Perplexity; am I screwed up, or is he?
1/23/05
A message I wrote to Gary on the 16th.
I was thinking about the weekend and something that happened that I would like to have your perspective on. I’m really curious about that thing with the door, you leaving it standing open despite people’s requests that you close it.
When someone asked you again to close it you said, with scorn in your voice: “It isn’t cold!” Can you see that you basically decided for everyone in the room that they weren’t feeling uncomfortable when the outside breeze blew in to the warm cabin? Or, you were saying that they SHOULDN’T feel that way–that there was something wrong with them for feeling cold. You weren’t respecting what people were feeling.
To me this seems as obvious an error as telling someone to shut-up to their face–we just know that that isn’t done. Yet you don’t seem to know it. And it really perplexes me. Aren’t you aware that your circumstances are different from other people’s–you’d just walked up the hill with a coat on and were hot, while we were all dressed lightly, for a warm cabin. And that because YOU’RE not cold doesn’t mean that other people aren’t.
I think most of our friends probably think of this as an eccentricity of yours and don’t let it bother them. It does bother me, I think, because since I live with you I encounter it more often. I find it one of the things that makes it difficult for me to re-marry you (someone once described a marriage as a series of re-marriages…renewed commitments to the relationship.). And I think what bothers me the most about that is that you don’t seem to realize that you’re crossing a boundary when you do it–so you have no control over it. That makes me feel that this will never change about you and I’m not sure how to live with that. I’m not sure how to live in a situation where you cross over the line, yet resent ME or dismiss me when I call it to your attention.
Do you really think that that was normal, inoffensive behavior?
And here’s a message I wrote to him Friday:
I know I was mean to you last night.
Please consider this:
By the time I was speaking to you that way, I’d been up since 1:30 a.m., had already cleaned up in the bedroom, given Scott a bath, and made a fix on the vomit in the bed, which until that point hadn’t been much. Scott was very difficult to deal with, partly because he was sleepy and disoriented, partly because he kept gravitating toward getting back into the mess and spreading it. Then we’d just gotten back to bed when he started vomiting all over again, lots this time, on the pillows, too.
So I was now on hour 2 of dealing with it. He was in the tub for the second time. I had to wash his hair, too, because he had vomit in it. It was appreciated when you came in and got the towels I’d gathered up and put them in the wash. You’ve got to admit though that that was a small part of the overall effort, which went on for another hour. And I was spread pretty thin, and when I DID ask you to do one thing you weren’t even willing to do that (email Skip). So in addition to everything else I was doing I had to do that too because you wouldn’t.
The thing with Skip and Shay: I agreed that Shay could come over on basketball nights after practice. Since you did that last week too, it’s not like you’re completely out of the radar either on that. How can you expect that Skip “take responsibility for his own kids” when he doesn’t know that there’s been this change?
So then I’m finally down to the last of the things I needed to do so Scott and I could get back in bed; I’ve cleaned up the new, bigger mess on the bed, stripped pillowcases, including the barley hull pillow which spilled barley hulls all over so I had to clean those up too, not only in the kitchen where they spilled where I was trying to get them into the trash, but on the mattress, too. I’d had to make a number of extra trips downstairs to add newly soiled towels to the wash. I stripped the bed of the soiled sheets, and put new ones on, all while Connor slept in the bed. I’d just put the big sheet on Connor, spreading it over the bed, BY MYSELF, when you come in sliding your feet on the floor like the whole thing is funny or some sort of joke. You grab the big blanket from me that I’d pulled out of the basket, acting like you were taking ownership of getting it spread. Then you acted like I *should have known* that you needed help for me to spread it, because you couldn’t do it yourself, despite the fact that I’d just spread the sheet myself. Then you are critical that the blanket isn’t “big enough”, and you dump that on me to solve that problem. You don’t say, “Where are there some more blankets, and I’ll get one”. You just demand that I figure it out right then and there. So I ask you to go get the comforter off the bed downstairs and you demand to know where you’re going to sleep.
You’ve got to take some ownership in this house, Gary, and some responsibility for either knowing where things are, or having a plan for figuring it out if you don’t know. You know that there are closets that have blankets, one right there in the hallway, there’s a big basket in our room that has blankets, and there is a blanket on the bed downstairs. All you have to do is check a few places out. Why didn’t you just go get the blanket I asked for, and if you didn’t know where any others were, just ask where there were some others? Solve the problem for yourself about “where you’re going to sleep”? Instead, you dump this whole problem of where you’re “going to sleep” on me to solve, when I’ve already been up for more than 2 hours cleaning up vomit. And, you’re acting like you’re some kind of hero just because you came in and had me help you spread a blanket over Connor.
Basically you were asking me to do you a favor of acting like you were being a really big help when the couple of things I’d asked you to do you wouldn’t do, and you were giving mixed messages about the small amount of help you offered to provide. More than anything, you seemed to be presenting problems, not helping me solve them, and I was tired after 2 hours in the wee hours of cleaning vomit and so didn’t have the energy left over to protect your feelings by pretending that you were being a really big help.
I KNOW when I’m having the experience of being helped instead of being harassed.
I shouldn’t have talked to you that way last night. I was tired, and human and operating in a very difficult situation.
And now, I have Scott all day today. He does seem to be feeling better; I probably COULD have sent him to school.
I just spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to decrease the indent from pasting that above in. Right off the bat I see a certain irony in the fact that after I write my big insight on the 19th, it was nowhere in a functional sense that night when Scott was vomiting.
So what WAS called for in that situation? Just brainstorming here, and I’ll say the obvious, that Gary either be helpful or get out of the way. I mean “obvious” in the sense that it ALWAYS seems obvious, in the human nature sort of way, to assume that it’s the OTHER person’s behavior that needed to change.
Gary takes on a manner sometimes that’s sort of like a big, untrained, dog. Where his presence adds a degree of agitation and confusion in a moment. Part of it is a persona he’s chosen, at some level, and it’s often quite funny and lighthearted. But there are times when it’s not helpful, and just adds something else to cope with: like his scooting his feet as he came that even sounds like a big excited dog running toward some stimulus. Or pulling something out of my hands, in a parody of taking charge. And then sending mixed messages, like “I’m taking charge to help you with something that’s too much for you”, to “Why can’t you see that I need help spreading out the blanket?!”
Gary seems to be completely unaware of the effect he has in a situation. How to me it makes him appear useless at best, and at worst counter-productive.
To digress a bit, basically, I’m going to dare to say it: I think he’s really screwed up. I think he has habitual and unconscious behaviors that are detrimental to having any sort of intimate relationship. He lacks a basic sense of personal boundaries so he intrudes without realizing it (and this also causes him to expect things from people that aren’t realistic for him to expect), he behaves in ways that tell people (and the kids) to not take him seriously. He is disengaged—he uses disengagement as an escape from unpleasant realities, and is resentful when something unpleasant is brought to his attention. And he really seems unable to get that OTHER people have different experiences in their bodies than he has in his. He doesn’t seem to be able to step outside of himself and see the world through someone else’s eyes and experience on a basic and functional level. He is quite self-centered.
All of the conflicts that have been a result of the dynamics between us that result from the way he is in the world, he harbors resentment against me. His default is to treat me with unpleasantness—to add a sting to a comment when just a simple answer would do; or to be annoyed and show it when I ask him for some information about something. There was something just this morning…his cell phone beeped in the office. I was in the living room. He asked me if I had his phone. I said no. He said, “Well it just beeped!” as if somehow that would mean I must have it.
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