It’s a conspiracy! Every person I talk to, and every thing that happens is convincing me that I’ve got to do something. The final straw is when Seth’s mother contends that he’s not as bad as the worst kind of abusive father. I read through sixteen years worth of diaries to figure out how it happened, and what I can do now.
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Homeless... at Home
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Seth left last night, after Shabbat was out, for three weeks in the US. When I hugged him good bye at the airport, I said, earnestly, "Seth, I DO love you ..." The implication being ... in spite of everything you do to make it impossible. He just grunted. I do love him, don’t I?
This morning, Eli and Leora had gone off to school, and I was dropping Rafi off at day care when it started to pour. Nobody remembers a winter as rainy as this one. I came back home to leave the bike and take the car to work. The shower turned into a real downpour just as I was about to leave the house. I know that ten minutes after a downpour the streets fill with runoff from the sodden yards and the roofs, so that the low spots in town are impassable. Then twenty minutes after that, the storm sewers have caught up and the streets are passable again. So. What to do for a half hour? Wow! Home alone! That NEVER happens!
Well, I could move the beds. I promised the children that we could move beds and mattresses into our room so we can have wall to wall beds as we did last year, during the war when everybody slept with us during alerts. So I moved the beds, and decided to just keep going. I put the living room furniture in the dining "L". I put the dining room table in the kitchen, the patio table in the living room, and the kitchen table in Rafi's room. Brought the TV down from our bedroom and put it in the living room. Swapped rugs all over the place. I set up Rafi's room as a homework workshop. By the time I was finished, very little remained in its original spot. I couldn't wait to see the children's reactions. I'll have to move it all back again in three weeks, but for now, it's refreshing.
I drove to work, and a little later our new group member Malka arrived for her first day on the job. Totally soaked. How embarrassing - to slosh in, wet to the knee, hair dripping into your eyes, just when you want to make some sort of impression. But the cold and damp hadn't dimmed the warmest smile I've ever encountered.
"I have a pair of dry socks here in my drawer," I said, holding them out to her, sure that she wouldn't accept a pair of socks from an as-yet stranger.
But Malka said, "That would be lovely! Thank you so much." Hey. That's how I want to be. Spontaneous, warm, happy, friendly.
I picked up the children on my way home and they loved the rearranged house. They found even more things to swap around. We had such a cozy evening of reading and tumbling and singing in bed, while it stormed outside. Now they're all snuggled down here and I'm writing this. My little angels!
Somehow, today seemed so different from other days. Even from other trips Seth has taken. I seem to have short cut the four days it usually takes me, at the beginning of his trips, to start to feel like myself.
I feel as though I have a new sister. Kay's friend Mim is in Israel on a tour, and she spent two days with us. We just talked the whole time. It was great. I felt as though I were talking to Kay. Even better - Mim gave me insights that Kay is too close or too kind to give.
In more ways than just being a surrogate, Mim brought Kay to me. She brought a tape of songs Kay wrote and performed. They're fantastic. My little sister! Each one investigates different aspects of relationships, how we relate to family, friends, ourselves. I've had it playing every waking hour that I'm home, and on the tape player in the car. Listening, and digesting insights I've gained in the past few days from the various other sources. Each morning I wake up with one of Kay's songs in my head.
And Mim brought me a book Kay wanted me to read. 'Dance of Anger'. The book describes to a T several of the 'dances' Seth and I have been doing for the past decade and a half.
I'm reminded of once when I went to Dad, tearful because one of the neighbor boys was always chasing me on the playground. Dad's sound advice: "Just don't run."
It's true. All the stuff Seth is doing, he couldn't do if I didn't, on some level, allow it.
Earlier this evening I got a strange phone call from Jessica. I thought she had laryngitis, from the way she was whispering into the phone: "We need to ... that is, we want to come and see you. I hope that's all right."
"Sure! When?"
"Tonight. Now. We're leaving now. We'll be there around eight, if we don't drown in a flooded road."
"Fine. That's great." I was puzzled but very pleased.
I washed the cookie sheets and mixing bowls from the afternoon baking fest, and arranged the results on a plate.
