Me:

Go slow. Be slow. Be patient. Take time. Take it slow.

Slow is okay. Slow is better!

Okay, since I recently said that I write less and less here that is quotidian narrative, I’ll subvert my own pronouncement and give it a try, just like I used to when I started blogging.

Today:

– Got up feeling vaguely interrupted
– Wanted to send a message to my wife right away, but made myself wait just for good measure
– Messaged back and forth with my wife and felt loved
– Told her that I had to clean
– Failed to clean for longer than I’d like to admit (read: procrastination; I hate cleaning)
– Began to clean
– Procrastinated again by reading (Kathleen Parker, ambivalent about her) and napping
– Woke up later than I’d like and began to clean again, this time with determination
– Spent hours shampooing the hallway (for some inexplicable reason, shampooing takes forever)
– Messaged my wife with genuine regret that I couldn’t visit (my fault—the slow start to the day)
– Stopped cleaning at length when it was very dark outside
– Played guitar and sang for the first time since before the holiday break
– Sat down to write and got stuck here; have been doing this for some time now
– Am thinking about sending a good-night message

Here we have prime evidence for why I no longer blog about everyday activities. Because it makes me feel rather more domestic than I want to feel. In my twenties, it was about bars and photo shoots and time out in the city and political involvement and dates with mysterious women and so on. Now, it is about shampooing the carpets. I don’t want this to become “Aron the Dad, a Blog About Housecleaning and Lunch,” so there’s basically no point in recounting actual daily activities.

“Life at 40! Exciting! Untamed!”

But I suppose to inject some boring reality every now and then isn’t too bad.

“Anger is a secondary emotion; it always masks something else.”

This is what our therapist says.

I feel as though if a couple can internalize this, the rest is secondary. All the rest helps, no doubt, and the more you can learn from books or therapists, the faster you can bypass slow periods of learning and the need to “reinvent the wheel.”

But this concept, this concept is fundamental. It is what I, and she, have always to remember: anger is a secondary emotion.

The yelling, the withdrawal, the isolation, the resentment—none of these are basic. They are bandages and scars. It is what’s underneath them that matters. If as a couple you can remember always that there is something underneath them, you can and will grow old together in intimacy, trust, and happiness.

Remember, me. Remember!

It comes up. So this is a post about what I love about my wife. Because in the moment, it can be hard to articulate deeply felt things.

— § —

– She surprises me, in ways that are delightful and that leave me utterly breathless and ecstatic

– She is shockingly competent, in ways that don’t overlap at all with my own brand of competence

– She feels things as deeply as I do, but in ways that are foreign to me—addictive to a feelings junkie

– She doesn’t realize which things about her are most alluring (not sure why this is attractive but it is)

– There is fury and power behind her convictions; I respect her in ways that I don’t respect many

– She actually has convictions, even if she is not always aware of them (but who is?)

– She is as gentle as a baby’s touch and as powerful as the midnight sky over a plains thunderstorm

– She cares, deeply; she cares, she cares, she cares, she cares

– She is different, an individual, unique; she is fully realized as a (stunning and complex) character

– She is pretty and sexy as f**k, the woman in the room that makes the other women want to go home

– She is kind underneath it all, even if this kindness is so harrowing for her that she sometimes hides it

– She is funny without trying, not a joker or a comedian, but someone with an actual sense of humor

– She has a sudden enthusiasm that is utterly, incorruptibly genuine, electric, and endearing

– She is not self-absorbed or conceited about any of this; I tend to believe even that she is unaware

– She is uniquely flawed as are all of the best people, but always manages to transcend her flaws

– Somehow in all of this, she is as deceptively delicate as a child’s first memories of spring

— § —

I love her because I’ve never met anyone else like her and because she has the unique capacity to cause me to me see things in utterly new and beautiful ways that I’d never considered before, or even been capable of considering.

