Fuller Wiser

I need information. It occurs to me that I have a huge information hole in my relationship calculus, and that is the possible effect of a divorce on my son.

I have no personal point of reference on the subject, being the son of two people who, despite a truckload of domestic strife, are still married. The friends I have who are the children of divorce are also the children of alcoholics, psychotics, and the generally unwell. There must be sane people who get divorced and whose children must navigate those waters. I just don’t know any of them.

Thus, my picture of a kid whose parents have just divorced is that of a miserable wretch with no self-esteem, or else a conniver who plays both sides against each other for maximum material benefit. Is this the entire range of possibility? And it’s not the same as kids of celebrity divorce, because in our case, money is a huge issue. If my wife and I are both poorer (and more stressed as a result), my son’s life will be adversely affected.

But of course the other end of that calculus also bears examination. It would be tempting to say that the reason I have a good deal of my head together is because I had a stable home life as a child. But that would leave out the fact that I’m seeing a shrink because evidently there are fair portions of my head that are not together at all. How much of this is due to the fact that my parents were miserable throughout my childhood?

One of the things one always hears is that children of divorce think it’s their fault. If my parents had split, though, I don’t know if I would’ve come to that conclusion. They just didn’t get along. They only sort of get along now. True, my old man didn’t get along with me either, but it was always clear to me that the prime area of tension was between him and my mom.

But how much of the effects are due to the subsequent arrangements? If you have two parents who live in two separate places and you see them an equal amount of time, that situation will yield a different result than if there’s one parent who’s hardly around and another who spends most of their time with you.

Consider, however, the inherent feeling of instability that must be present when your life is split 50/50 between two homes. A sense of belonging would be hard to establish very firmly, given that even things like what room is your room change from week to week. Different neighborhood kids, different toys, different routines, it’s got to be at least a little jarring.

But maybe I only think that because I lived in the same house forever. My wife had the opposite experience, though, moving every few years, and it really threw off her sense of belonging and ability to make and keep friends. Though that’s not really what we’d be doing, it would just be a weekly rotation between two fixed points.

I still need more information. It’s all conjecture until I get firsthand sources. And I’m off…

So it would appear that I’m sick.

Not just sick, actually, but Sick, in the way that some people are Old or Blind. I have enough things wrong with me that many duties normally expected of husbands cannot be reasonably expected of me. So says our therapist.

I can’t say I’m entirely sad about it. Honestly, I’ve suspected and argued as much for quite some time, and now that the weight of a degreed professional’s opinion has brought my wife around, it’s a tremendous load off my back.

Mind you, I don’t enjoy being Sick. I have a lot of things I would like to do, and lacking the energy to do many of them is very frustrating, given that most available energies must first be put towards things I have to do. But the idea that it’s Not My Fault is incredibly relieving, and at least gives me a target for my frustrations.

Many of the things I’m Sick with are currently undergoing treatment, and will simply take time to heal. Some issues have been put on the back burner as I’ve dealt with the more pressing ones, but their continued presence affects my overall Sickness, so now I have to turn my attention to some of the more obscure ones as well. It will involve a lot of doctor visits, a lot of time off work, and some short paychecks. But if, maybe a year from now, I am no longer Sick, I will be in a much better position to work through all the non-medical problems in my life.

For now, though, those will have to wait. I can keep myself awake with the fear that medical woes are ancillary, and not causational, to our marital strife, but there is really no objective way to make that determination. In the absence of all evidence, you use what data is presently before you. It’s obvious that I’m Sick. Fix that, and at the very least we’ll know what’s not wrong.

Here I sit, awaiting my fate.

In an hour and a half, I will sit down with my wife and a doctor whom we will pay to listen to us. We will emerge from this experience with either a more or less healthy relationship. At the very least, we will know more than we did when we entered.

I’m more worked up about it today than I have been because yesterday’s session with my own private shrink seemed to point in the direction of me not being the crazy one. I don’t suppose I had fully accepted that I might not be the chief obstacle to our relationship working until I heard someone with a degree say it.

While I realize that I have indeed been a giant pain in the posterior from time to time in our 10 years of marriage, I do believe I’m correct in suggesting that our current troubles would be best assessed by examining the current situation, not the entire bloody 10-year span.