When they got here, Jessica explained that their two teenagers had sat at the dinner table scheduling use of the car, between them. Jessica had asked, indignantly, "Did it ever occur to you that your father and I might need the car?" Blank looks. Blinks. "No, where would you go?" "It just so happens that we're going to visit ... uh ... Shlomit and Seth tonight." A nudge with her foot halted Yehuda's surprised question. So she had had to call on the QT to check whether they could actually come. Of course, they hadn't known that Seth is abroad.
Jessica and Yehuda have been my guardian angels since I've known them. They were one of my few sources of human contact before we had children. They took me in while Seth was away on business trips. Jessica gave me childbirth lessons before Eli was born and visited me when I was in the hospital after Leora's and Rafi's births.
Yehuda came to visit once, when Leora had been home from the hospital for only a few days. Anything we tried to talk about, came back to my worries about the terrible diaper rash my poor little girl had developed while she was in the incubator. Yehuda told me the name of a cream that had worked for their children. And it did the trick! That may seem a trivial thing, but part of being a good friend is to empathize with what is going on with the other person, and to come to the rescue, even if the problem might seem trivial to an outsider.
Several times Jessica and Yehuda have seemed to have ESP. When I'm really down from the situation around here, the phone will ring, and Yehuda will ask, "How's it going, Poopsie?" I've never told them any details, but I think their ESP picks up alot.
So, tonight, we talked for six hours. About all sorts of touchy-feely topics. Yehuda is taking a course in NLP. Sounds fascinating. I told them, for the first time, about what the children and I have been going through with Seth, but they weren't surprised. They admitted that in the car on the way over they did as they always did before a visit to us - went over possible topics of conversation to try to find one that Seth wouldn't stamp his foot at. They had decided we could discuss the stock market and the rainy weather. In actual fact, we discussed everything but!
When Seth stamps his foot to indicate that he is hearing something he doesn't want to hear, I just stop mid sentence if I'm the one doing the talking. I thought he does it intentionally, but once his mother was telling him something, and he started pounding on the dashboard of the car. She said, "Stop pounding and listen to me." He asked, "What do you mean, pounding. I'm not pounding!" She said, "You were pounding on the dashboard." He looked at her as though she'd gone mad, "I'm not pounding! Why would I pound on the dashboard?"
It's two AM, now, and Jessica and Yehuda just left, but I'm wide awake. In fact, I feel that I am waking up, finally, after years of being half asleep.
I went to a Bar Mitzvah party tonight for one of the neighbor boys.
Seth and I rarely go to neighborhood events. When we moved into this little religious subdivision, six years ago, I hoped we would be part of a real community. The people here are so nice. Half of them are Anglos. Mom has said she thinks the neighbors would like to have more contact with us.
In fact, Mom told me, a year after the fact, that when Rafi came home from the hospital and I was still in, the neighbor women sent a task force over to the house, offering their services to Seth. Offering to take shifts to help our family however they could, once my parents had gone back home. Cooking, babysitting, taxi service, food shopping, invitations to Shabbat meals, whatever. They had lined up some nannies to take care of Rafi. And Seth, Mom said, seemed angry at the implication that anyone would think he needed help with anything. Just sent them packing. Told them he could manage just fine without their help, thank you. Seth's kind of 'thank you', that means anything but.
Well, we did manage. But things were pretty bleak and strenuous. It would have made such a difference if I had just had a neighbor sitting with me for moral support when I was trying to feed Rafi.
Those first few months with Rafi would have been so different if I had even known that the neighbors had offered. They visited me at the hospital, and they all came to Rafi's Brit, but once I was home, they kept their distance. I didn't know at that point that they had made such a thoughtful, helpful overture and that Seth had turned them away.
That might have helped us to be real members of this community, instead of outsiders. They say that to get close to someone, you should accept a favor from them.
It's as much my fault as Seth's, though, that we don't go to neighborhood simchas – the bar mitzvas and weddings of the neighbors’ children. I just don't like to be with him. Especially, of course, at weddings, where I find myself chanting, ‘be good to her … be good to her … be good to her’.