Being around her is like being born and meeting the world for the first time—over and over again. Each time beautiful, thrilling, terrifying, bewildering, and also—true and right and utterly, utterly fulfilling.

Unlike some men, I don’t love my wife because she makes me feel taken care of, or safe, or because she makes life easier. (Sometimes she does, and she very much wants to, but as a man and as a person, I am not always attuned to such things, and she is not always attuned to them either, despite the pressure that she puts on her self to be so.)

I love my wife because she forces me—and life itself—to grow, again and again, into something(s) more and different than I ever imagined self and life could or would be. I love my wife not because she makes life easier, but because she makes life more worth living.

I used to share more about what I did on a day-to-day basis here. There was introspection, yes, but there was also daily narrative.

Over the years, as I read back through this thing, that has become less and less true.

This tells me that as I have become older, and as I have gained experience (or, perhaps: trauma), rather than “getting me out of my shell” and “connecting me more to the world,” the effect has been the opposite.

The more experience I have, the less solidly everyday activities are represented in my psyche, and the more important cognition, emotion, and abstraction are in my understanding of the world, of myself, and of time as it passes.

This is not the way it’s supposed to happen, is it?

— § —

A post like this terrifies me, because it’s the sort of post that is most likely to drive my wife to second-guess our togetherness. And yet it is what it is.

So I will publish it.

So yesterday while I’m visiting, my wife tells me that she’s spent a lot of time lately talking to T—.

I know that T— is just a friend, but of course it gets me all tied up in knots and feeling hurt and jealous, mostly because at certain times over the last few months, she hasn’t been willing to spend as much time talking to me as I wanted, particularly at times when I thought I desperately wanted and needed it (for myself, at least). She was, perhaps rightly, put off by the responsibility and expectations, not to mention by recent history.

My feelings yesterday were terribly unfair and ridiculous, since over the years I have, for example, spent a lot of time talking to L— and H—, and particularly over the last few months.

And it’s rather clear to me that I absolutely love my wife and have no particular interest in L— and H— as anything other than friends with whom I share unique relationships that enable, at times, pleasant and supportive conversations.

So how is it that even as I live something rather simple and innocent inside my own skin, I have to struggle to empathize with her doing the very same thing inside her skin?

— § —

I once thought that adulthood would be the state in which I would no longer feel these sorts of things. I would know that I’m grown up when I stopped, for example, feeling threatened and made insecure by what are (theoretically, but not really) potential rivals. And the same would be true for the other “adults” in my life.

Our popular culture makes a rather good show of promoting this sort of perspective—that “mature” people simply aren’t ever threatened by things.

I rather think that this is bullshit and nonsense. In fact, it’s human nature to be envious of things that others have and that you want, and to be insecure about people that command the attention of the people whose attention you rely on.

What separates the adults from the children is that the adults manage to not act on these feelings, even in conversation. Once again, it comes down to the notion that it is okay to feel, but the responsibility of an adult is to avoid acting on every last feeling that one may have, no matter how intense or tinged with indignation.

— § —

At some level, we remain always a collection of silly monkeys. The old adage that civilization is a thin and fragile veneer of repression shielding us from an ocean of savage impulses is very true.

This is why children and child-rearing are so important. With each generation, we have precious few months to recreate ourselves as a species that is somehow different from the monkeys. We do this by repressing everything in sight. We bristle at the repression, and at times it creates problems of its own, but the alternative is bleak indeed.

Here’s an observation that bears mentioning.

My negative emotions are the ones I blog about. My positive emotions go to the people in my life.

When I am able to do it, blogging gives me a place to put my fears, insecurities, anger, and sadness, and to feel better—without having to give it to others directly.

— § —

Thing is that I don’t actually know whether this is a healthy strategy or not.

On the one hand, it means that things that I really don’t want to impose on them—not as a matter of insecurity always, but often just as a matter of caring—don’t have to affect their days.

On the other hand, it also means that there are things about me that they don’t know unless they read. A kind of dishonesty?

