Fuller Wiser

“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” quoth Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.

Well, the crude matter doesn’t seem to give a shit about that.

All the tortured writings that have littered these pages, they come from the one organ of the body that believes itself to be independent of the others. And those of us inclined to find our bodies to be more cumbersome than a brain case should ideally be will readily ingest the fiction that mind triumphs over matter.

And of course it doesn’t. There is not a single intelligence which death, matter’s enforcer, has not or will not eventually snuff out. All claims to the contrary are at best contrived and at worst delusional. The works of the mind may live beyond man’s years, but for how long? Ask one Gordon Sumner:

They say a city in the desert lies
The vanity of an ancient king
The city lies in broken pieces
And the wind blows, and the vultures sing
These are the works of man
This is the sum of our ambition…

Matter has been very much on my mind these past two days, for an accident of chemistry has rendered me suddenly, inexplicably happy.

Awake and fretful on Saturday night, I took one of my wife’s melatonin supplements, figuring at the very least it couldn’t hurt. Sunday morning, though lacking a full night’s sleep, I arose feeling an immense calm, a sense that everything was, somehow, going to be all right. I spent the day with my son, with the usual mix of fun and child-wrangling stress, but no matter the conflicts, I never once gave way to despair. I simply enjoyed my son’s company, and took comfort in his happiness.

Anyone who’s read my previous writings will note their stark contrast with the above paragraph. My mind could hardly believe it. Happy? What the hell is that?

So I tried it again last night, and though my body is aware that I still didn’t get enough sleep, I do not currently hold that mustard seed of despair in my heart, threatening to bloom at the slightest provocation. But for Pete’s sake, where did it go?

It would both elate and enrage me if all this time, I had simply been suffering from a melatonin shortage. Of course, that would certainly not be the whole thing. I likely did need my recent surgery, and had legitimate recovery issues subsequently. Other medications I am currently taking are also helping, as Aimee Mann would say, to bring me up to zero.

And really, that’s what I’ve been striving for in recent memory. Not superhuman health, just regular human. Hovering a notch below that level is maddening, and demoralizing. Normal functionality is right there, almost within your grasp, but surrounded by a thin, impenetrable membrane that is nonetheless clear enough for you to see exactly what you’re missing.

I’ve been further down, of course, and so I haven’t complained as much as I might have. In those times when normal life is unfathomably distant, when you’re locked in an underground bunker of pain and disorientation, there is no complaining. Only begging your body and all beings real and imaginary to make it stop. I have no interest in going back to that place, and I retain enough vestigial superstition to therefore refrain from overdramatizing small-p pain.

But look at what such tiny troubles have wrought. My entire marriage thrown into a crashing wreck simply because the organs in my body were not receiving enough of a given chemical. It’s beyond offensive. It’s grotesque.

We are puppets on strings. The old ones were right, we do not fully control our destiny. But the gods are neither lumbering Titan nor ethereal sage nor undead father-confessor. They are indescribably tiny. They inhabit the space between spaces, and they govern our lives as surely as salt governs the taste of soup. We are their works, not the other way around.

So, my tiny masters, might I ask one favor? This feeling I have, that it’s all going to be okay, could you just keep that setting turned on? I promise, I’ll give you what you crave, just don’t send me back to the other side of that funhouse mirror. Pretty please.

I think therefore I am, my ass…

It’s never going to be the right time.

These objections I have in discussions with my wife, these caveats and conditions, they will never go away. If one of us isn’t sick, then the other one is, or we have a bunch of unexpected expenses, or we just had a big move, or the ozone level is brutal, or someone in the extended family is having a problem, or whatever the mother monkey fuck.

All these old Phil Collins lyrics are starting to make sense to me. Say what you will, the man knows about divorce. There truly is never a time when all parties can gather unhindered by life’s myriad assaults and discuss the problem rationally. How we behave in the midst of crisis is how we behave ALL THE TIME.

I meet people who seem to have a lower crisis-to-normality ratio than I do, but those people don’t seem to want very much out of life. As Siddhartha accurately notes, it is in the striving that the suffering is born. And as I’ve noted in this space before, there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my desires, any more than I can switch sexual orientation. I am what I am.

Then again, Aimee Mann has true words on the subject of what is changeable and what is not. However, I think I am in fact losing critical pieces by shambling down a road that my frame is unfit to traverse. And hoping that the road will become smoother is merely stabbing in the dark, no more useful than reading a horoscope. If my adult life has taught me anything, it is that major upheaval must be included in the equation not as an if, but as a when.

With that in mind, are we doomed? If the present state of chaos will only give way to a new state of chaos, can we assume that how we might behave in the eye of the storm is the anomaly rather than the rule? If that is the case, then this is the shape of the future. And in its form I see only darkness and despair.

I will never forgive myself for bringing my son into this situation. Had I a modicum of true spine, I would have prevented the disaster ahead of time. But like our deluded president, I cannot unbreak the vase. I only want to keep it from getting broken further. I want my son to be happy, I want my wife to be happy, and I want myself to be happy. The unification of these goals creates a fell chord of ear-cracking dissonance that will reverberate for as long as the attempt is made, and shake the bones of any who are near it.

Perhaps it is best to let go. We are drowning, clinging to each other for life, and in the process pulling everyone under. Maybe getting it over with before my son can grasp the full ramifications will make it easier on him. Or maybe my name will pop up on a therapist’s couch in 30 years and smart for it. There is so much that I cannot know. The horror of uncertainty has bred many industries over time. I work in one of them now. It shouldn’t surprise me to fall victim myself.

