  Or the keys to a backhoe.  So my task is to move away from what Daniel will or won’t, does or doesn’t, is or isn’t, dodges or dives into, and to focus on what the hell has been going on with me all of these years.

I am in for some excruciating pronoun re-alignment.  He abandoned me and stopped loving me?  Well, I abandoned me.  I stopped loving me (did I start?).  I sold myself down the river for a veneer of comfort and harmony.  How could he do that (fill in the blank) to me?  No — how I could I do that to me?  How could I treat myself with so little care and concern?  He lied to me.  Yes, but I also was complicit.  I bought into a unreality.  I lied to myself.

Daniel would love to know that I am looking at my own role in the wreckage — except he doesn’t want to admit that there is really wreckage.  But he wants me to think about what I’ve done to him.  He — as a doer or being done to — is not the focus of this big dig.  Where was I for myself?  Where was I when I was being abused?  Why did I refuse to call things by their true names?  And how have all those lies colored my understanding of what has been happening around me?  Did lies to myself keep me from seeing true things that were good — not just true things that were bad?  What are the consequences of me-to-me violence?

This isn’t to excuse Daniel, it’s to dethrone him.  I gave him all the power to define the terms and the truth.  I won’t be able to take it back unless I do this work and get right with myself.  I would so like to skip this step.  (More than a step.  An Empire State Building’s worth of steps.)  I need a lover for this — not a sexual one, although that would be a joy.  I need the comfort and care of someone who loves me.  I need arms I can fall into every day.  And I don’t have that now.  This is my third crisis: the crisis of my marriage, which is frozen in place because a thaw becomes a conflagration and I just can’t right now; the crisis of my job, which is letting up a bit and now the crisis of my own culpability.

Weirdly, what’s keeping me going — and I am writing it now because I will want to disown it as soon as I see it in front of me, so I better write it (like disaster) — is thinking that this is the real prep work for divorce, and it’s cheaper and easier to take care of it in our current household configuration.  I don’t see this as work that has to be done to stay married.  I see it as work that has to be done to stop, and to start again by myself, and maybe eventually with someone else.

9:39

Breakthrough in the shower

Or, Backwards (is not the right direction)

Or Behind us, put it

Or, Coda, but I want to save a new letter for a fresh day if I can.

I thought that what I needed was Daniel to give me a full accounting and to see my pain as deeply and clearly as I felt it, and, I’m afraid, as often as I felt it.

Nothing good comes from that.

Rather than revisiting again and again and again (I could fill this post with agains) my pain and the breaches of trust, and a forensic investigation, which is backwards looking (although, sadly, not too far back) I need Daniel to reestablish trust.  Not “it’s broken, it broke here, it broke then, it broke then, it broke there.”  But, it’s broken, we know it’s broken.  You, dear love, broke it. How will you restore it?

Whee! Hello friends from my happy place, the moral high ground!  I need to climb down again. I know that.

But it is on Daniel to restore trust, I think. And if he doesn’t see that or doesn’t want to, that’s an important thing to know as we, or he and I, go forward.

(Could we stop having this same filthy, useless, life-sucking fight?  I hope).

Accountability

9:47

I have re-committed to writing every day, or more days than not, just 10 minutes.  I’ve decided I’m a writer, so… write.  (Though it may look, Write it, like disaster)  Per that parenthetical, I just finished a biography of Elizabeth Bishop.  Her life was a mess.

Here is what I told Daniel two hours ago:

I cannot stay married as we are married now.

I will find my professional footing, and once found, we will separate.

I need him to 1) stop lying; 2) admit he lied in the past; 3) apologize for the harm he has caused by lying and mean it.

I didn’t talk about other things that need to change, but those three seem quite large enough.  A lot of new year’s resolution for Daniel, who is irresolute about many things, but quite resolute about how wronged he is, and the small, small range of the changes he will contemplate for himself.

I don’t think he believes me.  I’m wobbly myself on point 2 — will we really separate this year?

