Fuller Wiser

My wife said it last night, and she’s right: Sometimes I’m too nice.

It may sound strange coming from a cranky misanthrope, but of course behind every cynic is a beaten optimist. The peace-love-and-understanding (which apparently is funny after all) of my upbringing has always manifested itself in ways both beneficial and destructive.

On the good side, I have very good relationships with all of my ex-girlfriends. I’ve burned very few bridges in my life, and can count my actual enemies on less than one hand. I’m very good at defusing tense situations, and prefer compromise to conflict more often than not. If there’s a way to get along, I’ll find it.

But oddly for a self-absorbed INFP, I sometimes forget to make sure I get what I need. The cat’s petting needs have sidetracked writing sessions. Nights out to assuage the wife’s melancholy have postponed many an hour of creative pursuit. The calls of “Daddy!” from behind my door send me out for playtime. These are little losses, but they build over time, and eventually thoughts of works undone begin to creep up my spine, and I just snap.

The snapping usually involves an exhaustive rant to the wife, as well as fantastical thoughts of lotto wins and other white horses galloping in from unforeseen directions to swoop me out of the mundane and into the world I still dream of inhabiting, but which seems to drift farther away each day.

In the throes of my recent illnesses, the coping mechanisms I’ve built up over the years completely broke down, and I saw the truth unvarnished: I am an unhappy man living a life I never wanted, with any real hope of a reversal growing dimmer the older I get and the more responsibility I accept. All of the stories I tell myself in times of health to keep my mind off of its misery were exposed as the lies they are. Certainly there are grains of truth in them, but the underlying despair still burns white-hot in my core, though I have taken pains to dampen it with wet rags of reason.

And that’s the real problem: Reason exists. Sitting here with pen and paper, it’s beyond obvious that the path I’m currently taking is the logical one given my circumstances. I have done the best I can. But don’t tell that to my heart, who cares not a farthing for reason, and aches to work in a space unbounded by the petty animal concerns that bog humans, especially those raised middle class, down in debt and indenture.

I write this at my desk at work, in full view of my supervisor, who is likely well-versed enough in the duties of my position to realize that this does not look like company business. But my mind is not here, and has not been for a while. This eventually happens in every job I take, and it was not as problematic when I was a childless temp. I would simply move on, docked for a few workless days between assignments, and start afresh with people who gave me the benefit of the doubt.

These practical fallback thoughts I have of getting a degree and teaching history are looking more dubious now. That, too, requires this elusive free time which flies from my weak grasp, a grip that falters as I consider the happiness of others alongside my own. There are times when I have to choose, and in most cases, damn me, I defer. Were I more selfish, I would probably get more done, but I might also have run my wife off many years ago.

With adult relationships, though, these things are negotiable. But to a child, all he sees is a father he wants to spend time with, and that father choosing something else for his attentions. I know it happens all the time, and it is a necessary lesson for children that they are not the center of the universe, but I’m haunted by a spectre. A ghost who hid behind newspapers, and in his workshop, emerging only to dispense criticism and provide an example of what not to become.

My wife tells me that I’m not my father, and that’s true. But one reason is that I default to compromise rather than selfishness. And it makes me miserable. So is it better to be selfish and miserable, getting things done but sacrificing time with loved ones that you will never get back? Or does the compromise bring the late-ripening fruit borne from the strong bond between father and child?

There is a third option, of course, and it’s the one I fear. That is the attempted merging of these approaches that is threatening to tear my brain apart, and may one day result in a mental collapse that will do my son no favors, and may in fact finish me off.

I’ve addressed prospective splits with my wife in this space before, and each time we seem to come to the conclusion that it’s better to work around our problems than to use them as a springboard into divorce. Some of the factors we use, though, are more practical than emotional. Living separate lives would raise costs for each of us, and create logistical difficulties. Plus it introduces a variable that terrifies me in particular, which is the possibility that my son will carry the divorce-child’s burden in his heart. I have no personal experience with that brand of emotional turmoil, but I know far too many people who are its victims, and I have no wish to put my son through that.

I don’t have any answers today. All I see is the path before me, and in its dimness could lie anything. My brain wants to play fortune-teller, and it profits me less to imagine orcs ahead than unicorns. We tell ourselves stories all the time, and the only way to find out if they’re true is walking forward, one step at a time.

My health worsens, and it appears that surgery is now the only remedy. I’ll be away from the interwebs for a while, do keep the lights on for me.