Whoever we’ve been at various times in the last decade, we are now who we are now. I have resolved to show absolutely no tolerance for rehashing old conflicts fought under old circumstances by people whose eyes had not seen all the things that ours now have. If I hear it, I’m shutting it down, and I no longer think that makes me the asshole. I want to fix our present situation, not wade torturously through layers of mud laid down by two young idiots with illusions of marital immortality.

Thus, this session will likely be different than the one we attempted last March, wherein I watched 10 years’ worth of history pass by whilst the problems of the present day went unaddressed. I realize that the therapist wasn’t there for the whole thing. I’m perfectly willing to provide a synopsis. But it should be brief, followed immediately thereafter by the current state of affairs.

I’m angry now. It’s probably not the best frame of mind to be in prior to an attempt at reconciliation, but I’m extremely concerned that we will emerge from this session none the wiser, after which two weeks of meaningful silences and sleepless nights will ensue. It’s why I have Xanax, and I really don’t want to be a lifetime customer.

My wife said it last night, and she’s right: Sometimes I’m too nice.

It may sound strange coming from a cranky misanthrope, but of course behind every cynic is a beaten optimist. The peace-love-and-understanding (which apparently is funny after all) of my upbringing has always manifested itself in ways both beneficial and destructive.

On the good side, I have very good relationships with all of my ex-girlfriends. I’ve burned very few bridges in my life, and can count my actual enemies on less than one hand. I’m very good at defusing tense situations, and prefer compromise to conflict more often than not. If there’s a way to get along, I’ll find it.

But oddly for a self-absorbed INFP, I sometimes forget to make sure I get what I need. The cat’s petting needs have sidetracked writing sessions. Nights out to assuage the wife’s melancholy have postponed many an hour of creative pursuit. The calls of “Daddy!” from behind my door send me out for playtime. These are little losses, but they build over time, and eventually thoughts of works undone begin to creep up my spine, and I just snap.

The snapping usually involves an exhaustive rant to the wife, as well as fantastical thoughts of lotto wins and other white horses galloping in from unforeseen directions to swoop me out of the mundane and into the world I still dream of inhabiting, but which seems to drift farther away each day.

In the throes of my recent illnesses, the coping mechanisms I’ve built up over the years completely broke down, and I saw the truth unvarnished: I am an unhappy man living a life I never wanted, with any real hope of a reversal growing dimmer the older I get and the more responsibility I accept. All of the stories I tell myself in times of health to keep my mind off of its misery were exposed as the lies they are. Certainly there are grains of truth in them, but the underlying despair still burns white-hot in my core, though I have taken pains to dampen it with wet rags of reason.

And that’s the real problem: Reason exists. Sitting here with pen and paper, it’s beyond obvious that the path I’m currently taking is the logical one given my circumstances. I have done the best I can. But don’t tell that to my heart, who cares not a farthing for reason, and aches to work in a space unbounded by the petty animal concerns that bog humans, especially those raised middle class, down in debt and indenture.

I write this at my desk at work, in full view of my supervisor, who is likely well-versed enough in the duties of my position to realize that this does not look like company business. But my mind is not here, and has not been for a while. This eventually happens in every job I take, and it was not as problematic when I was a childless temp. I would simply move on, docked for a few workless days between assignments, and start afresh with people who gave me the benefit of the doubt.

These practical fallback thoughts I have of getting a degree and teaching history are looking more dubious now. That, too, requires this elusive free time which flies from my weak grasp, a grip that falters as I consider the happiness of others alongside my own. There are times when I have to choose, and in most cases, damn me, I defer. Were I more selfish, I would probably get more done, but I might also have run my wife off many years ago.

With adult relationships, though, these things are negotiable. But to a child, all he sees is a father he wants to spend time with, and that father choosing something else for his attentions. I know it happens all the time, and it is a necessary lesson for children that they are not the center of the universe, but I’m haunted by a spectre. A ghost who hid behind newspapers, and in his workshop, emerging only to dispense criticism and provide an example of what not to become.

My wife tells me that I’m not my father, and that’s true. But one reason is that I default to compromise rather than selfishness. And it makes me miserable. So is it better to be selfish and miserable, getting things done but sacrificing time with loved ones that you will never get back? Or does the compromise bring the late-ripening fruit borne from the strong bond between father and child?