And now I find myself wanting to improve my powers of description and observation.  But not wanting at all to describe how I”m feeling, or unable to describe it because I am resolutely (!) not feeling anything right now.  I dove back into normal life — cajoling Milo to eat the fresh-baked challah (he cares nothing for my baked goods.  I should stop baking breads.  No one likes them but me, and I don’t like the way bread feels in my belly), cleaning the kitchen (baking soda is the best for the burnt residue of black-eyed-pea overboil), folding the laundry.  If we do separate, I will keep a very good house for myself and my part-time Milo.  I am good at being alone.  What if I’m only good at being alone when it’s optional and time-bound?  Am I good at being alone when I desperately want to be with someone?  I have felt very alone the last years in my marriage, so in that way, I have been good at it.  But it’s different.  There are entire frontiers of frozen aloneness that I am just beginning to discern, and I have just told Daniel that I’m headed there.  Resolutely.  What does it mean that that looked better and truer to myself than saying, okay, we can go on?

 

9:58

The door after another door

I love how WordPress has a simple icon and the word “Write” next to it at the top right of the screen.  Write — is it a suggestion, and invitation, a command?  I like it as a command right now.  If English had a distinctive imperative tense, we’d have the answer.

Without going into details, I am back to where I began this blog, in the following sense: there has been a terrifying, saddening rupture in my expectations of what the future will look like.  So, Write.  I wrote myself through the last rupture without knowing how important writing was.

Okay, a few details.  Daniel and I are NOT getting divorced, at least not now.  In fact, the thing that has happened might be the salvation of our marriage.  That is my hope.  For the foreseeable future, the family’s economic health depends on me and on our savings.  This is an unprecedented situation for me.  I might need to change jobs, trading love for security.  That’s what the spring will likely be about.

I am not feeling anything right now.  I can see the feelings, but am not feeling them.  I am opening up this space for when the feelings come.  Well, I am feeling dizzy, literally.  When I got out of bed at 5 to go to the bathroom, the room spun, and I fell hard against the side of the bed.  The spinning continued when I returned to bed, and it was intermittent throughout the morning.  The internet is of two (at least) minds whether vertigo can be stress induced.  During yoga class, it occurred to me to start writing again, and I recall having something urgent to say, a marker I wanted to lay down for myself, but I don’t remember it now.

There are some early intimations of fear.  I am terrified of having to do more, to work longer hours, to put more energy out into the world, to have more work of all kinds to do.  I can’t even talk to my beloved friends right now, although I am avidly emailing and texting, because I can’t release energy for conversation, for describing how I am doing, or how Daniel and Milo are doing.  Introverts in crisis: we need tea, a soft blanket, and Netflix.

That said, I have poured so much energy into a marriage that was not working, and that’s like pouring gasoline into a rusted-through tank.

I sound frenetic.  I don’t feel particularly frenetic, but I can see the frenzy.  I had hoped to be quieter and wise, almost vatic.  I will meet myself there.

Intentions check-in 2016

I am so relieved.  For a moment, I thought I was on the hook for intentions 2017, and I don’t have them yet.

(short pause to run to the basement — which, Freudian-ly, I originally typed with a leading “a”, and now I wonder what that’s about — to put in a load of laundry.  What IS that about?  Is that I have to abase myself by making sure that I am doing the right and proper thing for the care of the family — a family that doesn’t care about the done-ness of the laundry and wonders what the hell I’m on about all the time?  Is it that I come to this site to abase myself?  Charmingly, the archaic use of “abase” meant to lower physically, and I did go downstairs.)

Aaannyyyway.  For the second year running my intentions were Pay Attention, Have Fun.

Readers, I was awesome at both.  So much of this stems, as it did last year, from my meditation practice.  My job also requires me to pay attention, deeply, because I have so much to learn.  One of the things I do in my job is lead days-long group discussions between near strangers on Big Issues.  That requires a lot of exquisite attention, and while I sometimes cannot get through a 30 minute conference call without wandering to Gmail or worse, I can attend and hold those discussions.  2016 was the first time I was called upon to do that, and I did it well, according to the people who were there.  Paying attention is a gift and a skill, and I am blessed to be in a position to have a little bit and cultivate the rest.