And in the event that I wind up on the bad side of surgical statistics, it’s been good knowing you.

Here’s to modern science. Don’t fuck it up.

Days are when the sun shines and the mind travels easily to new places, taking life in as it comes. Some days are even better, ripe with hope and anticipation of every coming moment.

Today is darkness. Whatever force that keeps me afloat on the waves mysteriously deflates, and for a time I sink down into the deep. None can reach me there, I hear them but cannot grasp their hand.  Sometimes I try to swim up to the surface, but give up as the air grows no nearer.

Thus far, the deep has not drowned me. In time, I will return to the light. I fail to understand this cycle, but I no longer flail wildly against it as I once did. I know its way now. I close my eyes, acknowledge its arrival, and wait for its passing.

I regret that I cannot withdraw from the mundane tasks of life during these times. Even to speak to others is a struggle, pulling against the weight of sadness upon me. But perhaps participation in humanity helps move it along, convinces the darkness that I cannot remain here indefinitely. Yet I want only to sit down somewhere, away from people, life, duties, and just…be. My life will not allow such repose, and so I dread the coming days. But they will pass.

I saw a world once. It filled me with anticipation and hope. I am now unsure if it ever existed, or if my furtive grasping drove it away. It is beyond me now, as one day the distant stars will be to earth. I feel its absence in these days, though in others its shadow goes unnoticed.

Perhaps I am more honest now than on the good days when the hole in my life blends into the background. But one cannot live like this, and so it must be temporary sanity. Soon, I will remember to fool myself back into functioning in the world as it stands, and I will make the best of the days remaining to me. There are things to live for, that is enough. Craving more only brings me here, into the deep. It was not to be. God damn my senses, it was not to be.

It would appear that the grubby hand of winter has at last released the Dallas area from its wanton grip. Very indecisive is our winter, but once it gets in its last grope, you don’t see hide nor hair of it until November at the earliest.

The warmer weather means the return of many things, from lawnmowing to mosquitoes to nightly showers to wash off the day’s sticky film before bedtime. For my son, it means that the inside of our house is the last place he wants to be after school. Since he’s only 2 and a half years old, his outdoor explorations require an escort, usually me.

This spring is very different from our last. Back then, we had a 1 and a half year old who could barely walk unsupported, and seldom made it halfway down the block without upsies. This year, the second we open the car door in the driveway, out barrels a fully mobile chatterbox twice the size of other kids his age, who’ll be halfway across the yard before you can catch him.

Our neighborhood has a lot of kids. They’re generally in elementary-to-junior-high range, at least the ones out playing. My son watches them with rapt attention. Taking notes.

It was yesterday that it finally dawned on me: I am no longer the father of a baby. What I’ve got here is a boy.

It’s a pity that the teenage years follow boyhood. They can blur some of the good memories of youth, which lay in front of my boy as yet unexplored, ready to be cracked open with sticks and rocks and plastic bazookas and what have you.

Prior to teendom, I had a pretty good youth. Lots of exploring forgotten corners of our rural subdivision, imaginary space travel, role playing, and bad jokes. While I’ve never gone much for strict gender roles, when it came to boyhood games I fit the XY stereotype fairly closely. Everything was a potential weapon, battle strategies occupied inordinate amounts of my time, and I did indeed watch professional wrestling and got pretty worked up about it.

Though I was one of those weird creative kids who also staged plays and made radio shows on cassette, at that age such activities didn’t make one uncool. I had friends, and enemies were fairly benign. There were occasional fights among boys stemming from ridiculous disputes that were forgotten quickly, and grudges generally never lasted long.

Now, after two years of feeling submerged completely over my head in the murky waters of infant care, my baby’s transformation into a little boy brings a rush of relief, like a lead mattress lifted off of my back. Here, at last, is something I know how to do.

True, we’re a bit early for a lot of boyhood activities. One of the neighbor kids saw my son coveting his skateboard, and let him play with it. Though he tried a few times to stand up on it (anchored steadily by me), he mostly pushed it around on the sidewalk. He seems to know he can’t ride a bike, but he watches the bicycling kids with an unmistakable air of ambition.

Somewhat unexpectedly, my realization yesterday that he had in fact stepped over the baby/boy line sent me into a bit of a giddy frenzy. I ran out and bought him his own skateboard, so he didn’t have to borrow one to play with it. I eyed the bicycles greedily, wanting to give him that measure of independence I’d felt when I could hop on my red-and-white Huffy and ride anywhere I wanted. Shifting back to the reality of my very dependent 2-year-old, I bought a red-and-blue tricycle instead.