There is a third option, of course, and it’s the one I fear. That is the attempted merging of these approaches that is threatening to tear my brain apart, and may one day result in a mental collapse that will do my son no favors, and may in fact finish me off.

I’ve addressed prospective splits with my wife in this space before, and each time we seem to come to the conclusion that it’s better to work around our problems than to use them as a springboard into divorce. Some of the factors we use, though, are more practical than emotional. Living separate lives would raise costs for each of us, and create logistical difficulties. Plus it introduces a variable that terrifies me in particular, which is the possibility that my son will carry the divorce-child’s burden in his heart. I have no personal experience with that brand of emotional turmoil, but I know far too many people who are its victims, and I have no wish to put my son through that.

I don’t have any answers today. All I see is the path before me, and in its dimness could lie anything. My brain wants to play fortune-teller, and it profits me less to imagine orcs ahead than unicorns. We tell ourselves stories all the time, and the only way to find out if they’re true is walking forward, one step at a time.

Surgery and recovery were hard, but largely uncomplicated. I predict a return to regular posting soon. Turns out it takes more than sinus clearance and tonsil removal to kill me. Hydrocodone and Darvocet tried, though. Note to self: Narcotics and misanthropy do not mix.

My health worsens, and it appears that surgery is now the only remedy. I’ll be away from the interwebs for a while, do keep the lights on for me.

And in the event that I wind up on the bad side of surgical statistics, it’s been good knowing you.

Here’s to modern science. Don’t fuck it up.

Days are when the sun shines and the mind travels easily to new places, taking life in as it comes. Some days are even better, ripe with hope and anticipation of every coming moment.

Today is darkness. Whatever force that keeps me afloat on the waves mysteriously deflates, and for a time I sink down into the deep. None can reach me there, I hear them but cannot grasp their hand.  Sometimes I try to swim up to the surface, but give up as the air grows no nearer.

Thus far, the deep has not drowned me. In time, I will return to the light. I fail to understand this cycle, but I no longer flail wildly against it as I once did. I know its way now. I close my eyes, acknowledge its arrival, and wait for its passing.

I regret that I cannot withdraw from the mundane tasks of life during these times. Even to speak to others is a struggle, pulling against the weight of sadness upon me. But perhaps participation in humanity helps move it along, convinces the darkness that I cannot remain here indefinitely. Yet I want only to sit down somewhere, away from people, life, duties, and just be. My life will not allow such repose, and so I dread the coming days. But they will pass.

I saw a world once. It filled me with anticipation and hope. I am now unsure if it ever existed, or if my furtive grasping drove it away. It is beyond me now, as one day the distant stars will be to earth. I feel its absence in these days, though in others its shadow goes unnoticed.

Perhaps I am more honest now than on the good days when the hole in my life blends into the background. But one cannot live like this, and so it must be temporary sanity. Soon, I will remember to fool myself back into functioning in the world as it stands, and I will make the best of the days remaining to me. There are things to live for, that is enough. Craving more only brings me here, into the deep. It was not to be. God damn my senses, it was not to be.

It would appear that the grubby hand of winter has at last released the Dallas area from its wanton grip. Very indecisive is our winter, but once it gets in its last grope, you don’t see hide nor hair of it until November at the earliest.

The warmer weather means the return of many things, from lawnmowing to mosquitoes to nightly showers to wash off the day’s sticky film before bedtime. For my son, it means that the inside of our house is the last place he wants to be after school. Since he’s only 2 and a half years old, his outdoor explorations require an escort, usually me.

This spring is very different from our last. Back then, we had a 1 and a half year old who could barely walk unsupported, and seldom made it halfway down the block without upsies. This year, the second we open the car door in the driveway, out barrels a fully mobile chatterbox twice the size of other kids his age, who’ll be halfway across the yard before you can catch him.

Our neighborhood has a lot of kids. They’re generally in elementary-to-junior-high range, at least the ones out playing. My son watches them with rapt attention. Taking notes.

It was yesterday that it finally dawned on me: I am no longer the father of a baby. What I’ve got here is a boy.

It’s a pity that the teenage years follow boyhood. They can blur some of the good memories of youth, which lay in front of my boy as yet unexplored, ready to be cracked open with sticks and rocks and plastic bazookas and what have you.

