Ah ha moment while watching Arrested Development

When you’ve read this, you will be thinking to yourself, “why?” So, please understand that there were extenuating circumstances and let’s just leave it at that, for now. Okay?

I used to have in my mind Stephen Colbert or Rainn Wilson, or a mutant child of the two of them, but now I have had an epiphany and realize that it is Buster from Arrested Development. This is who my child’s father really is most like. When I heard the actress say the line “people find you odd and alienating,” it made me gasp in recognition. I studied the sweater over the button-down shirt. I looked at the dorky glasses, the high forhead, the receding hairline that makes the non-existent hairstyle look that much worse, and especially the awkward smile and speech patterns. And I knew. My daughter’s father is who they modeled Buster on. They must have followed him around the Cape for a while, studying how he likes to sit alone at a bar and drink PBR and pretend he’s slumming. While he watches boat racing on the TV. Because so many blue collar regular guys closely follow the America’s Cup.

Yes, my poor, poor child is the biological descendent of a person who took for granted his parent’s money and their provision of a good education, squandered it over five years and two schools, finally and barely getting his degree in History, only to spend the next sixteen years in a series of sporadic, menial, dead-end entry level jobs, moving across the country and back, living in crappy cheap apartments, making few friends and fewer impressions, but managing, through some ironic twist of fate, to stop off in Colorado long enough several years ago to impregnate me.

Whenever I consider how his family must feel about him, I think, sardonically, “They must be so proud.” He is now living with them, doing god knows what, and I can only be grateful for the 2023 miles that keep him from being more of a colossal pain in the ass to me than he already is. A master of nothing except being supremely passive aggressive, he recently told me he wants to – over the course of the next few years – acquire the “skills that I can support myself with.”

Did I mention that he’s almost forty?

*sigh*

Lately, his shenanigans have been getting me down. There is no personality disorder I find more tedious and aggravating to deal with than passive aggressiveness. It is no accident that my mother is a master of this game, as well. To have two of them in my life, simultaneously, both of whom have a stake in my daughter’s life… well, it’s no wonder I drink. Please be gentle with me. I know where I went wrong.

From the Shadows

I was disenchanted with the whole dating thing. As I got older it seemed more and more pointless. I got to a certain age when the men I was meeting were pretty much falling into two groups: guys who had never been in a long term relationship, and had no idea what to do with one, and guys that had never been out of one for very long, and were trying like mad to just fill a placeholder, more scared of being alone than anything. I just wanted someone who would consider me a gift – not a puppet, not a doctor, not a mother, not a savior, not a bank, not a doll. I had great men friends, and yet I was going to social things by myself.

By pure chance, I met a man I had no business being interested in, and he had no business being interested in me. At first, I was just goofing around, being myself, just concerned my own problems and life. We became friends, as unlikely as it seemed on the surface. We discovered that underneath the veneer of different backgrounds and different life experiences, we were pretty similar people, and we came to trust each other. One day, we became lovers. I knew our relationship was doomed from the start, and we broke it off several times, but he’d let months go by and then I’d hear from him again. The friends of mine that knew about him didn’t understand why I cared.

The lure was that he understood me so well. He didn’t think I was too smart for him, or too independent. He wasn’t threatened by me. He didn’t want me to be softer, or weaker, or dumber. He didn’t have anything to prove to me, and didn’t need me to do anything but let him be himself. Aside from everything else, that was what kept us drawn to each other like magnets for a long time, and through a lot of stuff in both our lives. We had some arguments, even some memorable ones. But that was part of the attraction, too; he would argue with me, rather than just clam up, slink away, agree just to shut me up, or lie to me.

When I knew him, I still desperately wanted a child of my own, and I couldn’t have one with him. That, in the end, put the nail in it. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

But I still miss his company. Not the heartache, certainly. Not the rock in the pit of my stomach, knowing he would never fit into my life and I’d never fit into his. But the time I spent talking to him, feeling his acceptance, his encouragement, and his approval of me, was something I have not felt since.

On nights like this, I doubt I’ll ever know that again. I don’t think so. My peak experiences seem to be once in a lifetime kind of things. Something to think about on dark, lonely nights, remembering.

I’m not yet old enough to be satisfied with only memories. I haven’t had the time or the inclination to probe into the shadows of my mind for quite a while. Tonight I heard his voice in the dialogue of a movie actor, by chance using a few phrases that had been his, in his accent. And then the movie was over, and I sat in the dark and felt it wash over me.

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

Not the Charm, part 3

Not long before I got pregnant, I was at a park with some friends, and the subject of regrets came up. With my past, I suppose I could have identified any number of things, but what I said was “my one regret is that I didn’t have the daughter I always wanted.”

I’ve felt since I was young that I would be a good mother, and that I was meant to have a girl. I wanted a child of my own very badly, but until I could offer a child far better than what I had grown up with, I knew I’d have to wait. I waited through my marriage to Skip, I waited through my relationship with MG, and the stars failed to align themselves. Yes, my life got much better, and I had friends and stability and had grown up a lot, but I wanted to give a child the best shot at being healthy and happy and whole, and it just eluded me.

I was past forty and now, here I was, and I wanted so much to be able to celebrate and anticipate and plan like other women get to when they are happy to be expecting a desired and wanted child. Instead, I was confronted with this reaction:

“It’s the end of the world.”

He did what he never, ever did. He called his father. His father and he had a relatively short telephone conversation, the gist of which is that he was encouraged to tell me to seek an abortion. Believe me when I say that I am and have always been Pro Choice. But I wanted this baby. I had waited my whole life for this, and damnit, I was going to have this baby, and his opinion at this point in our relationship was next to meaningless to me.