Having a giant child is difficult in many ways. Older kids think he’s their age and are confused when his speech is garbled. Diaper manufacturers thin their selections in the 4-year-old range, which is the size he wears despite his age. And I’m a little afraid that he’s already too big for a tricycle. We’ll see soon. I hid it in the garage because I belatedly remembered that I was supposed to be frugal until my check came in this Friday. We’ll try the three-wheeler out on Saturday and see what the little bugger makes of it.

He wants so much to be a part of the play-mob on our street. And at his age, that desire doesn’t give me the stomach aches that I get when imagining his future efforts to belong in teen crowds. Right now he’s a boy, and boys just play. Sure, some of them do the mind games, but in my memory at least, that sort of thing is easily ignored if someone else has a ball or Frisbee around.

I realize there will be downsides to this era. Toy commercials, now incomprehensible to him, will suddenly become potent siren songs. The minutiae of cartoon character personalities and attributes will take up inordinate amounts of mental space. Friends will be chosen by his discretion, not mine, and there are bound to be some troublemakers brought into my house. And greater independence means greater possibility for injury, mischief, and potentially deadly blunders.

But for all of that, I suppose I feel better because we’re now in territory I recognize. I remember nothing of infancy, and as mentioned earlier in this space, spent my adult life avoiding contact with babies. It’s hardly surprising that I completely freaked out when that became my 24/7 reality for a couple of years. Boyhood, though, is familiar ground. Now I can be useful. It’s a wonderful feeling. 

The best horror and science fiction writers capitalize on a feeling we all have from time to time, that of the unknown reality bubbling just below the surface of what we perceive. Often it’s only visible via some key, some secret hiding in plain sight.

I often get that feeling while scanning the headlines about the current financial crisis in the United States. All these words and analyses directed at specific issues, all interconnected but linked in such a way that it is impossible to see the whole. It is very much like the proverbial room full of blind men trying to describe an elephant based on the part they’re examining. It seems that there is something huge standing in the middle of this room, our culture, and we cannot see it for the same reason that we cannot feel our cells dividing moment by moment, or divine the history of the organized stardust through which we compose our thoughts. To paraphrase a certain presidential candidate, we are the thing we seek, and for that reason we cannot see it.

Humanity is not a monolith, obviously. But the intelligence gap between us and our nearest intellectual neighbor here on earth is remarkably large, and we have no other intelligent species with which to compare and contrast ourselves. We are more like each other than we are like members of other species, whether we like it or not. And we are alone in our intelligence, unsure whether that which we advance towards as a society is a natural progression or a colossal mistake. We have only the actions of our ancestors to measure, and of course we are their creations, physically and sociologically. We are where they left off, and they were making it up as they went along.

A while ago I saw a shrink. It’s something that I think every single human being ought to do, particularly if you honestly don’t think you’re crazy. My shrink had a relatively easy job with me, because apparently I was acutely aware of all the things wrong with me. I addressed all of these things as they came into my head, and upon saying them out loud in a linear fashion, they made perfect sense, and were not actually that crazy.

Towards the end of our first session, she made an observation that should be obvious to anyone who’s ever owned even a mildly intelligent dog. The more cognitive ability you have, the more your brain requires challenge and purpose. In the absence of that challenge and purpose, your brain begins to talk to itself. And something that talks primarily to itself for an extended period of time is bound to start chasing its own tail, barking loudly, and going a bit crazy.

Humankind has been talking to itself for many years now. Each of us possesses more cognitive ability than any other non-human being on the planet, and yet the majority of us find ourselves required to spend that mental power on basic issues of survival. We know that there is more to life than existence, and we seek our own ways to uncover it. Thus we have developed religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, art, music, language, things that on the surface do not appear to be biological requirements for survival. And yet these things persist even in the harshest environments, under the gravest of threats to life and limb.

We seek more than that which stands plain before us. Where there is simplicity, we look deeper, finding the complexity hidden within. Sometimes this impulse is driven by personal gain, and sometimes it has no attributable origin. We are a curious species.

As we have developed over centuries, over millennia, we have created a vast catalog of internal references, spanning languages and cultures. We speak to each other about love, courage, fear, intelligence, stupidity, hate, insanity, assuming the other person knows what we mean by these terms. They address only the human experience, for it is all that we can reasonably be aware of. What does courage mean to an elephant? Or love? We have no real data, only guesses.

