Resentment the First
It seems crazy to start a journey of building more and better closeness with someone by listing the things you resent about them, but I believe in the genius of The 12 Steps, so here goes:
1983. My daughter is barely one year old. I've been working insane hours for very little money, the baby makes for crazy sleep hours, we're broke, and my wife has basically stopped having sex with me. Her mother (whom I love and who remains to this day one of my best friends) is staying at a really nice rural spa an hour and a half out of the city and reserves a cabin for us for the weekend, on her nickel. Well, her rich married boyfriend's nickel, but that's another story. It's a chance to go away, catch a breath, be together, and maybe even make love. Or that, anyway, was my intense fantasy. Now I should say that my wife has a way of getting extremely and unassailably pissy--she'll work herself into a bad mood that there is simply no assuaging; the only way to deal with it, as I finally learned after two decades or so, was to go away and wait for it to pass--and pass it would, like it never happened. Will somebody please go back and tell that to the me of 1983 and save me years and years of grief? Okay, okay, let's get to the resentment. We set out on a Friday evening to drive out to the spa. There is some testy discussion as to the proper route to take. I happen to know exactly how to get there, and I say so, but my wife takes great pride in not being given directions and says no, we don't take highway X, we take highway Y. I try to convince her, logically pointing out simple facts about the nature of north and west, but she argues and I am so tired of the general atmosphere of pissiness and how relentlessly self convinced she is in moments like these that I say: okay. It's highway Y. And then I sit back in my seat while she heads north on Y, taking us farther and farther away from the correct route to the spa with every revolution of the wheels. After two hours, two hours of me sitting silently and waiting for the inevitable to come down, she realizes that we are on a fast road to nowhere and angrily pulls over to the side of the road. This is long before cell phones. This means finding a payphone and finding the number of the spa and waking up the night receptionist who has to somehow give us directions to the spa which involve crossing a very dark mountain range on barely paved roads. My wife just gets madder and madder as it gets later and later, and why? Because I sat there and said nothing while we were going the wrong way. "But honey, I tried to tell you that we should have--" Useless. Not a cat's chance in hell of getting through. I was the bad guy, and I was the bad guy all weekend, and affection and closeness were the last things in the universe that were going to happen, let alone sex. That was the closest in all the years we've been together that I've ever come to leaving her. I even told her mother that the next morning, on a hike. Mercifully it was all 23 years ago.
Okay. It's late and I'll do more resentments tomorrow. But I can't end with that. I need to end with something to clean the air. An opposite memory. Here's one: 1976. I'm in grad school, and have a summer job in Paris. She comes to visit me. We have our own tiny apartment. One warm evening we walk through the streets hand in hand singing the two parts of a Bach two-part invention, in counterpoint. She's a real musician and I'm just a music lover but she never gets the least bit impatient as she helps me through my part, and there we walk through the streets of Paris, holding hands, singing Bach at the top of our lungs, and we're twenty three years old, and there's just us, and we are very very happy.
1983. My daughter is barely one year old. I've been working insane hours for very little money, the baby makes for crazy sleep hours, we're broke, and my wife has basically stopped having sex with me. Her mother (whom I love and who remains to this day one of my best friends) is staying at a really nice rural spa an hour and a half out of the city and reserves a cabin for us for the weekend, on her nickel. Well, her rich married boyfriend's nickel, but that's another story. It's a chance to go away, catch a breath, be together, and maybe even make love. Or that, anyway, was my intense fantasy. Now I should say that my wife has a way of getting extremely and unassailably pissy--she'll work herself into a bad mood that there is simply no assuaging; the only way to deal with it, as I finally learned after two decades or so, was to go away and wait for it to pass--and pass it would, like it never happened. Will somebody please go back and tell that to the me of 1983 and save me years and years of grief? Okay, okay, let's get to the resentment. We set out on a Friday evening to drive out to the spa. There is some testy discussion as to the proper route to take. I happen to know exactly how to get there, and I say so, but my wife takes great pride in not being given directions and says no, we don't take highway X, we take highway Y. I try to convince her, logically pointing out simple facts about the nature of north and west, but she argues and I am so tired of the general atmosphere of pissiness and how relentlessly self convinced she is in moments like these that I say: okay. It's highway Y. And then I sit back in my seat while she heads north on Y, taking us farther and farther away from the correct route to the spa with every revolution of the wheels. After two hours, two hours of me sitting silently and waiting for the inevitable to come down, she realizes that we are on a fast road to nowhere and angrily pulls over to the side of the road. This is long before cell phones. This means finding a payphone and finding the number of the spa and waking up the night receptionist who has to somehow give us directions to the spa which involve crossing a very dark mountain range on barely paved roads. My wife just gets madder and madder as it gets later and later, and why? Because I sat there and said nothing while we were going the wrong way. "But honey, I tried to tell you that we should have--" Useless. Not a cat's chance in hell of getting through. I was the bad guy, and I was the bad guy all weekend, and affection and closeness were the last things in the universe that were going to happen, let alone sex. That was the closest in all the years we've been together that I've ever come to leaving her. I even told her mother that the next morning, on a hike. Mercifully it was all 23 years ago.
Okay. It's late and I'll do more resentments tomorrow. But I can't end with that. I need to end with something to clean the air. An opposite memory. Here's one: 1976. I'm in grad school, and have a summer job in Paris. She comes to visit me. We have our own tiny apartment. One warm evening we walk through the streets hand in hand singing the two parts of a Bach two-part invention, in counterpoint. She's a real musician and I'm just a music lover but she never gets the least bit impatient as she helps me through my part, and there we walk through the streets of Paris, holding hands, singing Bach at the top of our lungs, and we're twenty three years old, and there's just us, and we are very very happy.
posted by Tom at 10:13 PM
1 Comments:
Tom,
Wow! Bach, Paris, addiction, love, resentment, children. You are cool!!! At least you've had a heck of a life so far. You seem to be about my parents age (or at least my Mom's age, and the age that my Dad would be). I read your blogs. They are very moving. Really I originally came to your blog site just to let you know that I got your comment to my "Language and Religion" blog and responded to it. I hope your steps foward in the Program are going well. I've had friends involved in that - it is so difficult!
Jason
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