I told him that I was going to have it, and that if he was going to bail on me, he’d best do it. I explained that I knew that it would be harder to cope with it later, and that I definitely did not want my child to ever feel abandoned, so if he was going to go, there was the door.
He chose to stay. I can’t say whether that was the best decision, but I also knew that I wanted to be able to say that I had given him the chance. I just had no way of knowing what kind of obstacle course he was going to put me through. I did know that we as a couple had no chance, so we never even considered getting married. All along the way, I can say that I was pragmatic and outwardly rational. I offered him an easy out on more than one occasion. He agreed to do far more than he ended up doing, but I was prepared to do this alone, so it wasn’t about manipulation. It was about keeping it something I could be honest about to the only one who mattered to me; the child I was going to have.

-- to be continued

Not the Charm - continued

I think that part of the problem is that I really do want people to be the person they profess to be. I give them the benefit of the doubt, even while my inner voice is shouting “No!”
Because some of the significant relationships in my life, especially the early, formative ones, were with people who weren’t exactly stable, or trustworthy, or dependable, I have both a great need for those qualities in others and an unhealthy familiarity with the lack of them.
So when I start to find out that someone is lying to me, say, part of me wants very much to not believe it, instead of just accepting what is and dealing with it right away. Makes for a bit of a muddle for a while, I suppose.

By the time it was clear to me that not only was the situation worse than I’d thought, but also not likely to change, I was in despair. It had been a long time since I’d taken such a leap, and I felt very tragic and ill-fated about the whole thing. I was no longer young, I was going to have to make a big decision about my house, and now the man I lived with was turning out to be a big liability. It seemed like everything I’d worked so hard and so long for was disintegrating in my hands.

I remember the day I went walking in the watershed with my best friend, telling her how I’d come to realize that I’d have to end it. Summer had come after a long winter of struggle, and instead of the lightness that summer always brings, I felt resigned. I was going to be alone for the rest of my life, despite everything, and all that remained was the details. We talked about options and possibilities for the future, but it was clear that things were going to change, and change in a big way, and I knew it was up to me to take action.

Soon after that I discovered I was pregnant.

-- to be continued

The third time isn’t always the Charm

I lived with but did not marry the man who is my baby’s father. I had a house, and he had a crappy apartment, and we both were struggling with financial issues, so I thought it would help us both out to live together. I made a BIG mistake, and it was my idea. So there. If I’d been thinking clearly and not rushed it, we’d have broken up long before I got pregnant, though, and since my daughter is the best thing that ever happened to me, I try to be philosophical about it. Still…

I was working in IT at the time, and his most recent job had been as a system administrator for a company that had left the area, so he was unemployed when I met him. The ‘tech bubble” had just burst and a lot of my friends were in the same boat, so that particular red flag didn’t get the attention it should have. He had a way of not revealing things until much later.

The thing that was so frustrating is that I would work, come home, and find that he’d not really done anything all day. He had criticized me for being what he called “materialistic” because I had a house and a tv and a computer, but he was more than happy to watch my tv and sit on my computer for hours. Not looking for a job – at all, as it turned out – just reading conservative Republican websites, obscure articles about dead people (he liked to read obituaries) and studying astronomy. He didn’t clean or fix dinner or do anything to make an attempt.

At first I believed that he was trying to find a job and was depressed because he was not finding one. So I tried to be supportive, and frankly, I was going through stuff at work and wasn’t focused too much on what he was doing. It was annoying to come home and find things worse than when I’d left, but I tried to be patient.

After a few months of this I told him he needed to make more of an effort. I was starting to suspect the job hunt was non-existent and I was disturbed by some of the statements he was making.

A had a good friend that would often come over and watch movies. One night we all watched a historical drama about England that centered on the conflict between the English aristocracy and the impoverished Irish. After the movie ended, he said he didn’t believe the Irish had ever been treated badly by the English. I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d said the Holocaust never happened. He was serious. I was so glad that she was there as a witness, in a way. He’s a history major. He said it was all made up. . And he’s part Irish!

I think that is when the worm turned for me.

-- to be continued

Skip Dreams

When I am feeling particularly stressed out, I have Skip dreams.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I was married to a man named Skip. He had a real name, but few people knew what it was and he never used it. Our relationship began when I was very young, ignorant, and still living with my parents. I really, really wanted to get out of the house, so moving in with Skip seemed like a good idea. I was a dumb kid.

I wanted to get a divorce for a long time before I finally did, and by the time we parted I was such a mess that I was having near hallucinations. When he moved out, I started having bad dreams that he was back.

When I have Skip dreams these days, it signals to me that I am much more upset about things than I am aware of. The funny thing right now is that I am fully tuned in (or so I thought) to just how uncomfortable, unhappy, and anxious for change I am, and am doing everything in my power to make good things happen. I have so many irons in the fire at this moment, I could burst into flames.

Dreaming about Skip is just unfair. He wasn’t abusive in a physical way, he was passive aggressive and was like a PhD program in manipulation. He did things just to drive me crazy and took delight in pushing my buttons. He was terribly dependent and unmotivated, sneaky and untrustworthy, and chemically addicted. He was also smart, funny, and could be tender and kind. His life was a series of disasters that he never saw coming. I was always taking care of things, cleaning up after him, and running myself ragged. We spent eight years together before I finally divorced him and he pretended he was wounded.

That was twenty years ago. I dreamed about him the other night, and as always, once I woke up it took a while for my brain to remember that. It is unsettling to revisit; it makes me kind of jumpy for a few days.

As I look out the window at the rain falling, I am thinking about how much I am looking forward to moving on.