Anyway, tonight, at Yair's bar mitzvah party, some of the neighborhood women said they go folk dancing every week at the community center down the street, and they suggested that I come, too. At first I said I would wait till Seth is home from his trip, so he can baby-sit. But then I realized that if I don't start going now, I'll never start once he's back at the helm. So when I got home, I asked Tehilla if she could sit again tonight, and I went dancing!
Oh, it was so nice. It's been twenty years since I danced in college. I dance with an American accent.
Twenty years? Twenty years. Since Seth and I were a couple, dancing every Sunday night at the university. We were good together. Well, that was a long time ago. Alot has changed in those twenty years. We’re dancing to different drummers, now, for sure.
It's not even so much how I feel, with Seth away, as that I feel at all. When Seth is here, I'm just numb.
I feel so good. Loved. Kay's music, and friends from near and far, and fun with the children.
It's more than that, though. This is going to sound kind of flaky.
I feel taller when Seth isn't here. I look up and about. When I walk around town, I notice the second storeys of buildings. The signs. The faces of people I pass. I realize that when he and I are on the same continent, I shuffle around looking at the ground.
My feet feel different. (I warned you!) I always notice that my feet relax when he's not here. Sometimes, when he's here, I'll just try to stand the same way I do when he's far away. With my feet planted. Comfortable. Attached to the ground. But I can't do it when he's here. Maybe the term 'walking on eggs' is more fundamental than just the image. When we know we have to 'watch our step' with someone, our feet think they have to be ready to leap out of the path of danger. I walk differently. I stride. Especially at home. Long, confident, balanced strides around the house.
I smile and giggle all the time. Yesterday the children were goofing off, and Leora was so funny that I laughed a great belly laugh. They stopped in their tracks, and Leora said, suspiciously, "You never laugh like that when Abba's here, Ima."
I breathe all the time! So often, when he's around, I find myself holding my breath. When he first comes home from work, for sure, until I see which kind of evening it will be. Any time he comes into the room. If one of the children says or does something that might be dangerous.
And people react differently to me. I always have encounters and serendipitous experiences when he's away. People notice me and like me. I come out of my shell. I'm so glad Seth goes on trips a couple of times a year. So I can be reminded that I'm not really Chuchundra – Kipling's frightened little muskrat.
At work, last week, the group decided I look like Jane Fonda! Nobody would think the Seth-in-residence Shlomit looked like anybody so glamorous.
I sleep at night. I sleep way fewer hours, because I can't stand to let go of each wonderful day. But I sleep straight through. Then, sometimes after only five hours, I awaken before the alarm with a surge of joy in my heart, ready for the next day. I don't wake up stiff. When he's here, my whole body is sore in the morning. As though all my muscles had been prepared for fighting or flight all night. When he's not here, even though I often wake up with Rafi's head rammed against my ribs, and Leora's legs entangled with mine, and the cat against my cheek, and no covers on my feet, I feel limber and young.
The children are so different, too. Calmer? Or maybe more lively? When he's not here, I can't imagine how they are when he is, and vice versa.
We talk at the dinner table. Eli and Leora and Rafi talk among themselves. We chatter and smile and share and we sit comfortably and the time flies. It feels like a normal family mealtime. When Seth is in the room everyone's just busy dealing with him. He sets the tone. He monitors us and we monitor him.
We hum! The other day, I was scrambling eggs, Rafi was sorting the clean silverware into the drawer, Leora was peeling cucumbers and Eli was setting the table, and Leora said, "Listen to us! We're all humming!" Sure enough, each of us was humming a (different) happy little tune as we worked.
Our Shabbat walks are totally different. When it's just us, we bounce along and talk and sing and stop for interesting things and meander and discuss where we'll go. Not the forced march of the Seth walks.
I still have over a week left before he comes back. Just as it takes four days for me to find myself, at the beginning of a trip, four days before he's due to come back, I start winding down. Start shrinking again into the small, careful Chuchundra I am when he's here.
I just got another phone call from Seth’s mother. He's on the plane back east from California where the conference is, and will be coming back to Israel tomorrow. A week early. His bleeding hemorrhoids are acting up.
"Bleeding hemorrhoids? That sounds serious! What is it?" I asked her.
"You certainly know that Seth suffers from bleeding hemorrhoids!"
"No - I didn't know. Gee, that’s too bad."
