You Win, We Lose
10/9/05
I sent him back an e-mail on Thurs or Fri I think. Then live with feeling disappointed every time I check messages and find there isn’t one back. We were in the neighborhood yesterday to invite our neighbors to a party up here at our place to show it. I don’t know how to read anything any more; on one hand partly reassured because it did seem like a nice smile he gave me…on the other that could be a total projection. I’m considering the possibility that he’s picked up on a vibe from me that’s not really “proper” and that he’s just plain embarrassed by it. I’ll never know, either, since discussion about the whole thing is precluded by its very nature. I see the nature of how the possibilities of the situation have largely served to bolster my feelings in the less-than-positive atmosphere with Gary. And the possibility its all a one-sided illusion sort of deflates that and leaves me with the reality of a marriage where we don’t like each other and most of our moments together are a chronic irritation.
The way that I explain Gary’s behavior is that for some reason he learned that it makes less sense to discuss things openly than it does to parlay his feelings of resentment into passive aggressive behaviors such as subtle put-downs, obstructionism…little things in a moment that feel bad, but are subtle and quick and seem ridiculous to point to each and of itself, but add up and up and up. I think he feels like he wins when he can score points with these behaviors, or in the case of agreements, non-behaviors. (It made no sense to me yesterday to spend hours with him at the table reading the paper and the boys watching TV, occupied and me spinning my wheels, ready to work and start moving but unable to start because the stuff that needed to be done required 2 bodies. So we lost a window where the boys were occupied and happy and not fighting each other or being in the way. He doesn’t seem to see that. We could rest and read the paper after that.) He’s only interested in winning, which he feels he does when he’s angered, or disappointed me.
I don’t know…I suppose this could just be a very prolonged “bad patch” that intensified (not “began”, because it may have “begun” back when he started working those terribly long hours) about the time that he was interviewing for Nike and it was a unilateral decision on his part. We’ve been in transition ever since and it hasn’t finished yet and the remodeling and waiting for workers is only an extension of it. For example, Rick, our builder, was going to come over yesterday to set the trim in the family room we made out of unfinished basement (he’d been going to do it before the carpet went in Friday, as well as cart of his tools that were on the floor and needed to be moved to make way for the carpet). I’d already started moving boxes down and had piled them in the center of the rooms down there so he’d have room to work. Well, he called to say that he has trouble with his truck and so can’t come til Monday. So that means a few more days of stuff just piled in rooms. And I’m uncertain about his schedule, since it’s a constant work in progress as he seeks to find jobs. We proceed in fits and starts. And we’re in an uncomfortable situation of having to choose, within the work schedule he has with us which may or may not be the same on Monday, with having the shed built, so we can stick our garage-n-shed stuff from Willamette into it and free up some room in the house, with completing the skylight which right now is a big hole in the kitchen ceiling, trimming the downstairs so we can arrange our furniture and get unpacked, or getting serious about figuring out the extent of the dry rot he discovered and getting it fixed. While we’re waiting there’s a hole in the window beam that’s letting cold air into that room. And with natural gas prices expected to blossom, it’s expensive to heat that way.
So, I guess it’s a possibility that when the heat from all this extra burden on our lives is past that things may improve between Gary and me, that is, if they aren’t too damaged already by what we’ve gone through in the past few years.
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