Prior to teendom, I had a pretty good youth. Lots of exploring forgotten corners of our rural subdivision, imaginary space travel, role playing, and bad jokes. While I’ve never gone much for strict gender roles, when it came to boyhood games I fit the XY stereotype fairly closely. Everything was a potential weapon, battle strategies occupied inordinate amounts of my time, and I did indeed watch professional wrestling and got pretty worked up about it.

Though I was one of those weird creative kids who also staged plays and made radio shows on cassette, at that age such activities didn’t make one uncool. I had friends, and enemies were fairly benign. There were occasional fights among boys stemming from ridiculous disputes that were forgotten quickly, and grudges generally never lasted long.

Now, after two years of feeling submerged completely over my head in the murky waters of infant care, my baby’s transformation into a little boy brings a rush of relief, like a lead mattress lifted off of my back. Here, at last, is something I know how to do.

True, we’re a bit early for a lot of boyhood activities. One of the neighbor kids saw my son coveting his skateboard, and let him play with it. Though he tried a few times to stand up on it (anchored steadily by me), he mostly pushed it around on the sidewalk. He seems to know he can’t ride a bike, but he watches the bicycling kids with an unmistakable air of ambition.

Somewhat unexpectedly, my realization yesterday that he had in fact stepped over the baby/boy line sent me into a bit of a giddy frenzy. I ran out and bought him his own skateboard, so he didn’t have to borrow one to play with it. I eyed the bicycles greedily, wanting to give him that measure of independence I’d felt when I could hop on my red-and-white Huffy and ride anywhere I wanted. Shifting back to the reality of my very dependent 2-year-old, I bought a red-and-blue tricycle instead.

Having a giant child is difficult in many ways. Older kids think he’s their age and are confused when his speech is garbled. Diaper manufacturers thin their selections in the 4-year-old range, which is the size he wears despite his age. And I’m a little afraid that he’s already too big for a tricycle. We’ll see soon. I hid it in the garage because I belatedly remembered that I was supposed to be frugal until my check came in this Friday. We’ll try the three-wheeler out on Saturday and see what the little bugger makes of it.

He wants so much to be a part of the play-mob on our street. And at his age, that desire doesn’t give me the stomach aches that I get when imagining his future efforts to belong in teen crowds. Right now he’s a boy, and boys just play. Sure, some of them do the mind games, but in my memory at least, that sort of thing is easily ignored if someone else has a ball or Frisbee around.

I realize there will be downsides to this era. Toy commercials, now incomprehensible to him, will suddenly become potent siren songs. The minutiae of cartoon character personalities and attributes will take up inordinate amounts of mental space. Friends will be chosen by his discretion, not mine, and there are bound to be some troublemakers brought into my house. And greater independence means greater possibility for injury, mischief, and potentially deadly blunders.

But for all of that, I suppose I feel better because we’re now in territory I recognize. I remember nothing of infancy, and as mentioned earlier in this space, spent my adult life avoiding contact with babies. It’s hardly surprising that I completely freaked out when that became my 24/7 reality for a couple of years. Boyhood, though, is familiar ground. Now I can be useful. It’s a wonderful feeling.

The best horror and science fiction writers capitalize on a feeling we all have from time to time, that of the unknown reality bubbling just below the surface of what we perceive. Often it’s only visible via some key, some secret hiding in plain sight.

I often get that feeling while scanning the headlines about the current financial crisis in the United States. All these words and analyses directed at specific issues, all interconnected but linked in such a way that it is impossible to see the whole. It is very much like the proverbial room full of blind men trying to describe an elephant based on the part they’re examining. It seems that there is something huge standing in the middle of this room, our culture, and we cannot see it for the same reason that we cannot feel our cells dividing moment by moment, or divine the history of the organized stardust through which we compose our thoughts. To paraphrase a certain presidential candidate, we are the thing we seek, and for that reason we cannot see it.

Humanity is not a monolith, obviously. But the intelligence gap between us and our nearest intellectual neighbor here on earth is remarkably large, and we have no other intelligent species with which to compare and contrast ourselves. We are more like each other than we are like members of other species, whether we like it or not. And we are alone in our intelligence, unsure whether that which we advance towards as a society is a natural progression or a colossal mistake. We have only the actions of our ancestors to measure, and of course we are their creations, physically and sociologically. We are where they left off, and they were making it up as they went along.