"What! You don't even know that your own husband has bleeding hemorrhoids??"
Well, I'm sorry - I never thought to ask him if he happens to have bleeding hemorrhoids, and he didn't volunteer the information. Now not only am I such a lousy wife that I don't know when he's going abroad, I don't even have the common decency to know what's going on with his rear end.
I believe that we are communicated with, from - well, call it the supernatural, if you wish. From the vast world that we can't see and hear. Call it G-d or fate or our subconscious or the right side of our brains. We get messages in the form of spotting coincidences and making associations. We read a story and the patterns remind us of something going on in our lives, even though there may be few similarities that are obvious to the verbal, left side of the brain that we think of as 'us'. These messages help us to process and understand the here and now.
Sometimes you find yourself with a tune going through your head, and you wonder how it got there. When you think of the words to the song, you realize that the theme of the song parallels something that is going on in your life or your mind just then. It's the right side of your brain or your guardian angel that put it there as a message.
This winter, of my sixteenth wedding anniversary, it seems that everything in my life is conspiring to give me insights. Is trying to tell me to stand back and really look at this mirage of mine. (See? Like that! I typed 'mirage' instead of 'marriage'. Even my typos are Freudian slips.) And to do something differently. Everyone has been in on the effort. My children. My friends and their children, strangers, colleagues at work, my sister, my sister's friend. Even the rainy weather that somehow made each encounter seem so cozy. Even my mother-in-law.
Even Seth's hemorrhoids. Because, you know what? Since I didn't have four days warning, to wind back into my Chuchundra self, I think I just remained the 'me' that I am when he's gone. Not totally, but maybe enough to bootstrap the rest of me back, too.
During the few days that Seth has been back, instead of seeming scary, his strange rantings just seem kind of silly. Pathetic. It's as though I'm viewing him from the side, and not from underneath. He always seemed so tall, before, but now he only seems as tall as he is – a few inches taller than I am.
We went for our normal Seth-in-residence Shabbat walk. Sharp contrast to last week's, when we all wound up sitting in the branches of a tree, singing. This was the normal forced march through the streets of town, following Seth's back.
Rafi's shoe lace came loose and I stopped to tie it. Eli and Leora waited with us, partly because I was telling one of our adventure stories. Ima and Eli and Leora and Rafi were headed for a dentist appointment in a tall building. But lo and behold, when the elevator stopped and the doors opened, we found ourselves in a strange land with elves and delicious fruit growing on trees, and baby dinosaurs to play with.
When I had finished with Rafi's shoe, and we had finished deciding whether it was Eli or Leora or Rafi who found the key to the door in the side of the mountain, we continued walking. We got to the corner, and there was no sign of Seth. Truth be told, I had a very good idea which way he had gone - there's not much variation in these walks. But, the real me decided, this seemed a perfectly good excuse to add some. Oops? Is this that passive aggressivity finally rearing its beautiful head?
"So! Which way should we go, guys?" And we unanimously chose the road less traveled. Through an interesting old neighborhood. We would pick an old house and try to describe what it had looked like fifty years ago when it was new, and how that old grandma’s life had been, when her children were their ages. We wended and talked and story-told and stopped to look at things. For awhile we alternated right and left turns to see where it would take us. And we even found a turtle! It's funny about turtles. You never find them when you're actually looking for one.
Our sessions with Sandy have revealed gory details about some of Seth's philosophies. Last night, emboldened by being my real self, I asked Seth where his philosophies came from.
"Seth, I was wondering. You have theories about relationships that are ... different from the way other people see things. Where did they come from, do you know? When did you evolve them, do you remember?"
"Kohelet," he enunciated around his toothbrush.
"Kohelet? Ecclesiastes?"
He rinsed and wiped his mouth. "'All is vanity'."
"What do you mean? You got all your theories from ... 'All is vanity'?"
"That's what I said. So that's what I mean."
"So, like ..." I tried to get a discussion going. If our whole life is based on three words, you would think he would be interested enough in the topic to discuss it. Especially with the person who has got to fit in with it.
