Can't Argue with That

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Change seems to happen so quickly now. When, on Monday morning, I look back on Friday, I think, "It seems so long ago, and I was a different person then." It's hard to grasp how long 23 years is, and how long I lived as that person, that Husband, and how strange it is, now that I've been out for a few months, stumbling back into that house again, that house where I was Husband, and finding it so foreign and inscrutable.

So I thought I was going to tell you about my weekend, but I don't want to now.

I want to tell you about me.

I want to tell you about the things I'm learning.

It's been 7 months since the word "divorce" was first spoken aloud. Within days, I quit drinking, and I haven't had a drink since. Not because the drinking was the reason the word was spoken, but because I knew for years that it had to be done, and instead I had put it off. Suddenly, it felt like there weren't years left. That word, "divorce," was a big part of the push that let me finally stop. I also sought help, most importantly and lastingly and profoundly from my friends and family, whose outpouring of love and support has overwhelmed me and changed me in its own ways. But also from a professional. I found a counselor that I loved, and who was damned good at her job. She listened well and asked the right questions at the right time, helping me find my own way to the path I'm on now. We parted ways with a hug, in full agreement that it's a great path to be on. I also went to my primary care physician to talk about medication to bust me out of the depression that led up to that word, a depression that oddly didn't evaporate on the destruction of my marriage. I'm off those meds now, and moving forward, thinking and talking and writing a lot about who I am. There's nothing more exciting for me than finding out who that is since it's not who I was for all of those years.

That in itself is a difficult thing to understand, how I am and am not the same.

I've been thinking of the negatives about myself that I've lived with for decades and struggled unsuccessfully to change. They were key to the failure of the marriage, character traits of which I was ashamed, but never enough to really change them. Now that I've seen that which was most important to me detonate, in part because I would not or could not change, I'm beginning to see those traits as central to my character, and not as hated flaws.

We were married young, and neither of us knew who we would be 20 years later. I, and perhaps she, saw the struggle as an act of love, trying hard always through the years to be what she seemed to want, and always, or almost always, failing. And trying more and more, especially through the last half of the marriage, and definitely always failing, to get her to be what I wanted. I failed to love her enough to be the person she wanted and deserved, and I thought she didn't love me enough to be what I wanted and deserved.

But now, I have deep and profound gratitude to her for seeing that it had to end and for having the courage to persist through all of my objections and efforts to save it. It wasn't salvageable, and that's OK. She set me free to begin the journey that I'm on now, and I will forever owe her a debt of gratitude for that gift she gave me.

It hurt like a motherfucker, though, and it still hurts. Not because I'm sad that I'm not with her any longer, but because there is so much history and emotion piled up that it's hard to sort through. And because we both said things intending to hurt each other, and the memory of the hurt is almost as painful as the hurt itself. I don't always understand what it is that I'm feeling, just that I'm feeling it on all cylinders and can't do anything with it but to cry.

I couldn't think of the word I wanted, so I consulted the Oracle at Google, and found myself at the Wikipedia entry for the concept of "reappropriation." I'm sure that it's terribly racist and sexist, and probably other ists too, for a heterosexual middle-aged American white man to apply reappropriation to his own situation, but fuck it. I'm doing it. That's one of probably several hundred new mottos and maxims and philosophical tropes that I've adopted as guides to my new life: "Fuck it. I'm doing it." Or, "Kiss my ass, I bought a boat." I am reappropriating these hurtful definitions of me, and making them my own. I suppose it may seem like venom, repeating the words that were said about me out of anger and frustration, but it's not. It really isn't. I'm done feeling venomous.

I never could keep my fuckin' mouth shut.