And in truth, most of what we know about humanity is guesswork. Individual experiences vary widely, and each piece of information will of course be examined by a human being, with a unique perception and cultural references of their own. The human condition is a quantum state, its true nature altered by the act of measuring. As I am studied by a therapist, so do I change my perception of myself, and thus does my behavior shift in response.

What does any of this have to do with the financial markets? Absolutely everything.

Economics is one of the world’s oldest sciences. Cost/benefit analyses began in the earliest human tribes, whose members measured the value of one thing against another, with an eye toward receiving maximum benefit for minimum inconvenience. Tools, hunting methods, agriculture, metalworking, architecture, all of these things result from centuries of the human drive to streamline, to maximize the chances of survival against the forces of nature.

All along this road, there have been those who have pulled off to one side, to try and gauge just what it is that we are building here. They, too, were driven by this inner scrutinizing eye, seeking the working parts behind the machine. While their neighbors leveled their gaze at bettering the mechanisms of human survival, these lonely few sought to get at the root of the longing, to understand why mastering the devices of mortal prosperity was somehow not enough, why we still wanted more.

Tribalism enters into the equation, certainly. To have enough is good, but if your neighbor has more, the mind almost involuntarily seeks to know why. And when they who have more seek to take the little that you have, then survival against the dumb elements of nature is not enough. Survival against the human elements—greed, domination, envy—becomes paramount.

To that end, humans invented money.

Money is a variety of things. As a weapon, it works very much like artillery. The more you have and the better you can aim it, the more formidable you become against your foes. As a tool, it is the ultimate Swiss army knife. It can become anything: A house, a car, a meal, a sexual favor, even another human being to do your bidding. As an invention, money makes fire and the wheel look like tinkertoys. An old man in a wheelchair may seem to be a pitiable thing, but with enough money in his pocket, he is as deadly as the fittest assassin.

But like other tools, money does not operate independently of humanity. And its strength grows in direct proportion to the sharpness of the mind that wields it.

Humanity has long moved past the stage where brute strength alone confers status. This may seem counterintuitive as we witness the imposition of imperial will by force, but a closer look reveals that the strength held by the world’s most powerful armies is one borne of technological and scientific innovation, not muscle mass. The deadliest weapon yet conceived by man came not from the mind of a warrior, but from the introspection of mild-mannered scientists, killing millions with pencil and paper.

In the years since the advent of mutually assured destruction, human minds bent on conquest have had to turn their focus away from military pursuits. Money is the 21st century’s weapon of choice, and the best and brightest of the postwar generations have clustered to high finance like moths to flame. Wall Street firms employ physicists, statisticians, probability theorists, each group a financial Manhattan Project, in search of a secret key to ensure domination for their tribe, those who put their money towards a chance to create more.

But as discussed earlier, money is not a single thing. Money is what we say it is. A person can say that a house has money in it, which we call equity. An individual can hold a share of stock, a noncorporeal concept that nonetheless has a monetary measure. People can invest in an idea, a “future”, representing a certain amount of money.

And to a degree, these values are objectively provable. If someone will buy a house for a set amount, that house is obviously “worth” that sum. If a share of stock can be sold for an agreed price, that is the “value” of the share. Orthodox capitalists may mock Burning Man types for currencies based on found objects in the desert, but using their own logic of “value,” it is a functional system.

In this state of affairs, with money being a purely psychological entity, it was only a matter of time before people started playing games with it. In the past fifty years, it is as if financial institutions have been playing an increasingly gigantic game of psychological chicken with each other and the public at large. Complex instrument begets complex instrument, which entwine to create yet more complexity. And once these are set in motion, new complexities arise to capitalize on the complexity of the ever-expanding definition of the “market.” The wider the net, the more numerous the loopholes, and the more threads woven through to create ever larger nets. Understanding the structure is now even beyond those who helped create it.

It is madness.

There is no other explanation. We have created a world of shadows, of self-fulfilling prophecies and circular logic, where every assertion is balanced upon another, bills of sale carbon copied a hundredfold, pies cut into mathematically impossible proportions, lies which cannot stand but for the lies which came before. We have created the ultimate self-referential universe, and it bears no resemblance to the world which it inhabits. We know only that we are here, and that it was well under construction when we arrived, giving us the choice either to get on or be trampled under its gears.

The economic society in which we live is both of us and beyond us. There may be no conceivable way to stop its momentum, to truly stop and take an accurate gauge of what constitutes value. And like our atomic demon children, mishandling it may unleash our doom.