He tisked. Sighed. I was being obtuse. "Most of the stupid little things people call 'interpersonal relationships' - 'please and thank you', and 'what a beautiful hat', and 'let me carry that' and 'oh, I'm so sorry' and all the smiling and small talk and pats on the back ... and high and mighty ideals ... and lovey-dovey this and lovey-dovey that ... you know ... 'mother and apple pie' ... and sacrificing for other people and being a hero and ... loving your children just because your gametes produced half of them. It's all just vanity. People just thinking they're so great. None of it is real. It's all vanity. I just don't go by it."
"Oh, so ... like … you mean …"
"That's it. That's all."
I think I should go read Ecclesiastes over again.
When I go dancing, I always find the porch light off when I come home. I know that Seth disapproves of my going out. Forcing me to return to a dark, unwelcoming house, and to fumble to get my key in the lock in the pitch black, is a very effective way to show it. I always make sure to have the porch light on for Seth when he comes home after dark. I don't do it only for him, actually - it feels good to turn on the light to welcome a family member home on a cold dark evening. But my non-verbal demonstration of friendly behavior apparently isn't a strong enough hint that he should leave the light on for me.
This morning, after coming home to a dark front door last night, I casually said, "You know, Seth, I try to leave the porch light on for you when you're out. I thought you would see how nice it is, and maybe leave it on for me."
He burst out, "Did it ever occur to you that I'm turning it off on you to tell you that I don't want you to leave it on for me?" As though that statement had been on the tip of his tongue for weeks, and I had finally given him the opening he needed, to verbalize it.
Well, no, it hadn't occurred to me. "Seth, anything you want to tell me, you can just tell me, OK?"
"You're my wife, Shlomit, in case you hadn't noticed. After all the years we've been together, I shouldn't have to spell everything out for you. You should have enough sensitivity to understand me without my having to be so totally explicit about everything."
Sigh. "OK. So, anyway, we understand about the porch light now?" I asked, "I'll leave it off for you, and you'll leave it on for me?"
Reluctant grunt in the affirmative.
Why, why, why, why, why?
Either a memo went out to the teachers to call parents of delinquent students yesterday afternoon, or it was a coincidence, but both Leah and Dvorah called. With the same message:
"For the past couple of months <child> hasn't been as well prepared in class as usual. It would seem that the parents are spending less time sitting with <him/her> over homework."
To each teacher, I said, "Yes, that's true. I stopped helping with homework seven weeks ago."
"Well ... so ... you'll try to remedy the situation?"
Sigh. "I'll see what I can do."
So last night, when Seth came out of the shower, I asked him, "Have you noticed that the house has been neat and clean for nearly two months?"
"What? No ... What do you mean?"
"Every day for the past two months, when you have come home from work, the kitchen has been cleaned up and the rest of the house has been neat and tidy."
"No, Shlomit," bored, as at some private little game I'm playing, "I really hadn't noticed."
"OK. We also haven't noticed that you have been in a better mood for these two months."
"What are you talking about?"
"At Sandy? You said that the main reason you are angry at the children in the evening is that you come home and find the house a mess. So I've been keeping it neat. But I guess you were just bluffing."
"Shlomit, there was so much blah-blah at those sessions with Sandy. It figures you would latch onto one little thing I might have said and take it to extremes."
"Well, you didn't notice the clean house, and Leah and Dvora did notice that the children aren't getting help with their schoolwork ..." quizzical frown from Seth "... their teachers. So I'm switching my priorities back to children first and house-keeping second."
"Fine!" he shrugged.
I just can't get used to intentionally leaving the porch unlit when I know a member of my family will be returning after dark. Somehow it hurt less to feel around in the dark for the keyhole, than to intentionally darken Seth's homecomings.
As I was writing, a couple of weeks ago, about Seth's tisking and muttering and accusing when he comes home, seemingly just to frighten me when I have no idea what I've done, a memory kept nagging at me. Well, I just figured out what it was. Back before we had children, we had a striped cat named, originally enough, Stripes.
When we first adopted Stripes, a palm full of fluff who had managed to make her lonely piercing abandoned-kitten wail heard two blocks away, we thought of naming her Claudia. She was so frightened, flinching and shaking there on the kitchen floor, being pounced on by Blackie, the palm full of black fluff we had found the day before, that she reminded us of the timid, palsied Roman emperor on the TV mini-series we had watched.
