She Curmudgeon

I joke that my Dad is the pic­ture of cur­mud­geon when you look up the term in the dic­tio­nary, and in my head, it’s true.  But I’m not easy to live with either, these last months and more.  (The bipo­lar diag­no­sis was really only offi­cial con­fir­ma­tion of the coaster one rides when you roll with me on a reg­u­lar basis.)  You could call me moody, to put it lightly.  Sub­ver­bal at the end of a work­day, often.  Don’t ask me for input on sup­per (much less ask me to take over the cook­ing of it at 8:30 at night when I walk in the door  because I’d rather have cheese sticks and whisky) at the end of a long mid-shift.  And don’t prompt me for con­ver­sa­tion at table, much less expect me to con­tinue my expla­na­tion after Dad in his Wal­dorf mode inter­rupts me with one of his rants about how the world should be rather than let­ting me con­tinue with my expla­na­tion of how it actu­ally is (much less how my day went) ….  No.  Like a pup­pet whose strings have been cut, I fall back into the habits of child­hood, feel­ing dis­an­i­mated and slumped, at least when I don’t have my full crank on and give back my best Statler, my own inter­nal eighty-year-old fully engaged as we have at one another.  (And yes, there are parts of the house uphol­stered with gilt fringe and vel­vet, in case you wondered.)

So there are times when I say  “No.  Never mind.”  I don’t always have it in me to yell at him for inter­rupt­ing me yet again or going off on a rant at the stu­pidi­ties of the retail world in gen­eral or my store in specific—because I don’t have the heart to explain how I’m yet too heart­bro­ken to muster the courage to find some­place new, some­place where he thinks (and I don’t dis­agree) I could put my legal/intellectual skills to bet­ter use but where I– on days where I am less inclined to think I’m a gen­eral fail­ure and yet—think I will be chal­lenged enough, paid more and yet not be too stressed to burn myself out before I can rec­og­nize (unlike the last time(s))—“Hey.  I’m get­ting burnt out.”  Hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with him about the cama­raderie of other-job-misfits, my fel­low manager-nerd-artist-heroes, the tiny vic­to­ries of real cus­tomer ser­vice, the thrill when the thou­sand small gods of book­selling help me find the answers the cus­tomers need and get all the stock out—those are lost on my purely intel­lec­tual papa, a man who’s never lived out­side his own head or heaved freight for an under­paid liv­ing.  The gar­den­ing pick­axe, the gentleman’s heir­loom toma­toes, the power tools in the base­ment… that prac­ti­cal know-how, trans­mit­ted to me and used up cherry pick­ers and gird­ers and in too many shitty col­lege and grad school apart­ments to count as I rewired Sal­va­tion Army lamps and re-sanded and repainted floors and ran new phone exten­sions–  they are all trans­mis­sions of knowl­edge, of sorts, an expres­sion of love in its way.  He can’t just come out and say so—but he can show me some­thing he thinks is use­ful to know.

It’s why I don’t have it in me to yell at him for repeat­ing the behav­iors I found so hurt­ful (inten­tional or not, and I knew that they usu­ally weren’t but habits—goddamn them to hell…) in my hus­band, and  because—after all—isn’t it often the truth that we marry our fathers?  (“It takes us until we’re at least forty-two to get over the things that hap­pened to us with our par­ents,” he announced one night at sup­per, recount­ing a con­ver­sa­tion he’d had one day at work with a coworker.  “Forty-two, hunh?”  Wal­dorf sipped his hor­rid caffeine-free Diet Coke.  “Give or take a few years.”  He knows.  We just don’t talk about Wal­dorf v. Statler out­right that often.)  I do, at other times, try to men­tion when I am calmer, less overtly hurt, that I find it hard to respond to cer­tain ways of his behav­ing because of (what­ever rea­son du jour).  He tries.  He tries awfully hard.  He buys gluten free brownie mix for me, and buys my pro­tein bars.  If I show the vaguest inter­est in some­thing con­crete, he is an enthu­si­ast for it, even when my energy flags (and then I feel guilty about dis­ap­point­ing him… a bad cir­cle to get in.  Still, though, he tries.)  So.  I try in return.

I tried with my hus­band.  It didn’t work then, though the open ques­tions of when I should have real­ized what and what and how I should have tried will be ques­tions I’ll ask for … who knows.  Right now, I am try­ing to set them aside and just say—I tried.  I don’t imag­ine I’ll get that far with my father.  But I can at least say my piece and (some­times lit­er­ally) retire the field if I get too aggra­vated.  Some­times, I even get an apol­ogy in the morn­ing, even if I get a splut­ter or an accu­sa­tion of sulk­ing at the par­tic­u­lar moment when I put my foot down and say no.  Stop it.  You hurt my too-tender, stu­pid bipo­lar feel­ings.  I would like to not sulk, not to retreat into my clamshell or get sullen or slam things—but short of that, at least being hon­est is some­thing bet­ter than say­ing noth­ing at all and work­ing myself into the sneaky hate spi­ral.