On the other hand, nearly everyone that matters to me knows that this space exists, and they choose or have chosen at various times to avoid it. So maybe it is in an indirect way healthy and honoring their wishes?

I don’t know. I know that I usually feel better when I (am able to) write, and that traditionally I haven’t felt better when sharing the kinds of things that I post with the people that I care about.

But is that right or wrong?

Does right or wrong even enter into the discussion here, or am I searching for answers where there are only choices?

— § —

If there’s one thing that introspection and self-work do, particularly when aided by expertise, it’s confuse the hell out of you.

So, she knows.

It came up today as we are talking and sharing that I have been blogging again. And while on one level it is wonderful to share and there’s a part of me that hopes she reads what I write, there’s also another part of me that’s terrified of the prospect.

– What if it derails everything?
– What if, in reading, she decides I’m just not someone she can live with?
– What if it changes how I write, without me realizing it?
– What if it stops me writing again altogether?

But I think this time I have to continue. I have to try. If I stop again, or if I let it change how I write, that—that is also how everything gets derailed.

God I’ve had enough with meta and mazes. But that’s where we are.

— § —

We had a wonderful day.

We talked, felt close, took the kids to the ice castle in the evening, watched a film, spent time together just being and being happy with each other. Days of the kind that you wish, really wish, could maybe go on forever.

Why do the two of us have such trouble trusting days like this after the fact? Trusting their simple truth? I don’t mean at a conscious level. I mean underneath it all.

Love. Love, love, love. What is wrong with simple love?

After eight years of marriage, you know very well what love is and what it isn’t, and whether you love someone. We love each other.

That this isn’t enough seems, at times, to be beyond unjust. Well beyond unjust. At yet we are also the source of this injustice in one another’s lives. We are the very ones for whom it wasn’t enough.

It is this paradox that we are working our way out of. Thank god for professionals and for books by professionals and for the incredible gift of a second chance to get it right.

— § —

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

— § —

I think she has more insight into her psyche right now than I do.

What, precisely, is the source of my pain in life? I have never once thought of myself as “abused.”

Unjustly dealt with by society and social norms in general, at times, during my childhood. But that applies to a great many people if not to all of them. And it all seems a very abstract reason for my part of the turmoil in my life. And yet turmoil there has been, woven throughout, particularly in my personal life. Why?

— § —

One key thing, a very important thing:

I don’t feel like avoiding her anymore. I did for the last year that we were living together. It’s not that I wanted to end our marriage, or that I stopped loving her.

I just knew that if she called on the phone or if we ended up in the same room or out on the same activity together, somehow we would end up further destroying what we had built, suffering in isolation even as we were together. It was a terrible, helpless feeling.

In recent months, after we started putting things back together, there have still been regular appearances of a kind of foreboding about this. The subtle inclination, when things were going really well, to extract myself and leave before they could go wrong again, to “leave on a high note” or “keep us in a good place.” It was something that at times I’d have to fight.

But that’s leaving. Trust is building. Now we can spend whole wonderful days together and that sense that I have to escape in order to save us and our relationship is almost nonexistent.

There are still other things that make me tend to back up and head for the door (sometimes even subconsciously, as happened once today), mostly when I start to feel a bit emotionally undressed. But that’s a far cry from leaving because you dread the next devastating, inexplicable fight.

I think that phase of our life is over.

And that is one of the best feelings in the world.

— § —

Yes, it affects what I write.

I don’t know if it’s possible to help that.

At the same time, maybe it’s not such a bad thing either, as long as I can preserve honesty and creativity at the same time.

Maybe it’s all a part of the same problem, the problem that has at times led to very long dry spells here—I need to be able to access and share myself, and, if this is to work, I need to be able to access and share myself even if she might be reading, even when she is around.

In that sense, this blog is a barometer. I hereby declare the era of Leapdragon-as-weather-instrumentation.