Stripes grew to be a sweet affectionate pet. She and Blackie were inseparable. But she never lost her timid stripe.
Seth, during a period when he was depressed much of the time, sometimes entertained himself by holding Stripes up near the ceiling above his head, with one hand. He would grin and say, "Look at her! She's petrified! I can feel her shaking!"
"Then why do you do that?" I asked.
"It's an experiment," he chuckled, "I never do anything other than hold her up here like this, but she always thinks I'm going to do something worse. It doesn't fit into any category of behavior she understands, so she's afraid of it."
I remember that I was frightened, too. Of the pleasure he took in scaring her. This wasn't the kind of man I had thought I had married.
Is that what he's doing with me, now? Enjoying seeing me afraid of his illogical attacks? He has never hurt me physically, just the glaring and muttering and threatening stance.
One time when I was in graduate school, studying at night in the math sciences library, something about the way a guy was standing between the shelves made me look up. There he was - exposing himself to me. A feeling of unreality washed over me. My knees turned to jelly as I scooped up my books and papers and practically ran toward the door. As I stopped to tell the girls at the checkout desk, the perpetrator, all zipped up again, hurriedly passed us and left the library.
I didn't want to be alone, just then, so I went to the suite of some undergraduate friends, and told them of my adventure. A psych major told me that there was nothing to be afraid of, really. These guys rarely have the guts to actually do anything to the women they gross out.
I did know that men who expose themselves or make obscene phone calls are not going to attack or even approach a woman. And I wasn't an innocent little freshman. I had had boyfriends, and hey, this was the 70's - we were pretty open about sex. So why had I had such a strong emotional response?
I realized that I was frightened for the same reason the baby monkeys we read about in Psych 101 are afraid of dolls that look sort of like monkeys, but just aren't close enough. I was repelled because this human standing a couple of meters from me was so different from what I expected a human being to be. I couldn't place him in the same category as the people I understand and can predict, and know how to deal with. I wanted to distance myself from him. Be with normal people. Where you can assume their behavior will stay within reasonable bounds.
I fear Seth. I can't trust him. So much of what he does just seems ... perverted.
Or something like that. I took German in high school, but never would have sat down to read a magazine article in German. Today, in the dentist's waiting room, that title on the cover of a German women's magazine - 'But, Mom! He always used to hit us!' - caught my eye. I picked it up, and read avidly. Actually able to forget that I was reading German. I think that, in learning to read Hebrew, I have learned to accept the ambiguity of reading a foreign language, and it has spilled over into my rusty German.
The article was about a woman whose husband became an invalid after abusing her and their daughter for a lifetime. The daughter tells her mother that she should just put him into an institution - how can she stand to be enslaved all day to this man who ruined their lives?
I found myself wondering if it would be any worse to be enslaved to an invalid than to an ostensibly healthy man. Would I put Seth into an institution?
Now that we have children, the radio, especially at meal time, is a disaster. When Eli was a baby, the three of us would be in the kitchen, and Seth would keep turning up the radio to drown out the crying, and Eli would cry louder to be heard above the radio, till the noise levels were unbearable. Now that the children are bigger, and supper time should be a time for conversation, that blaring radio cuts off all possibility.
That rainy Sunday when Seth was in the US, as part of my general rearrangement of furniture of all kinds, I decided we don't all fit in the kitchen to eat, anymore. And it's fantastic. Now we eat in the dining 'L', away from the radio. Of course, now the TV is on, so it's still not a family meal like what I grew up with, but at least the children watch the TV instead of competing with it, and getting Seth angry, so the din is bearable.
Seth seems so old. Last summer when he presented his passport, and Rafi's, at the bank, to arrange to convert shekels to dollars for the trip, the clerk asked if Rafi is his grandchild - making sure that there was a close enough family relationship that Seth would be eligible to have Rafi's foreign currency allowance.
It's hard for me to believe that he's only a couple of years older than I am – with his hunched posture, grumpy face and shaky hands. Of course, his personality has always been sort of elderly. Annoyed by every little thing. Set in his ways. Things I excused in a 25 year old because I attributed them to immaturity, and thought he would mature out of, were really premature aging of the spirit, I guess.