A while ago I saw a shrink. It’s something that I think every single human being ought to do, particularly if you honestly don’t think you’re crazy. My shrink had a relatively easy job with me, because apparently I was acutely aware of all the things wrong with me. I addressed all of these things as they came into my head, and upon saying them out loud in a linear fashion, they made perfect sense, and were not actually that crazy.

Towards the end of our first session, she made an observation that should be obvious to anyone who’s ever owned even a mildly intelligent dog. The more cognitive ability you have, the more your brain requires challenge and purpose. In the absence of that challenge and purpose, your brain begins to talk to itself. And something that talks primarily to itself for an extended period of time is bound to start chasing its own tail, barking loudly, and going a bit crazy.

Humankind has been talking to itself for many years now. Each of us possesses more cognitive ability than any other non-human being on the planet, and yet the majority of us find ourselves required to spend that mental power on basic issues of survival. We know that there is more to life than existence, and we seek our own ways to uncover it. Thus we have developed religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, art, music, language, things that on the surface do not appear to be biological requirements for survival. And yet these things persist even in the harshest environments, under the gravest of threats to life and limb.

We seek more than that which stands plain before us. Where there is simplicity, we look deeper, finding the complexity hidden within. Sometimes this impulse is driven by personal gain, and sometimes it has no attributable origin. We are a curious species.

As we have developed over centuries, over millennia, we have created a vast catalog of internal references, spanning languages and cultures. We speak to each other about love, courage, fear, intelligence, stupidity, hate, insanity, assuming the other person knows what we mean by these terms. They address only the human experience, for it is all that we can reasonably be aware of. What does courage mean to an elephant? Or love? We have no real data, only guesses.

And in truth, most of what we know about humanity is guesswork. Individual experiences vary widely, and each piece of information will of course be examined by a human being, with a unique perception and cultural references of their own. The human condition is a quantum state, its true nature altered by the act of measuring. As I am studied by a therapist, so do I change my perception of myself, and thus does my behavior shift in response.

What does any of this have to do with the financial markets? Absolutely everything.

Economics is one of the world’s oldest sciences. Cost/benefit analyses began in the earliest human tribes, whose members measured the value of one thing against another, with an eye toward receiving maximum benefit for minimum inconvenience. Tools, hunting methods, agriculture, metalworking, architecture, all of these things result from centuries of the human drive to streamline, to maximize the chances of survival against the forces of nature.

All along this road, there have been those who have pulled off to one side, to try and gauge just what it is that we are building here. They, too, were driven by this inner scrutinizing eye, seeking the working parts behind the machine. While their neighbors leveled their gaze at bettering the mechanisms of human survival, these lonely few sought to get at the root of the longing, to understand why mastering the devices of mortal prosperity was somehow not enough, why we still wanted more.

Tribalism enters into the equation, certainly. To have enough is good, but if your neighbor has more, the mind almost involuntarily seeks to know why. And when they who have more seek to take the little that you have, then survival against the dumb elements of nature is not enough. Survival against the human elements–greed, domination, envy–becomes paramount.

To that end, humans invented money.

Money is a variety of things. As a weapon, it works very much like artillery. The more you have and the better you can aim it, the more formidable you become against your foes. As a tool, it is the ultimate Swiss army knife. It can become anything: A house, a car, a meal, a sexual favor, even another human being to do your bidding. As an invention, money makes fire and the wheel look like tinkertoys. An old man in a wheelchair may seem to be a pitiable thing, but with enough money in his pocket, he is as deadly as the fittest assassin.

But like other tools, money does not operate independently of humanity. And its strength grows in direct proportion to the sharpness of the mind that wields it.

Humanity has long moved past the stage where brute strength alone confers status. This may seem counterintuitive as we witness the imposition of imperial will by force, but a closer look reveals that the strength held by the world’s most powerful armies is one borne of technological and scientific innovation, not muscle mass. The deadliest weapon yet conceived by man came not from the mind of a warrior, but from the introspection of mild-mannered scientists, killing millions with pencil and paper.

In the years since the advent of mutually assured destruction, human minds bent on conquest have had to turn their focus away from military pursuits. Money is the 21st century’s weapon of choice, and the best and brightest of the postwar generations have clustered to high finance like moths to flame. Wall Street firms employ physicists, statisticians, probability theorists, each group a financial Manhattan Project, in search of a secret key to ensure domination for their tribe, those who put their money towards a chance to create more.