He said not long after I first moved back in—“I wish there was some way you could find to not feel things so badly.”  I know that it’s part of it (at least, that’s what I’m hop­ing that’s what I pay my ther­a­pist for), aside from the whole thing of being bipo­lar– though where the pathol­ogy ends and my inher­ently roman­tic and sen­si­tive, anx­ious per­son­al­ity begins is an Ourobouros, a Gor­dian Knot, an Icarus no mat­ter which inept tra­di­tion I try to analo­gize to.  I am too sen­si­tive to his brusque­ness that is noth­ing but his habit of liv­ing alone and his own social inept­ness.  I am too sen­si­tive to the fact that every­one has their own shit and the uni­verse is gen­er­ally indif­fer­ent.  I know it’s not about me 98% of the time.  And yet, that’s pre­cisely what hurts so very much, and why that Auden poem is both exactly right and totally wrong.  I have been both the more lov­ing and the more indif­fer­ent (entirely self-involved/depressed/obtuse/take your pick) party.  It hurts, either way, to real­ize, later, that the peo­ple about whom you’re sup­posed to care have been ignored when they needed attention—or at least that’s how I feel.  And I feel it intensely—prolongedly.  Too long—and yet, I’ve not so far in these 37 years, learned quite yet how to stop car­ing so long or so much.

He’s said, too, that he would have done bet­ter if he could be more patient with peo­ple or make some effort to like them—but at his age (push­ing 70, hard) he’s not likely to change.  There is some­thing to be said for the Irish per­son­al­ity type/essential belief that work occu­pies a soul and one should sim­ply keep one’s self busy—but down time will hap­pen, and he’s prone to lone­li­ness, too.  I know that I am his only real friend.  I need to buck the hell up and force myself to con­ver­sa­tion despite the fact that I feel crushed, often.  The mere fact that I’m not com­mit­ting sui­cide because it would prob­a­bly give him a heart attack find­ing my body isn’t enough.  I need more self esteem, damnit.  (Reread­ing those two sen­tences makes me laugh-snorfle-cry.  I think that’s prob­a­bly good, at least the laugh part.)  I need to pre­tend to be cheery until I can learn to do it again.  I need to be more patient even when I am depressed and exhausted and feel­ing heart­bro­ken, still, over some­thing I need to just—not ever for­get because you don’t for­get love and the way that it hurts when you no longer love and are loved in the same way you were at its first blush– but that it shouldn’t spoil the mem­o­ries of that first blush, either.  I need to accept that there are new sto­ries to write and that while this one didn’t end hap­pily, it doesn’t make it a bad story, not over­all.  I need to accept that this story is over, and I’m start­ing a new one.

Aren’t all sto­ries love sto­ries of one kind or another, either the find­ing or los­ing, the hav­ing or lack, the loss or the gain or some­thing the cycle of all of those things?  There are all kinds of love, all kinds of ways it can be sub­jected, objected to and objectified—but those peo­ple and things we desire and loathe and thus form our actions in response to—of course we write our sto­ries as bal­lads of love.

“Love’s awfully hard,” he said, about a month after I first moved back in and was will­ing to actu­ally talk a bit about things.  He never came out and asked, and I wasn’t ready to vol­un­teer very much.  He never pressed.  “Mar­riage is one of the hard­est things two peo­ple can do.  You have to not be too hard on your­self if it doesn’t work out, because there are two peo­ple in it, and if you’re both not push­ing toward the same point, even when you’re both try­ing….  And if there aren’t chil­dren….”  He shrugged, look­ing off to the side of my face in the way that he has of never look­ing straight at me that he has when dis­cussing emo­tions, because they make him squirmy.  “You have to take some time off and know that lov­ing another per­son is just rough.”  And then we went out­side and hacked the privet hedge in the front into shape.

So.