He really does seem more like some old Grampa with the children than their father. They like to tumble around with family friends and uncles, as they would never think of attempting with Seth.
These are my feelings, as of today, about my marriage. I think it has been finished for years, and we might as well admit it.
I don't like Seth. What could be called 'love' is more like pity. I don't need him. I don't understand him. I guess you could say I don't know him. Most important, I don't trust him. He doesn't provide companionship, support, or anything else people marry in order to have.
I married Seth on a gamble. He was unusual, but his family seemed so normal and healthy, and I figured he would mature. An unattached person has a right to be however he wants. But he decided to marry. Not every behavior is moral anymore. If he had told me ahead of time what all his theories and principles would force our life to be, I wouldn't have married him. I don't think he had any right to make me a guinea pig for his ideas.
Ten years ago when Seth said "This is how I am - you can take it or leave it" - I should have left it. But then I wouldn't have these three wonderful children. Further indication that if Seth had given himself a chance, he could have been a normal, healthy person. Genetically, Seth must be OK, to have good parents and good children, no?
I had been thinking that as long as the children are living at home, I could bear having Seth around, because I have the children for normal, emotionally stable company. I would never be able to go back to the way life was before we had children, trapped in the same house, alone, with him. But now he's hurting them.
But if he has been such a creep even while we are ostensibly on the same side, I dread the thought of the tantrum he would throw if I tried to leave him. I have seen how Seth treats 'the other side' and I dread being there. So often I have wished he would just cease to exist. It's ironic that it's for the same reasons that I don't want to live with him, that I dread to part with him.
There have been periods when Seth is pleasant, and life with him is quite nice. But those periods are shorter and farther apart, and I know it's futile to hope, as I have been, that something will happen so that THAT Seth will be in permanent residence.
Seth is in such a good mood! First that phone call just to say hi, then he came home and asked how my day had been.
The children and I had eaten supper already, because otherwise the bedtimes get so late, and usually if I so much as hint at what he might want to eat, he'll eat absolutely anything other than what I mention or prepare. But I told him there were left-over (halves of the children's) veggie cheese burgers, and he said, "Good," and heated them up and ate them. Later, he was prowling around looking for a snack, and I mentioned some cookies we brought from Ruthi's, and he took that suggestion as well.
Poor Leora and I had been working all day on this backlog of arithmetic homework - while I tried to do all the other motherly things at the same time - and after he ate, Seth sat down with her and patiently explained, and helped for an hour and a half. He NEVER helps with homework! He's good at it, and she responded.
Then, instead of his grouchy, "When are you going to be through down there?" he asked me whether he could help with anything. I mentioned that all the numbers we had written down for the US taxes, the night before, had to be typed in on the computer. So he sat down and put them in - more than an hour's work. And cheerful the whole time.
I wouldn't mind anything else if he could just be cheerful.
I had done all that painting, in the afternoon, and Seth had said at the outset that just to whitewash over dirt doesn't do any good because whitewash is not optically opaque. But before he went upstairs, he said, "This looks good. It covered pretty well." That's got to be the first time he's ever changed his mind about anything.
Then this morning, I was downstairs and Rafi woke up early and I could hear him and Seth playing, and Seth singing the ABC song with him, and then Eli joined them and I could hear them laughing and squealing. It reminded me of rough-housing around with Dad. I realized that I'm trying to be father and mother to my children. Or at least to provide what my two parents did for us. Do the caring and kissing and managing and loving and feeding and clothing that the mother 'should' do, and also fixing bikes and teaching them to ride, and tumbling around and giving piggy back rides and having them help fix things around the house and giving explanations about things, which were the things Dad did for us. I'm able to do the fathering things, and I like it at least as well as the nurturing part, but it pleases me to see Seth acting like what I expect from a father.
So I don't know what's going on with Seth, but I wish it went on more often.
Last week I sat down at the computer and wrote out all my feelings about my lousy marriage. Now, just because Seth has acted like a normal human being for twenty-four hours, it seems tolerable.
I get so angry with Seth. There are so many pleasures that are denied to us because of circumstances. Why would anyone think that he's somehow 'better' if he can deny himself even the ones he could have. I'm not speaking just of sex, but of enjoying your children, and the people around you, and your own emotions. Just being happy. For himself, I just pity him, but for what he does to this family, I'm angry.