I was better, although far from perfect, at paying attention to Milo when he needed it, and understanding that what he really needed was attention, and not the thing he was leading with.  It is deeply satisfying to do that, although I am inconsistent about it.

And Daniel. Well, y’know.  My beloved Daniel is the black diamond slope of my relationships.  Pity I didn’t have a harder time with my parents or sibling, so Daniel could look like easy, or easier.  I realize how reluctant I am to give him my full attention, although, again, I think I’m better than I have been in the past (which has been pretty horrible.  Two people, one oxygen mask– I’ve written that before, but I don’t remember which post — that was how our marriage seemed.  Or no oxygen mask.  Or an oxygen mask way over in the kitchen, which was where I was desperately trying to get to at any given moment).  The stated-to-myself reason why is that I am afraid giving it to him will leave nothing for me.  That is sounding a little stale now.  I wonder what is the reason behind that reason.  I was just typing, “Daniel’s need for attention is bottomless,” which is why I allow myself to shrug it off so often.  But maybe Daniel’s need for attention is not bottomless.  Maybe it can be met with 10 minutes, but I get really, unbearably antsy after about 7 (that’s being generous to myself.).  Maybe I can hold the pose (in the yoga sense, not the poseur sense, but I am open to the second) for just a little bit longer than I think I can.  That’s worth thinking about.

And, if my attention to Daniel at the end of the workday is measured by my lack of attention to cooking (Daniel set up an either-or years ago.  Why was I in the kitchen cooking dinner when he wanted to talk at the end of the day?  No, he couldn’t come into the kitchen and talk while I was cooking because I wasn’t giving him my full attention then.  Daniel has abysmal eating habits, and believes he doesn’t care about food.  This is not exactly true; food does a lot of non-food work with him.  It is true that he cares nothing about me cooking.  Like laundry.  He wants domestic work to be outsourced & invisible. I’ve written that before.  I want it to be out loud and proud.)

Wow.  That may be the longest parenthetical this blog has yet entertained.  Restart: And, if my attention to Daniel at the end of the workday is measured by my lack of attention to cooking, then 2016 was aces for Daniel.

What feels really good to me now is that I feel like writing about my marriage here is getting less and less interesting.  Also less and less original.  That feels like progress.  It feels like the marriage is not the main thing I’m working on now.  Which has to be tied in some way to my un-listed intention around divorce, right?  Maybe I did divorce myself from something in 2016.  I divorced myself from my initial views of what my marriage should and must be.  I ended that marriage-in-my-head, which was not working, and got clear, or clearer, about the marriage in my real life.  I decline to say whether it is working or not.  It is still going.  It is going more happily now than it has in a long time, and Daniel’s emotional volatility (I originally wrote “squirrely-ness”.  It’s wonderful and precise and inexplicable, but see urban dictionary) doesn’t entirely undermine it.  Except when it does, and that just means we’re two humans being all human together.

Have fun.  Yes!  I did !  Flywheel is fun!  Deciding that self-care in the form of an unwavering commitment to working out is absolutely necessary for me to do my job sounds grim but… it was fun!  Binge-reading Louise Penny?  SUPER FUN!  (I thought I was having an affair with Armand Gamache, but now I realize I’m having an affair with Jean Guy Beauvoir.).   I’m reminded of the summer Shakespeare program I did in college, which was centered around the idea of play.  We lived in dorms in a tiny town next to nowhere, and performed Shakespeare plays on stage (not just comedies), but really the eight weeks were less about performance than an exploration of play.  Of course, we thought it was about performance.  The professor and mastermind of the project kept telling us it was about play.  We read Homo Ludens, even!  Now, more than 25 years later, I am getting it.

And suddenly I am winding down and feeling done.  One last observation: I think paying attention is essential to having fun.  Paying attention opens up so many opportunities for delight, joy, silliness, and play.  They are not opposites, they are complements.

I am very happy with the personal history of the year.