Humanity is prone to mass hallucination. A man claimed godhood for himself, and it was so. Priests said the sun was Apollo in his chariot, and it was so. Clergymen spoke of demons inhabiting parishioners, and it was so. The color of a man’s skin was said to remove his rights as an independent human being, and it was so.

And yet, outlasting all of this, there was money. And in an age when humans turn themselves further inward, daunted by the swarming mass of humanity, when our fates are cast by faceless organizations, when what we consume is increasingly beyond our ability to manufacture ourselves, money becomes the very air we breathe.

But what is money? We are money. It is a creation of our collective intelligence. Without us, it does not exist, and it controls our behavior as surely as our brain pumps our heart. We cannot escape it because it is us. It is what a species that has talked to itself for millennia has created.

To unplug, to seek a life free of the collective, certainly it is feasible to try. But there is nothing not monetized. Land, from which comes food, and on which goes shelter, is also money. Taxes are levied on its owner, a fee for the privilege of residency on a monetary asset. A life free of land promises no better. Food, water, shelter, all are money.

I am not an anarchist, nor am I particularly libertarian. I am as much a creature of this society as anyone else. I desire more than my body requires, I envy those whose lives I deem more prosperous. I dream of living lives that exist nowhere beyond a film screen or printed page.

But I am under no illusions. The life we lead in this society resembles madness for the simple reason that it is madness. There is no difference between the two. Enough people speaking a thing and making it so, there can be no other description than mass delusion. My life, my livelihood, my future and that of my child, are built on the solidity of that illusion. If it cracks, we will simply patch it, put on a fresh coat of paint, and build a bridge to an adjacent structure, newly invented to confuse ourselves into prosperity. We cannot for a second admit, all of us at once, that it is a lie. To do so is ruin. And therein lies the greatest madness of all.

There is a welcome calm in my household at the moment, a peace I cannot altogether account for. No significant looks of sadness, no visibly swallowed words, no silent force-field between my wife and I as we lie together in bed. We’ve even had sex, something that’s been missing since the second-child debate cranked into high gear earlier this year.

The Pax Wiser is a great relief, so long as I don’t think about it too hard. We couldn’t even speak to each other a few weeks ago without barbs on the ends of words, all open sores and no healing. Where did it all go?

I’m not certain, but I’m not going to set out looking for it. Right now, I’m enjoying evenings playing with my son and loving my wife. And given the year I’ve had so far, I’m content to let the mystery be.

I’ve ruined my wife’s life. Good to know.

Better today. My wife and I are talking, which hasn’t happened in a normal tone of voice for a while.

However, she was taken aback by my revelation that I was tossing the creative work into the hobby bin. That may have even been the domino that tipped her defensiveness over, as quickly and quietly as she responded. She doesn’t think I should drop it, and yet my continuing to pursue it is one of the many things keeping our operation in chaos.

In a fit of martyrdom, she suggested that I quit my job and just stay at home making music. It pains me to say it, but my heart leapt. My poor old emotional, idealistic heart doesn’t know a lot of things that my mind does, and in truth, that has always been the case, thus my need for therapy.

But I pause, count to 20, and of course realize that there is no way in hell we could afford such an arrangement. We both have aspirations which need financing, and we’ve got this kid to feed. No, my facts are still straight: Education over art.

Unfortunately, in the heat of Monday morning’s breakdown, I emailed my mother. And a distress call from an emotional son activates the Mother Alert System, which cannot easily be silenced.

As I’ve documented here before, my mother and I have a very close and honest relationship. She has no purity and perfection expectations of me, and vice versa. We both understand that we are grown adults, with all the frayed ends and dented fenders entailed therein. Nonetheless, as a parent, I can understand the protective reaction if you sense your child is in danger. I will surely retain it well into my son’s adulthood.

So we’re getting together to talk, just her and I, this Friday night. Knowing us, the conversation will last well into the wee hours. This talk will be slightly deeper than most, though, because one of the reasons I’m seeking out her advice is that she’s been in a troubled relationship with my father for most of their marriage. I’m not entirely certain what I will uncover, but maybe there are parallels I would do well to be aware of.

The most alarming part of my current marriage crisis is how similar the battle lines are at their core. It’s not necessarily about the arguments, but about two different approaches. My wife on the side of heedless hope, and me on the side of watching our step on the tightrope. We both started out on the former side, but age and impact craters have driven me further over to the latter. Which, incidentally, is my father’s approach.