I've decided what I want most of all in the world to be is honest. Simple. Straightforward. Direct. I want always to seem to be what I actually am. I certainly can't control other people's perceptions of who I am, but I'm telling you right now: if you have interactions with me, believe I'm not working you. I'm not playing any games. I am not manipulating. I'm not acting in such a way that you will be forced, tricked, or otherwise induced to respond in a certain way. I am being me for my own sake. If I want something from you, I will say it out loud, probably using too many words. If you want something from me, just straight out ask me, because I'm not committing any more mental resources to trying to figure out what you want, and if, when you did this, you were actually trying to say that. That shit's exhausting and not good for my self-esteem, so I'm not doing it anymore. I'm just going to be me and expect you'll be you.

And I will talk about it. Best believe. I will always overthink it, and analyze myself in endless circles. And Facebook it. And blog about it. I'm not secretive, is what I'm saying. I think. I am. I do. And I talk about it. A lot. I think out loud. This is who I am. If it's not something you particularly like about me, well... Sorry (not sorry), as the kids say today.

I do want to be better at keeping secrets, though, and not talking other people's business. Because I do that, too. More than I should. I will be talking my business though. And if yours and mine overlap, you might want to know that from the start. And don't confide anything to me unless you make it really, really clear that you want me to keep my mouth shut about it. I mean, I told a kid once what my brother was giving him for his birthday, and I haven't really gotten any better at it since.

I'm a lazy piece of shit.

OK, not the piece of shit part. I know with certainty that I'm not a piece of shit. I'm an amazing guy, and the more I get to know that guy, the more I like him. But it's a fact. I'm lazy. At least when it comes to things that I don't care about, which I'm thinking of less and less as a character flaw and more and more as just pretty normal, actually. I do not prioritize housework above very many things. I cook and wash dishes and do laundry and such, so that the household operates just fine, but I do not choose, for example, to sweep and mop the kitchen floor over, for example, going kayaking. Or reading a book. Or playing video games. Or sitting on the porch listening to music. Or staring off into space. Or anything else, really, until it reaches the point that it draws my attention every time I go in the kitchen.

This used to make me feel like a terrible person. This used to be a constant struggle, to transform myself somehow into a person who wanted to sweep and mop the kitchen floor. I made schedules for myself that I didn't follow. I set up Outlook reminders. I put a dry erase board on the kitchen wall. And then I wouldn't do it anyway, because there was always something else I'd rather do. I was angry at Aerie that it seemed to matter so much to her when it didn't matter to me, and I was angry at myself that it mattered so little to me when it seemed to matter so much to her. Now, I have my own space, and it's a source of joy. I walk around naked when Thumper's staying with her, and I clean when I find myself thinking, "Gross, dude." As a parent, I will have to balance this with teaching Thumper to take care of business, because ain't nobody 'round here his servant. But my own standard of acceptability is just fine.

Re-reading this, I realized that the fact that I walk around my apartment naked when no one else is there has nothing to do with anything. But like I said, I overshare. You're welcome.

So there you go. That's what I'm thinking about today. I am who I am. I will continue to work to improve myself, especially as it relates to diet and exercise, because I want to and not because it will make me who I should be instead of who I am. I like me a lot these days. I don't hate me for not being someone else. And I don't hate her for wanting me to be someone else, for marrying me before she knew who she was, or who I was, or what she wanted from herself or from someone else. That's what I'm learning. That's what I wanted to tell you. I'm a lazy piece of shit of who never could keep his fuckin' mouth shut, and I'm pretty happy with that. Is that the wrong thing to say? Fuck it. I'm doing it.

Fetch. Also, Noisy.

I tried to teach the boy a scaled-down version of catch this afternoon. I rolled him the ball. "Roll the ball!" I said. When it gently nudged his foot, I said, "OK, now roll me the ball! Roll it! Roll me the ball!" while making various gestures indicating motion in my general direction. He looked at me. He looked at the ball. He looked at me. "Roll me the ball!" I encouraged.

"Ball?" he asked?

"Yes, ball. Roll me the ball!"

"Danku!" he said, picking up the ball and carrying it over to me.

