As long as he needs me

My wife has been doing a lot of traveling lately, getting the word out about the new nursing school she's helping to found at the University of California at Davis. This leaves me to my own devices, which seem to deteriorate as the days go by. 
     At first I am the model single male: rising early; cooking myself a wholesome, well balanced meal; cleaning up as I go along (because isn't that half the fun?); buckling down to write. But then I forget lunch, unless the hunger pangs get too pronounced, in which case I pull out a bag of chips, a soda, and some dip, if I can find any. Suppertime passes into night, and around ten I may microwave a hot dog or call out for a pizza, then it's over to the television for some late night viewing, after which I resume writing, snack some more, leave a couple of lights on, turn in, read for an hour or two, and finally drop off around three in the morning. 
     I don't think I'm particularly sleep-averse, and Debbie's regime is not so oppressive that it's as though I must go romping around the schoolyard when she's away. But something truly giddy and juvenile comes over me during her more prolonged absences. 
     I am not entirely helpless. In fact I am handy, can cook my meals, keep my environs relatively tidy, and by the time she gets back I've usually managed to clear away all evidence of my delinquency. The dishes are done, the kitchen sink is spotless, the laundry is washed and dried and sorted, the garbage has been dumped; the recyclables have been, well, recycled; and if I took the opportunity that her absence afforded of taking on some handyman project I have usually completed it, put away the tools, swept up the sawdust. 
     In other words, I usually present a home that's in better shape than when she left it. But I myself am a mess -- malnourished, sugar-high, sleep-deprived -- and may well greet her with my fly open. 


Her homecomings are always marked by a close and bustling inspection of the premises. I call these her fault-finding missions. The more immaculate the home when she gets back, the more intense her scrutiny, as though by getting everything ship-shape I were merely trying to put one over on her. 
     When, inevitably, she does find something amiss -- a paint drop on the laundry room floor, an errant screwdriver, a bottle left uncapped in the refrigerator, a letter unmailed, a call to the furnace repairman unmade  -- it seems to be almost a comfort to her, a confirmation of her core belief that I am a nitwit. 
     I am in no position to argue with that. Nevertheless, these inspections of hers do tend to diminish some of the pleasure I take in her homecomings. 
     But there's nothing like a little belated insight to soothe my wounded feelings, so I have decided that I know what really lies behind these inspections. It is a need to believe that I cannot live without her: that she is necessary to me, so central to my life that without her I would spin off into the void. 

But I did it for you

I have been married now, and to the same woman, for two thirds of my life. But then "the same woman" is a phrase that rebounds somewhat, for the woman I married is not by any means the same woman I am currently married to, nor am I the same man she married, and therein hangs a tale, perhaps for another time. 
     They may call it wedlock, but it's not gridlock. Stasis is not something you can expect from marriage any more than you can expect it from life, which is why we call it married life, I suppose. No matter how much we might want to sustain a particularly happy moment in our marriage -- "Oh, Darling, why can't it be like this forever?" -- it can't be like this forever, and that's just the way things are. 
     Now that may sound grim, but it isn't meant to. Because I am a better man than I used to be: grayer, shakier, deafer, more forgetful and more disabused, certainly; nevertheless I do occasionally have a game changing insight that keeps the ball moving down the field. 


My latest involves a longstanding pattern of our marriage that has occasionally sent us to our respective corners, bloodied, bruised and breathless after a verbal round of recriminations. 
     Here's what rings the bell. Debbie goes off somewhere on business, and I take the opportunity her absence presents of taking on some grandiose household project: tearing down a wall, building shelves, replacing the porch posts with columns, installing a hammock, clearing out a dying hedge -- you name it; I'm handy. 
     Now, I love to do this stuff. Nothing cheers me like slapping something together to delight Debbie on her return. The problem is that she is rarely delighted, or in any case, rarely delighted to a degree I deem commensurate to the wonderful thing I've just done for her. So I either sulk about this -- and I'm very good at sulking -- or I let her have it. "You don't appreciate all the things I do for you. And because you don't appreciate all the things I do for you, I am reduced to having to beg for your appreciation, and it's humiliating."
     But the last time around I prefaced all this with, "Now, I love doing this stuff, but -- " and then launched into my usual whine, to which she protested that she had thanked me, that she did say she liked the new raised bed I built for her. So what did I want her to do? Get down on her knees and throw up?
     I hesitate to reckon how many times we've had this argument, but something about my preface this time -- "I love doing this stuff" -- nagged at me afterward, and suddenly it occurred to me that as a matter of fact I don't do these things for Debbie. I do them for myself. I do them for the pleasure of doing them. 
     A little more thanks from her would be nice, sure, but not absolutely necessary if I simply absolve her of the expectation of tears of gratitude and whoops of appreciation I reflexively whip up as I go about my business. 
     I realize that I have done a version of this all my life: volunteering to be the go-to guy in family crises, making myself indispensable, and then resenting the hell out of everyone else for being insufficiently grateful, and for not stepping in more, when in fact I have left no room for them to step.
     I am much more likely to forget an insight than to have one, so I hurried over to Debbie with this one. From now on, I told her, I would not set us both up for another round or two of recrimination. She looked doubtful, but I meant it. Henceforward I will desist from pushing my own inner resentment button and stop setting her up for a fall. 
     I just hope she appreciates it.