But as discussed earlier, money is not a single thing. Money is what we say it is. A person can say that a house has money in it, which we call equity. An individual can hold a share of stock, a noncorporeal concept that nonetheless has a monetary measure. People can invest in an idea, a “future,” representing a certain amount of money.

And to a degree, these values are objectively provable. If someone will buy a house for a set amount, that house is obviously “worth” that sum. If a share of stock can be sold for an agreed price, that is the “value” of the share. Orthodox capitalists may mock Burning Man types for currencies based on found objects in the desert, but using their own logic of “value,” it is a functional system.

In this state of affairs, with money being a purely psychological entity, it was only a matter of time before people started playing games with it. In the past fifty years, it is as if financial institutions have been playing an increasingly gigantic game of psychological chicken with each other and the public at large. Complex instrument begets complex instrument, which entwine to create yet more complexity. And once these are set in motion, new complexities arise to capitalize on the complexity of the ever-expanding definition of the “market.” The wider the net, the more numerous the loopholes, and the more threads woven through to create ever larger nets. Understanding the structure is now even beyond those who helped create it.

It is madness.

There is no other explanation. We have created a world of shadows, of self-fulfilling prophecies and circular logic, where every assertion is balanced upon another, bills of sale carbon copied a hundredfold, pies cut into mathematically impossible proportions, lies which cannot stand but for the lies which came before. We have created the ultimate self-referential universe, and it bears no resemblance to the world which it inhabits. We know only that we are here, and that it was well under construction when we arrived, giving us the choice either to get on or be trampled under its gears.

The economic society in which we live is both of us and beyond us. There may be no conceivable way to stop its momentum, to truly stop and take an accurate gauge of what constitutes value. And like our atomic demon children, mishandling it may unleash our doom.

Humanity is prone to mass hallucination. A man claimed godhood for himself, and it was so. Priests said the sun was Apollo in his chariot, and it was so. Clergymen spoke of demons inhabiting parishioners, and it was so. The color of a man’s skin was said to remove his rights as an independent human being, and it was so.

And yet, outlasting all of this, there was money. And in an age when humans turn themselves further inward, daunted by the swarming mass of humanity, when our fates are cast by faceless organizations, when what we consume is increasingly beyond our ability to manufacture ourselves, money becomes the very air we breathe.

But what is money? We are money. It is a creation of our collective intelligence. Without us, it does not exist, and it controls our behavior as surely as our brain pumps our heart. We cannot escape it because it is us. It is what a species that has talked to itself for millennia has created.

To unplug, to seek a life free of the collective, certainly it is feasible to try. But there is nothing not monetized. Land, from which comes food, and on which goes shelter, is also money. Taxes are levied on its owner, a fee for the privilege of residency on a monetary asset. A life free of land promises no better. Food, water, shelter, all are money.

I am not an anarchist, nor am I particularly libertarian. I am as much a creature of this society as anyone else. I desire more than my body requires, I envy those whose lives I deem more prosperous. I dream of living lives that exist nowhere beyond a film screen or printed page.

But I am under no illusions. The life we lead in this society resembles madness for the simple reason that it is madness. There is no difference between the two. Enough people speaking a thing and making it so, there can be no other description than mass delusion. My life, my livelihood, my future and that of my child, are built on the solidity of that illusion. If it cracks, we will simply patch it, put on a fresh coat of paint, and build a bridge to an adjacent structure, newly invented to confuse ourselves into prosperity. We cannot for a second admit, all of us at once, that it is a lie. To do so is ruin. And therein lies the greatest madness of all.

There is a welcome calm in my household at the moment, a peace I cannot altogether account for. No significant looks of sadness, no visibly swallowed words, no silent force-field between my wife and I as we lie together in bed. We’ve even had sex, something that’s been missing since the second-child debate cranked into high gear earlier this year.

The Pax Wiser is a great relief, so long as I don’t think about it too hard. We couldn’t even speak to each other a few weeks ago without barbs on the ends of words, all open sores and no healing. Where did it all go?

I’m not certain, but I’m not going to set out looking for it. Right now, I’m enjoying evenings playing with my son and loving my wife. And given the year I’ve had so far, I’m content to let the mystery be.