Pangloss, you bastard.

I need information. It occurs to me that I have a huge information hole in my relationship calculus, and that is the possible effect of a divorce on my son.

I have no personal point of reference on the subject, being the son of two people who, despite a truckload of domestic strife, are still married. The friends I have who are the children of divorce are also the children of alcoholics, psychotics, and the generally unwell. There must be sane people who get divorced and whose children must navigate those waters. I just don’t know any of them.

Thus, my picture of a kid whose parents have just divorced is that of a miserable wretch with no self-esteem, or else a conniver who plays both sides against each other for maximum material benefit. Is this the entire range of possibility? And it’s not the same as kids of celebrity divorce, because in our case, money is a huge issue. If my wife and I are both poorer (and more stressed as a result), my son’s life will be adversely affected.

But of course the other end of that calculus also bears examination. It would be tempting to say that the reason I have a good deal of my head together is because I had a stable home life as a child. But that would leave out the fact that I’m seeing a shrink because evidently there are fair portions of my head that are not together at all. How much of this is due to the fact that my parents were miserable throughout my childhood?

One of the things one always hears is that children of divorce think it’s their fault. If my parents had split, though, I don’t know if I would’ve come to that conclusion. They just didn’t get along. They only sort of get along now. True, my old man didn’t get along with me either, but it was always clear to me that the prime area of tension was between him and my mom.

But how much of the effects are due to the subsequent arrangements? If you have two parents who live in two separate places and you see them an equal amount of time, that situation will yield a different result than if there’s one parent who’s hardly around and another who spends most of their time with you.

Consider, however, the inherent feeling of instability that must be present when your life is split 50/50 between two homes. A sense of belonging would be hard to establish very firmly, given that even things like what room is your room change from week to week. Different neighborhood kids, different toys, different routines, it’s got to be at least a little jarring.

But maybe I only think that because I lived in the same house forever. My wife had the opposite experience, though, moving every few years, and it really threw off her sense of belonging and ability to make and keep friends. Though that’s not really what we’d be doing, it would just be a weekly rotation between two fixed points.

I still need more information. It’s all conjecture until I get firsthand sources. And I’m off…

So it would appear that I’m sick.

Not just sick, actually, but Sick, in the way that some people are Old or Blind. I have enough things wrong with me that many duties normally expected of husbands cannot be reasonably expected of me. So says our therapist.

I can’t say I’m entirely sad about it. Honestly, I’ve suspected and argued as much for quite some time, and now that the weight of a degreed professional’s opinion has brought my wife around, it’s a tremendous load off my back.

Mind you, I don’t enjoy being Sick. I have a lot of things I would like to do, and lacking the energy to do many of them is very frustrating, given that most available energies must first be put towards things I have to do. But the idea that it’s Not My Fault is incredibly relieving, and at least gives me a target for my frustrations.

Many of the things I’m Sick with are currently undergoing treatment, and will simply take time to heal. Some issues have been put on the back burner as I’ve dealt with the more pressing ones, but their continued presence affects my overall Sickness, so now I have to turn my attention to some of the more obscure ones as well. It will involve a lot of doctor visits, a lot of time off work, and some short paychecks. But if, maybe a year from now, I am no longer Sick, I will be in a much better position to work through all the non-medical problems in my life.

For now, though, those will have to wait. I can keep myself awake with the fear that medical woes are ancillary, and not causational, to our marital strife, but there is really no objective way to make that determination. In the absence of all evidence, you use what data is presently before you. It’s obvious that I’m Sick. Fix that, and at the very least we’ll know what’s not wrong.

Here I sit, awaiting my fate.

In an hour and a half, I will sit down with my wife and a doctor whom we will pay to listen to us. We will emerge from this experience with either a more or less healthy relationship. At the very least, we will know more than we did when we entered.

I’m more worked up about it today than I have been because yesterday’s session with my own private shrink seemed to point in the direction of me not being the crazy one. I don’t suppose I had fully accepted that I might not be the chief obstacle to our relationship working until I heard someone with a degree say it.

While I realize that I have indeed been a giant pain in the posterior from time to time in our 10 years of marriage, I do believe I’m correct in suggesting that our current troubles would be best assessed by examining the current situation, not the entire bloody 10-year span.

Whoever we’ve been at various times in the last decade, we are now who we are now. I have resolved to show absolutely no tolerance for rehashing old conflicts fought under old circumstances by people whose eyes had not seen all the things that ours now have. If I hear it, I’m shutting it down, and I no longer think that makes me the asshole. I want to fix our present situation, not wade torturously through layers of mud laid down by two young idiots with illusions of marital immortality.

Thus, this session will likely be different than the one we attempted last March, wherein I watched 10 years’ worth of history pass by whilst the problems of the present day went unaddressed. I realize that the therapist wasn’t there for the whole thing. I’m perfectly willing to provide a synopsis. But it should be brief, followed immediately thereafter by the current state of affairs.

I’m angry now. It’s probably not the best frame of mind to be in prior to an attempt at reconciliation, but I’m extremely concerned that we will emerge from this session none the wiser, after which two weeks of meaningful silences and sleepless nights will ensue. It’s why I have Xanax, and I really don’t want to be a lifetime customer.

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.