"Thank you!" I said. "OK, I'll roll you the ball!" And so forth, and so on. I affected my most enthusiastic tone. I rolled. I encouraged rolling. When he accidentally dropped it, I praised him shamelessly. "Yay! Good roll!" To no avail. My first game of catch was really a game of fetch.

"Danku!"





I vacuumed today. The boy lost his mind. I guess that's testament to how rarely I vacuum. I think the last time I did so, his grandmother (affectionately referred to by the boy as "Mungo") was here, and she took him for a walk outside while I cleaned. That may have been as much as 6 weeks ago. It's amazing how much stuff he finds to eat on the carpet.

So I vacuumed. He freaked out. I only did one room. I stopped frequently to reassure him. "It's OK. It won't hurt you. It's OK. It's just noisy. It's not going to hurt you." And then I vacuumed again.

By the time I finished the one room, he was sobbing. And shaking. Seriously. Visibly trembling. I reassured him again. And for some reason, of all the words I used, he latched on to "noisy."

"Nosy?"

"Yes, it was just noisy. It's not going to hurt you. And it's all done."

"All done?"

"Yes, all done."

Etc., etc. So for the rest of the day, he's periodically looked toward the closet where the vacuum is stored. "Nosy? All done?" He said it for Aerie when she got home, too, and it seemed apparent that "Nosy?" is about the cutest damn word he's ever squeaked out. I think I'll torment him again tomorrow with another room. I'll tell myself I want to desensitize him to the vacuum so that it doesn't traumatize him so much, but really, I just want to talk about the Nosy some more.

All done!

In a Slump

You don't want to read this one, either. Additional details about me will be revealed that you will be unable to unlearn.








I'm in a slump. I can't get motivated. I don't feel like cleaning the house again because I swear I just did it. I'm bored with playing with the baby because we do the same things over and over. I don't want to go babysit because the talking and the talking and the talking, ugh, it's exhausting. I sort of worked out yesterday, but I half-assed it. And I quit early.

I'm loathe to say anything like this these days. One, I don't want this blog to be a place to bitch about my life. I've read some of those blogs, and they get kind of old. Two, as a SAHD, it seems like it's my job to put up a happy front. I feel like if I complain, the answer is simple: "you chose this, jackass." So whenever anyone asks me about it, it's wonderful! It's fantastic! We're having a fabulous time! My old full-time position was recently vacated by my replacement. My former supervisor jokingly asked me if I wanted my job back, and I said, "Ha! No thanks." A former co-worker, too, asked me if I was going to take my old job back. He thought this stay-at-home dad thing was just an arrangement for a few months, until the kid was old enough for day care, like any normal baby; he was flabbergasted when I said it was for years, not months. "Really?" he said. "Of course!" I replied. "It's so much fun!"

And it is, and I do love it. But man, I'm in a slump.

I know the answer I'll probably get, at least from my mother, is "get out there and connect with other parents! Go to the SAHD playdates! Go to their Dads' Nights Out!" And yes, I should. But who can be bothered? And Thumper's still napping through the playdates, and the Dads' Nights Out are during babysitting. I have been chatting with mothers at playgrounds more, but I haven't managed to wrangle the boy a girlfriend yet.

No, really I'm thinking it's time for a fast. There was a time when I tried to live by the principles of BFF's bible. It's largely about how to combine foods properly in healthy ways, like meat and bread don't go together because they require different enzymes from your stomach to digest. And melon is the perfect food for humans, but it shouldn't be eaten with anything else. That kind of stuff. I followed it very closely for a good six months, and didn't feel like it really changed my life. So I dropped most of it. But I did keep one aspect for several years after. Ready for it? This is the part you don't want to know: colonics.