For someone who’s spent a large portion of their adult life rejecting the ideology of his father, it’s maddening to find myself out on the battlefield in his old suit of armor, brandishing his coat of arms against wayward over-optimism. How the hell did this happen?

More frustrating is that it doesn’t have the effect of bringing me much closer to my father. We get along better than we ever have, but that’s mostly because he knows he can’t tell me what to do anymore, so he doesn’t.

Unfortunately, I have only recently started to notice that in our joint complaining sessions (what passes for conversation between my dad and I), there is an occasional glint in the old man’s eye and a satisfied smile when I assess the hopelessness of a given situation. I’m trying very hard not to believe that my dad is subliminally telling me, “I told you so.”

Upon examination, a good deal of the clashes between me and my father in my youth involved my outspoken rejection of pessimism. At the time, I would rather have described it as an embrace of optimism, but my attitude was just as much, and possibly more, about not being something as being it. Anytime I held forth with why I was going to do something, my father’s predictable riposte was that it was unrealistic. My retort to this brand of attack was seldom humble, often lengthy, and if I could get away with it, a bit condescending.

My brain at that time reflected many of the themes addressed here at various times: What should be is more important than what is. Right is right and must never yield to pragmatic go-along-to-get-alongism. Everything would be all right if everyone just ____.

Invert those statements and you get my dad’s positions, though with qualifications: What should be would be nice, but it’ll never happen, so deal with what is. Right may be right, but nobody cares, so you have to go along to get along. A lot of things might be all right if everyone just ____, but it’s impossible, so why bother?

I recognize those positions. To a large degree, I now hold them. My mother talks a lot about creating your own reality, but that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to do for nearly two decades. The problem is that reality already exists, and doesn’t give a damn about the reality I’m creating to compete with it, and being the actual reality, is able to just ignore me and go about its business, leaving me standing in the road with my little pie chart full of dreams that live only in my head, and increasingly not even taken seriously there.

I have a nasty habit of frequently watching the movie Contact. It represents very starkly the battle between idealism and so-called realism. And true to life, the only thing that stops Ellie’s SETI program from being crushed by the cynical climber Drumlin is A GODDAMNED SIGNAL FROM ALIENS. And though they conveniently show up just at the last minute in the movie, my own experience leads me to believe that if the aliens finally do contact us, we’ll be too busy watching American Idol and finding new reasons to hate foreigners.

Still, the movie reminds my heart of what it used to be. I have some nostalgia for my more hopeful self, the one that believed the nuts-and-bolts world could be overcome by the power of pure idealism. My observation is that cases where the ideal beats the animal are rare and perfect storms, attributable as much to dumb luck as effort. Far more numerous are the tales of I-fought-the-law-and-the-law-won.

And yet the old heart hasn’t died yet. I feel its tugging during, of all things, speeches by Mr. Obama. He is the perfect Ellie Arroway on the high seas of politics, damning torpedoes in the straits, calling all hands on deck to believe our way into making it, while people in the engine room are sweatily wondering what the hell we’re going to do when we at last reach hull crush depth.

Given my current leanings towards the pragmatic side, one would think I would vote against the Senator Of Hope. But in this one thing, I am allowing my heart’s voice to win. To believe that there is value in aiming high, in believing something can be done before you know it for a fact. A hidden corner of myself still believes that, and looks for ways to assert itself whenever possible, slipping past the guards I’ve put up near all the old hull breaches.

Could it be that I am not alone? That the national outpouring of support for this high-talking politician is representative of a hidden optimism in us all? Is our society built in such a way that hope cannot survive long in adulthood, and is pushed down, aided by the conventional wisdom of cynicism in all things, from politics to employer relations to human interaction? Is our whole country suffering from the same neurosis?

Obviously it’s not everyone. Theism is the preferred repository for illogical hope in America, and its gradual disappearance from my life has left me unprotected, caught out in the storm with no umbrella, much less a roof over my head. Many of those supporting the more pragmatic candidates have already tossed their hope into the Bank of God, and have no need of seeking shelter for their emotional assets.

This is actually one of the only stumbling blocks between my mother and I these days. In her life, she has made the journey from card-carrying Baptist to nondenominational spiritualist, admittedly a big leap. But having started near her spiritual endpoint, I have continued straight on into atheism, and thus far, it has been one bridge too far for her to go.

As I know from experience, the difficulty with being a general spiritualist is that the evidence is emotional, not empirical. You feel that something bigger is out there, you sense that you’re being pulled in one direction over another, you infer that a lucky confluence of events is engineered by a benevolent force. But nowhere is there actually any evidence of the invisible hand.

