12/20/05
Here is an e-mail I sent to Gary in the wee hours this morning:
I want to try to explain to you something about caring full time for children. This is something you may think you understand, but there really is no way to convey it to anyone who hasn’t done it. A weekend alone with them does not give you an accurate experience. Two weeks alone with them doesn’t either. To really get it you have to have been doing it for years.
Their needs and wants are bottomless and endless. It’s like the descriptions of war: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of excruciating intensity. The crux of it is their expectation that I am a bottomless pit of supply for their needs: “Look at me” “do this for me” interrupt, interrupt, “get this for me” “I’m hungry” “I’m thirsty” “uh oh (a spill)”. There are no boundaries for them—they have a need and their immediate expectation is that I will fill it. Immediately. No matter where they are in the house, or what I’m doing. They don’t see that maybe I’m trying to listen to and understand a complicated issue on the news, or that I’m already in the middle of doing several things at once.
Any one of these things by itself seems inconsequential, and I think that’s why you seem perplexed that it bothers me so much. It isn’t just the any one thing. It’s the cumulative effect. There is a cumulative effect of this sort of global 24/7 demand. I sometimes feel like little pieces of me are being pecked away bit by bit. Kind of a “death by a thousand paper cuts” sort of scenario. (Now I know that even though you think this wouldn’t bother you at all and that it shouldn’t bother me either—that 24/7 of this would indeed bother you. I know this because you frequently can’t be with the boys more than a few minutes without their behavior deteriorating and you ineffective in managing it. They behave far better with me than with you: far more respect for me as a parent. It often doesn’t take long for you to totally lose patience with them as well as lose control over a situation.)
They are children, and so I don’t expect them to understand that it costs me to be this endless supply for them, or that their demands drain me. It is appropriate to their age and level of development to assume that I exist for them and to gratify them.
This is the part that’s hard to explain. When I’m giving at this level to children all day every day it depletes me. And then when an adult wants something done for themselves, and expect it of me with no thought that it might be an additional burden and cost for me—it really upsets me. That’s why I get angry with you when you don’t keep your agreements—even with minor stuff (to you) like not taking out all of the recycling, or not noticing the trash is full in the kitchen, or leaving your clothes or coat lying around in the living part of the house. Because every time you choose to leave something in order to make things easier for you you are tacitly choosing to leave it for me to do. And it is a sort of straw-breaking-the-camel’s-back scenario.
There is something of this sort of childish expectation of being given to in this note from Nancy:
“Gary:
I hope this isn’t too much of an inconvenience to ask, but may I bring
my boyfriend Jim with me tomorrow night?”
There is nothing here that says that to her this is any different than bringing him along to a restaurant that we were going to meet at—where someone else is doing the cooking and clean-up. I’d feel differently if she made some sort of apology about the last-minute nature of this and the acknowledgment that this isn’t really courteous behavior.
“I’d really like you to meet him.”
This has nothing to do with me. This is about her introducing her boyfriend to you, and me providing the setting and ambiance, as if it were a restaurant, and I were a service person. And she really expects that this is ok—to ask something else of someone at the last minute and expect it will just be granted.
Like I said, in and of itself the request may not seem like much. And if she’d made some acknowledgment that it was a bit of an imposition it would have mitigated it somewhat. Or, failing that, if YOU had made some acknowledgment that this was a little out of line—that would have shown me that you care about my feelings and that you appreciate that I do so much already, and that it really isn’t inconsequential to ask me to give more. It’s when you dismiss my objections, or imply that there’s something wrong with me for feeling that way that those feelings get REALLY big and I “beat a dead horse”. I “beat a dead horse” because I don’t feel heard in the first place—if I’d felt heard by you right at the beginning I wouldn’t have needed to keep talking about it.
I expect the kids to expect me to give endlessly. But it’s bitter when adults do, too. And just because it “wouldn’t bother you” (and I’m not convinced it wouldn’t if you weren’t just in the same situation, but the same context —of endlessly meeting the thoughtless demands of children) you don’t seem to have any understanding why it may bother me. (Even as I’m writing this I’ve been interrupted 5 times by Scott—and I really need to talk about this with you.)
I so need you to understand. But it doesn’t seem that there is understanding or support in this relationship. It’s just more expecting that I just give more, and do it without complaint.
That, of course, was another fight. It’s sort of like political wrong-doing—it’s not so much the wrong-doing that’s at issue, but what was done to try to cover it up. The fact that when I express objection to something he attempts to ward it off and implies that I shouldn’t have an objection. And he is so sure that because something wouldn’t bother HIM that it shouldn’t bother me either.
I want to think a little more about the issue of context, and about my efforts being invisible and taken for granted. This is something that has upset me exquisitely since around the time Scott was born and Gary began working such long hours. When I realized that what was making it possible for him to be contributing to the business’s bottom line was the nightly hell I was going through in trying to prepare a dinner and he was absent. And that it was completely invisible—to the people running the business who only cared that Gary produce, and to Gary too. This is actually the worst of it, was that it became very clear that Gary didn’t want to know about it either—how agonizing it is to be constantly balancing the needs of the household as far as dinner and cleaning up in a very small kitchen with the needs of my children. And then like as not Gary wouldn’t be home in time for dinner and wouldn’t call either. And he just didn’t get how awful this felt inside to me. Again, he thought I shouldn’t be feeling the way I was feeling. And he dismissed it, or minimized it. There were no visible wounds (but he had no idea what it had taken to get things at the placid level things were often at when he’d walk through the door), so he didn’t take me seriously.
This has been going on a long time. And I haven’t penetrated Gary’s belief that my life is easy compared to his and that I’m just a complaining nag. I can see it in his eyes and face. And the things that I say in current time are only pressed into the mold of me being ungrateful and complaining about something that other women do with ease.
So I have had little of the ongoing kind of support and comfort from our relationship that would sustain me through these times when the demands are so intense, when the kids are small. It is a little better now, in terms of the physical demands being less. For example, I’m no longer diapering Scott (bending and straightening, getting supplies). But the emotional demands continue to be intense, be it the availability I described in my e-mail to Gary, or needing to mediate their disputes and try to balance between their conflicting needs, as well as cleaning up after them and being interrupted over and over and over. It’s living with the continuing expectation that I set aside my own needs and wants in order to meet somebody else’s. It’s very difficult when that somebody else is an adult, and that somebody else doesn’t see that it’s at cost to me.
Sigh. Phone call from Darlene today. She wants to drop by tomorrow after 1:30: “To drop off a gift”. So there’s a bit of a cloud knowing she’s coming over. But at least we’re not having to go to a performance with her, or having to do something Christmas-y, like a happy family, like go look at lights or something. It is too bad that the underlying feeling isn’t there, to make it a genuine pleasure to do something like that with her—or with Gary and the kids for that matter. The underlying feelings of warmth and good will that should be present in a family, and need to be to be a happy family are not present in ours. In that sense, I wonder if we do the boys a disservice in staying together, since our very contact with each other breeds conflict and it’s difficult to even be courteous to him. But at least they have me at home this way, whereas I’d have to work full time if we divorced.
I wish I had a prospect for an affair, right now. I think having that pleasure in my life might make this one more bearable, and I might be able to let more stuff from Gary pass. Maybe that’s a fairy tale.
I got a call from Gary a while ago. Said he’d read my message. Said “It makes sense. I liked how you put it.”
I don’t have a whole lot of hope about anything positive coming from that, as he has softened before when he reads my messages describing what I think is happening; but nothing changes. I wrote it though to be fair.
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