Yep. Self-administered colonics. Twice a year. In combination with a week-long fast. Since cheapness counts, I couldn't imagine spending hundreds of dollars on a Colema board (you don't want to click on that), so I made one myself. With $60 worth of wood and a wastebasket from Target. And yes, I thought it was crazy, too. I thought BFF was crazy. But the craziness appealed to me, in a way. "Hey, won't this be wacky? I'll be one of those nuts who hoses out his insides! Hee hee!"

But strangely enough, the fasting and colonics made me feel incredible. I fasted by eating nothing and drinking sometimes carrot juice, sometimes grape juice, or carrot-grape juice. Sometimes just water. Sometimes I used solutions for the colonic other than plain water, like coffee and water, or garlic and water. The first day or two of the week-long fast, with nightly colonic sessions, I would be exhausted and hungry. By the third or fourth day, though, I started to feel recharged. Energized. And that gut-gnawing sensation of hunger was gone. By the end of the week, I was refreshed, renewed, ready to start again. I'd ease back into eating with light and healthy meals. It was like pushing a reset button.

But after a few years, I'd stopped smoking. I was working out more, losing weight, feeling good. I didn't feel like I needed a cleansing, a restarting. And the tedium part of the colonics, the preparation, the cleanup, started to get to me. Not to mention having to clean the juicer daily from all those grapes and carrots. So I decided I was done with it and threw out my board. I haven't fasted since, and it's been probably two or three years.

So now, in a slump and feeling like I really need a good renewal ritual, I'm thinking about fasting again. And since I've been eating a lot lately, snacking when I don't really need it, I want to re-learn that feeling of hunger as a positive thing, to remember that being hungry isn't so bad. I don't think I can get behind building a new board, and I certainly can't get behind buying one, so I'll just skip the colonics this time around.

Maybe I shouldn't use the words "get behind" and "colonics" in the same sentence, huh?

Anyway, does anybody else out there fast? I've never done it without the colonics, and I wonder if it will be the same jolt of power and energy that I remember.

So who's with me? Who's up for a week of emptying the vessel and starting over? Come on! I promise I'll stop saying the word "colonic" now.

Brainwashed and Right on Time

For as long as I can remember, I've tried very hard to be punctual. Being late, or even the possibility of being late, gives me anxiety. I am often early in order to avoid being late. I'm not sure when it began; perhaps my mother would say that this concern with punctuality did not begin when I was a child. Whenever it began, I hate being late. I try not to get mad when other people are late, but mostly I steam. I fume. And then when they show up, I say, "Oh, that's OK." And then they do it again the next time, and I fume some more.

I don't generally consider myself an uptight person. When Mrs. Rodius and I met, I was a lazy slob, and she was a tightly-wound neat freak. She and her sisters had and have the highest standards of cleanliness, inherited directly from their mother, of any people I've ever met. I wouldn't go so far as to call them obsessive-compulsive germophobes, but hey. You draw your own conclusions. Over the years, I've increased my standards, and she's lowered hers. Otherwise, we might have killed each other. Or divorced. I know that she pines for a home as clean as her sister's, but neither of us really want to commit to that level of time and attention, and we've reached a sort of happy medium. We don't clean the bathrooms as often or vacuum as often as we used to back when Mrs. Rodius was crazy. We rarely dust. There are piles of opened mail, baby equipment, and other various daily detritus piled on the kitchen table and counters. But now, I find myself doing things, and my mother would certainly confirm this, that I would NEVER have done as a child: this morning, I swept up bread crumbs to maintain the cleanliness of the kitchen floor that I swept and mopped on Friday. Am I becoming one of them?

That's what I wonder: As I age, am I becoming an uptight prick with standards way out of whack? Is it just an Austin hippie thing? There is virtually no one that I know who pretends to care even on just a theoretical level that punctuality is mildly important. Am I crazy? I found myself giving a lecture on punctuality the other day, explaining that I think that being late is disrespectful and communicates that you don't care very much about the person or people that you agreed to meet at a specific time. I got the feeling my lecture was less than convincing.