This makes it difficult when attempting to convince others. You can recount your own stories of feelings, senses, and inferences, but they will never match another person’s experience. And in fact, they may directly contradict another person’s feelings, senses, and inferences in similar situations.

It’s the kind of thing that makes my mom and I hit conversational brick walls. She can tell me all day long that she has a feeling that everything happens for a reason, but never is there a scrap of evidence to support such a stance, save for anecdotes of her own experience and the resulting inference. While for me, the idea of an omniscient being tossing vague little clues into the ether in hopes that people will interpret them as such has really drawn my vigorous ire for quite a while now. If there is a god, he is a colossal asshole. When I tell my mother this, she just nods and says, “Well, I can see why you might think that.” Then we drop the godtalk and return to the world as is, something she’s less comfortable with.

I’m inclined to believe that this disparate god/godless worldview is one of the chief pebbles in my parents’ marital shoe, but I’m curious to see if, as usual, it’s more complex than I realize. With my wife and I, the god thing is already out the window, though I arrived in the abandoned celestial railway station a couple of years before she did. But like me, her heart is perfectly capable of irrational hope without a magic conductor to drive the engine. Unlike me, she hasn’t locked her hope away in solitary confinement.

It will be an interesting Friday.

Of all the problems that I ever imagined I would face in my thirties, this is not one of them.

I’m losing my wife.

Not to death, or even divorce (yet). But I am losing her, and it’s tearing me apart.

When we got married nearly ten years ago, we were fairly universally regarded as perfect for each other by all who knew us. We shared an offbeat sense of humor, enjoyed long nights of thoughtful discussion, and generally believed that most other people were morons. We didn’t hew to traditional gender roles, and had no conflicting theologies. We both came from middle class upbringings with no serious family neuroses or traumas, apart from her father’s death a few years prior from a heart attack. Our voting records even matched, at least those since her anti-abortion activist years in college (a remnant of mild fundie churching).

We never encountered the sort of pitfalls that other relationships around us fell victim to. I never felt threatened by her making more money than me. I was proud of her degree and accomplishments, and her sharp intelligence. I liked that she didn’t wear makeup or spend hours shoe-shopping, or buy into any of the myths of feminine mystique that screw up our culture. And she had no expectations of chest-beating masculinity from me, and enjoyed my apathy towards football, hunting, and other stereotypically manly activities.

We believed in each other’s dreams. I knew she was a good writer, and I believed she could one day make a career of it. She saw through my early-career artistic stumbling and encouraged me to work hard to better myself, praising me when I did. Our first four years, while financially and professionally difficult, were full of unbounded love for each other and comfort in the one thing that worked in our lives: Us.

What killed us was the clock.

It was in 2002, in the excitement of our move to NYC, that the problem first threw its shadow upon our doorstep. It started amicably, just discussions, not arguments. Proposed timelines, if/then statements, poles in the water to test the depth.

As it turns out, this was where I made my mistake.

My fairly consistent statement on children for the first part of our marriage was “yes, once my artistic career is established.” We were both young and stupidly optimistic enough to find this condition perfectly reasonable. But as years went by and no such career materialized, the question then became one of biology. My wife was entering her mid-30s, from which follow the late 30s, after which the prospects for healthy childbirth get ever dicier in the steady course towards menopause. The question was obvious: If there is no artistic career, will there be children?

My gut instinct was that no, there should not be. Because I wanted my career more than a child. I spent my childhood subconsciously aware that my birth was not my father’s idea. I was not abused, but my siblings and I were studiously avoided by my old man, as I’ve discussed here before. Above all other things, I did not want to feel resentment towards a child, because I knew that they would be able to feel it even if I never verbally confirmed its existence. Even if I smiled in their face and gave them horsey-rides and encouraged them to be the best they could be, they would be able to tell whether I was excited that they had been born.

However, as our discussions went on, through 2003-04, I didn’t say no. My career needed more time to develop, we needed to get on firmer financial footing, we both had to be in a better professional place…argument after argument, I presented these conditions. But the clock didn’t care. It said now, now, now, and I kept saying wait, wait, just a little while longer, please, and still it ticked on, potential offspring evaporating like water from a desert pond.