I love my hus­band very much.  And he loves me.  And I know him well in some ways, and he like­wise.  And in other ways, both of us have failed to know one another in crit­i­cal ways, either because we have changed, or because we never knew one another as well as we hoped, or because we were scared to tell one another about the scari­est parts of our­selves, or because we were or are scared to know what those parts are and share them, and they have to be shared if we’re going to move for­ward.  We had lots of fun.  Laughed.  Showed up places dressed in the same col­ors.  Fin­ished one another’s sen­tences, often.  Tried to give one another con­sid­er­ate gifts.  And yet, the story ends sadly because once we dis­cov­ered the facts, we dis­cov­ered that the things that were scary about me and the scary things that I needed and learned about me were not things he could know, no mat­ter how well he knew and loved me (and was often the more lov­ing one, oh, he loved me and loves me so well, bet­ter than any­one else has, even Wal­dorf) in so many other ways—and those things were deci­sive.  We couldn’t just go back to our cor­ners and hack privet hedges until the next morn­ing because at some point, we’d got­ten past the point where that would be use­ful.  I could tell the story as a Russian-length novel with all the banal­i­ties of every­day life and wor­ries about prop­erty, or Eliot-esque in the ways in which peo­ple change, age, fail them­selves and the peo­ple around them, Flaubert-like in the hyper­bolic obses­sion with feel­ing and striv­ing the hero­ine has, though the par­al­lels aren’t so close upon too close a scrutiny (no infi­delity, for starters) and I wouldn’t like any­one to com­pare my hus­band with poor, put-upon, obliv­i­ous Charles.

So when the per­son who I love the most in the world doesn’t love me in the ways that I need to solve that story’s prob­lems, that story has to end.  A new one begins.  It’s not a sequel.  Call it a new chapter—whatever—but there’s a dis­con­ti­nu­ity as I break both our hearts and wal­low a while and Wal­dorf and I elbow each other as we try to make room for each other inside this new novella of cur­mud­geonly grum­bling about who fed the cat and who’s going to make din­ner and why can’t you put the spat­u­las back where they belong even when Wal­dorf can never put them any­where but in three dif­fer­ent crocks his own self.  Mean­while, I reread the book of my mar­riage and try to learn lessons about how I should pro­ceed dif­fer­ently in the future– with­out dwelling too much on the happy parts that will make me cry because I am lonely, or becom­ing too bit­ter about the things that didn’t work and so I could be angry at me or at my hus­band (two to tango and all) as I remind myself– books are for  learn­ing, not just enjoy­ment.  I try to tick off the lessons.

Ask­ing for help.  Speak­ing my truth, even if it’s of anger and hurt.  Doing things for myself and not wait­ing for them to be done unto me– even if I think oth­ers should know, even if I have asked.  Being grate­ful when the nice things do happen—and not expect­ing them oth­er­wise, because—indifference is the norm, and I shouldn’t let it reduce me to tears, though often it does.  I’m awfully lonely, and not just because I miss my hus­band.  But there are things I can do to remind myself that I am deserving.

To wit, I can buy my own flowers.

Every week.  With­out fail.  Some­times two bou­quets a week, if I can afford it.  Sym­bolic and there­fore inher­ently mean­ing­less in some meta sense?  Yes.  Sym­bolic to me, and there­fore sub­jec­tively mean­ing­ful to me?  Absolutely.

I like flow­ers.  I like watch­ing them unfold and all that pos­si­bil­ity hap­pen.  Yes.  They’re going to die, such ephemeral things.  But while they live– oh, but the beauty.  I like watch­ing them across their life cycle, even like watch­ing them in their disha­bille as they wilt and flut­ter and die, drop­ping their petals and brown­ing, like a debu­tante devel­op­ing wat­tles and liver spots as she becomes a matron—but the fine bones of her coming-out photo are still vis­i­ble under it all.

Wal­dorf has never asked about my flowers—but at my birth­day, he gave me a Water­ford vase.  “For your flo­ral habit,” he said.

And not every week, but some, he brings me home tulips.  Or roses.  Or cheap daisies or mums.  I fill them with white flow­ers a lot, because I love how they glow against the crys­tal.  It isn’t a vase I would have cho­sen myself, but Waldorf’s old-fashioned lace-curtain Irish and a Water­ford vase is part of a lady’s dowry, I sup­pose.  It’s a vote of con­fi­dence, too, I guess.  I still get dowry presents.

Those semi-occasional gro­cery flow­ers (and the replace­ments for the pro­tein bars of mine that he eats, the Fri­day night din­ner dates that we keep) off­set the grum­bles and sighs and inter­rup­tions, the feel­ings that I’ve become a worry and disappointment—feelings that, if I said them aloud, he’d prob­a­bly refute but which I’m not (not yet) brave enough to be a Statler cur­mud­geon and get testy about, state my piece and my inten­tions as a way of get­ting my nerve up to actu­ally do it.  (Would that it worked that way, hmm?)

Along with the cam­era (that Wal­dorf bought me, because I like to take pho­tos) I need to do a bet­ter job about tak­ing pic­tures of my weekly flow­ers.  It’ll remind me not to miss a week.  And to use my cam­era, because if I can’t have a long con­ver­sa­tion with Wal­dorf with eye con­tact that says—thanks, Dad, I love you, too?

The least Statler can do is take some damned pictures.