Not the Charm - part 4

Okay, this is where some of the funny stuff comes in. It wasn’t at the time, but that is the beauty of time and distance... it can make even the most wretched things seem simply ridiculous. Most of that year was just that.

I worked in a small IT department of a large bank. Weirdly, three out of four of us working the support desk were due to have a baby in the same week, although I was the only one actually carrying the baby. It was a first child for all three of us. One of the three of us had been there longer and was a favorite of the management, so he and his wife were given a baby shower, and they half-heartedly threw a second one for me and the other guy and his wife. Awkward doesn’t even come close. Of course, my baby’s father couldn’t come. He had finally been coaxed into gainful employment, and it was way down at the Tech Center and I worked Downtown.

The day my baby was born, he stood by me during the delivery, but soon left to go “have breakfast” – claiming the hospital food was unappealing. I was later told he was in fact looking into moving his stuff into a storage unit while I was in the hospital, and then moving out without telling me, which he ended up not doing. I ran across the paperwork one day but he never mentioned it to me. My gut tells me that it turned out to be too much work.

When M was a few months old, I told him I couldn’t take it any more and if he wanted to stay he was going to have to go to couples therapy with me. He was driving me up a wall. I was kind of surprised that he agreed to go, but I discovered that he was so sure that the therapist would tell me that I was the problem that he was in agreement. Unfortunately for him, the therapist was an older woman who had seen and heard it all, and I liked her a lot. She saw right through him and I didn’t have to do much talking. She assigned reading and homework that he agreed to do – and then didn’t touch. Pretty soon, she was explaining to him what Passive Aggressive behavior disorder was all about. I found the whole thing hilarious, but put on a poker face.

My favorite moment of all was when we were talking about household chores and sharing the work, and keeping a clean and safe environment for the baby. He didn’t like doing anything, but especially cleaning of any kind because he imagined it as work that I had made up just to persecute him. They were discussing vacuuming, and she asked him what he thought the solution was. His answer? Just don’t vacuum. At all. He was serious.

I thought she was going to go ballistic on him! I about died trying not to laugh out loud. She was very professional, though, but firmly told him in no uncertain terms that his idea was NOT a solution! She also reminded him that we had two Labradors, and that for the health of the baby as well as us, he was going to have to man up. It wasn’t just household stuff, but that part stays in my memory.

I think it finally occurred to him that we were “ganging up on him” and he didn’t want to go anymore. I replied that I’d put up with as much as I was going to. For M’s sake, I’d given him every opportunity to pull his head out of his ass, but it was apparent that nothing was going to budge.

I arranged to divest myself of my house and most of my belongings in fairly short order after that. I was going to have to take care of M on my own, and for that to go smoothly I needed to regroup in a big way.

Throughout it all, he maintained his victim status.
- to be continued