I never said no. And I should have. I did not want to be the object of her resentment. And I knew I would be. I knew that the children I’d made her wait for would not be optional anymore. In the absence of her own artistic success (always more nebulously pursued than mine), she had placed children as her life’s wish, the thing that got her up in the morning. To take that away could mean the end, if not of our relationship, then our love. And I still loved her, I loved everything about her that wasn’t yearning towards motherhood. But that part of her grew, and it was not discussing now, but demanding a decision. Now, not later. What was my answer?

I crumbled. I couldn’t tell her no, this woman who meant so much to me, who had gotten me through my darkest days of despair. I couldn’t watch her turn into a bitter old woman, simmering with regret and resentment towards me for the child she never had. I couldn’t live like that, and neither could our marriage.

But I did one worse: I convinced myself that I wanted it. With absolutely no experience of what life with a baby was like, I told myself that it was a new phase of my life, a journey which would enrich me and fuel my creativity with new experiences.

I was an idiot.

Perhaps I am lacking a necessary emotional component, but for me, caring for a newborn is the height of brain-numbing banality. The life of the mind disappears, replaced by animal needs and repetitive tasks made even more drudging by sleep deprivation and, at least in the United States, income loss.

My creativity was not sparked by having a child. It was deprived of oxygen, strangled and shrunken now to the point where, like Grover Norquist with his ideal government, I can finally drown it in the bathtub.

Impossible as it is to believe, though, I don’t blame my son for this. As long as I can remember, I have had an intuitive sense of moral fairness. Only those who are directly responsible for a problem should be blamed for it. I have held to that steadfastly through all of my adult life. And so it is now. The blame for the death of my creativity stands squarely at my own feet, and I will never forget that. I love my son, and I will never for a minute penalize him for his father’s bad decisions. It is one of the only things I believe in with no reservations, qualms, or doubts.

But the fact is that it doesn’t matter. My wife, still eyeing the clock, has spent the months since my son’s birth lobbying for a second child, even as lingering post-partum depression sent us both into therapy and despair. This time, though, I have learned my lesson. I have said no. And in doing so, I have at last become the object of her resentment.

Take note, all who read this. Ignoring my instincts and principles for fear of bringing destruction to my relationship has only resulted in delaying that destruction for a few tiny years. Only now do I understand that this one issue was going to bring us down no matter what else happened in our lives, barring arrival of the elusive career success, and possibly even then.

We were doomed from the start. Because we didn’t know how to ask the right questions in the right way, and not only have an answer, but several answers, one for every level of potential outcome. Even as we congratulated ourselves on how smart we were, how much healthier our relationship was than so many others, we ignored the meteorite hurtling towards our tiny planet, soon to unleash great debris-strewn clouds of anger, sadness, and regret. We have become our worst nightmare, the couple who lie together in bed, yet cannot speak without opening a wound.

I will not live in a house where I cannot speak. The silence will become resentment, which will become anger, which will surely become hate. The words she does not speak will, in my mind, become sharper, crueler, more unreasonable, and my unspoken responses will grow nastier, more condescending, and less concerned with the hurt they may inflict. I watched it happen between my parents, and I swore never to let it happen in my life.

It is beyond infuriating that this single issue may ruin such a deep love. Because I still love her, all the parts that are not wrapped up in this debate, all the things we’ve shared, all the things about her that still make me proud to be her husband. And this makes her the object of my resentment, because I find it inexcusable that a good relationship should be snuffed out for want of one more birth.

And of course now it’s gotten more complicated. In passionate exchanges since my “no” verdict, I have let slip the fact that I fooled myself into greenlighting the first birth. She now knows everything I’ve just written here, and that rewrites a significant chunk of our past. She can now resent me both forward and backward.

Thankfully, we are intelligent enough to know when we need help, so we have lined up a marriage counseling session for next week. But in the days and nights of silence between us, the darkness will fester. Shapes, intents, emotions will be born from the formless black, demons named and released in anticipation of the coming conflict. Walls will be erected, defenses prepared, anger fueling the certainty of the worse-case scenario.

There is nothing so deadly as silence between lovers. In it, anything may come into being. In the bliss of new love, each partner impregnates these silences with their own dreams of the shared future, magic castles filled with each person’s deepest desires. But a castle, however beautiful, is a fortress, and inside these battlements dreams become entrenched. There may come a time when, looking up at last, you find that rather than building your dreams together, you have simply created adjacent structures, each protecting its own prize. One arrow may be all it takes to unleash wholesale war.

I write this without knowing the result of this conflict, and thus without a clear-cut moral for the reader. But life is like that. Not until the end do you really know what it is that you have done.