And I've been in other people's homes. I've been to the homes of friends who were expecting me. When I buy things off of Craigslist and am invited into the homes of people who knew I was coming, more than occasionally the word "squalor" comes to mind when I see the conditions in which they conduct their daily lives.

Am I crazy? Have I been brainwashed by my crazy in-laws to believe that it really is easier to maintain a clean home than it is to clean a dirty one? Am I the only one out there who regularly shows up fifteen minutes early in case I run into traffic or other easily predictable delays? Let's get together for lunch and discuss it. Say, 12:00? I'll be there at quarter 'til. I'll be fuming until you get there around 12:30 or so. It's a date!

Unvoiced Bilabial Plosives

Twitter's kind of fun, but it's probably better for people who live beautiful, artistic, fascinating lives, like suttonhoo and martingruner. And for people who have text-friendly phones and text-friendly cellular plans. Does anyone want hour-by-hour snapshots into the life of a guy who spends much of his time in contemplation of the poop, the pee, and the puke? I ponder the color, the texture, the consistency, in all its variegated glory. For instance:

Was the cat pee on the carpet a dark enough orangey color to indicate possible blood in the urine and therefore yet another bladder infection?

How can the baby poop out neat little brown balls of clay that fall cleanly out of the diaper and into the toilet, and then a mere two hours later fill his diaper with a wet, sticky, multi-colored extravaganza that takes me fifteen minutes to clean up?

Could I have guessed a year-and-a-half ago, when Pops and I screened in the back deck, that the best part of the kitties spending so much time out there is that it catches most of the puke? Trex is much more stain-resistant than beige carpet.

Speaking of beige carpet, when I see that the boy's spit up somewhere because he has it on his chin and the front of his onesie, how is it that I can search and search and search for beige puke on a beige carpet without finding it, but a half-hour later when I walk barefoot across that same carpet, I'll unerringly step right in it?

Somehow it doesn't live up to suttonhoo's jet-setting, tours of the Field Museum and catching up with her friend in Singapore, or martingruner's bilingual cross-country skiing. I can only attempt to elevate my philosophical musings by using words like "unvoiced bilabial plosives."

Wifely Duties

Since I've been doing this job for almost 3 1/2 months now, I thought it was time I did the Full Housewife and got down on my knees.

You know, to scrub the kitchen floor. What did you think I meant?

I'm not particularly particular when it comes to cleanliness. I'm not cleaning the floor on a weekly basis. Or monthly. But we have one of those Swiffer things, and every time I use it, I get pissed off. It's completely useless if your floor has any more texture than, say, your average pane of glass. So I'd use it, curse it, and put it away for another couple of months, then use it, curse it, put it away. Every single time, I'd look at the dirt still stuck in the pattern of our tile and think that some day I'd scrub it with a brush. For some reason, today was some day.

If this is how housewives before 1972 spent their days, it's no wonder they wanted to leave the home and join the workforce. It kinda sucked. I spent almost 4 hours, split between two Thumper naps, on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a brush, then wiping up the dirty water with a sponge. I kept thinking about Girl 6, Spike Lee's movie about a phone sex girl. In it, one of the phone sex operators acts out Richard Belzer's character's fantasy of a big-breasted woman in a short dress scrubbing a floor in "big, soapy circles."

Wait, where are you going? You got this far through a story about scrubbing a floor, and you're going to let the proximity of the words "sex," "Richard Belzer" and "fantasy" chase you off?

Well, anyway, I scrubbed a floor today. I thought about my mother telling me years ago that I'd make someone a good wife some day. I compared myself to a big-breasted vixen in a short dress. In the end, my manhood returned, though. As I neared the end of the job, I thought to myself, "I wonder if this will get me laid?" Sure, years ago, that thought would have occurred to me much, much earlier in the project and probably would have even been a prime motivating factor in undertaking the project in the first place. But at least I still thought it. I'll take what I can get.