I'm going to print this up and put it in my wallet. So that when I lose heart, and forget that he is ever nice to us, I can take this out and read it.
We got the numbers all cranked out for Uncle Sam, and I went upstairs and got the checkbook. I was about to write the check, when Seth cried, "Not that checkbook!" and grabbed it away from me. "That's ... You don't have signature rights to that account."
He's so funny. He knows I have money from Grampa. The statements come to the house. And, actually, I knew he must have money from his family, because Mindy said something about Jerry's money, and I know their parents do everything equally. I guess the bank statements are in the big envelope he gets from his mother every month.
It's not that I have any interest in his money, but why can't it be open and above board? What is he afraid I'll do if I know he has money of his own? He's so funny.
For three months, now, since Seth's trip to the US, I've been going to folk dancing every week. I love dancing! All the different aspects. It's good exercise. It's rewarding to see my progress month after month. And I go into a different mode when I'm moving to music along with other people.
This whole time, Seth has been going through all sorts of machinations to get me to stay home instead of going. We have had the business with the porch light, and of course muttering about having to put the children to bed. I always have them bathed and PJd, and Rafi in bed. Eli and Leora are actually in bed, or are all ready.
Then, last week Seth said (whined) that he would like to go to dancing together, as we did in college. My group is for women only, but I asked around, and found that there's a mixed group on the local college campus. I wish he had said something earlier. I wasn't trying to exclude him. I guess, again, I misinterpreted his hints.
So this week, instead of going to my group on Monday, we danced together last night. It was so nice.
It's true, isn't it, that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. All the nastiness to get me to quit, only made me more determined to get out of this unfriendly house and dance, dance, dance! Now that he's being friendly and offering to go with me, I'll gladly stay home from my group.
Oh well, enough scribbling. Seth's parents are coming in two days, to be with us for Passover. I've got to get this place ship shape!
So. OK. Here I am. Sitting here on my bedroom floor with the sixteen years of my marriage spread around me in the form of diaries and letters and notes from sessions with professionals.
That last entry was just before Passover. Then Seth's parents came, and we were busy with visits and trips in Israel's beautiful spring weather.
And then at one point, Seth's mother got me off by myself and - I guess to encourage me - told me that I should consider myself lucky that Seth only hits our children, and not me. And that he's not nearly as bad as some of the abusive fathers who make headlines in the newspapers.
Maybe she has been telling herself this for so long that it sounds reasonable to her. But somehow, her words just brought into stark relief the awfulness we've been living. The best that his most enthusiastic champion can say to defend him is to point out that he compares favorably with the most despicable element of society.
And her illogical logic sounds so much like the kind of crazy irrational things I have been telling myself all along.
If I were reading a book that contained a character like Seth, with a wife like me, I'd have decided chapters ago that he's a monster and she's an idiot.
So, for the past week, I've been going in to work an hour late each day, to read through things I've written over the years about this 'marriage'. Hoping to find a pattern. If I can understand why he does what he does, maybe I can understand how to help him out of it.
I skimmed it all, and I cried over some parts. I sighed at some points, and at others I huffed, Seth-like, in anger. Sometimes at him, but mostly at myself.
And, statistician that I am, I loaded all the data into my memory. All of this history, plus the discouraging revelations at Sandy last fall, plus the encouraging revelations from my friends and family during the weeks he was away in February, plus the crummy way I found out about the beginning and end of his trip to the States, plus the realization, on our sixteenth anniversary, that I've been flogging a dead marriage all this time, without progress. Plus Seth's mother's comment, last week.
I had set out to see if any subtle patterns emerge. To see what seems to cause Seth to be particularly bad. What seems to help. What the children and I might be doing, inadvertently, to make him worse.
My advisor Charlie, z"l, back at the Stat department, taught us all sorts of sensitive statistical analyses. These enabled us to determine whether we were looking at statistics that were significant.
But Charlie always said that the first test to apply to any set of data was the test for 'Inter-Ocular Trauma'.
"Sometimes," said Charlie, "the results are so clear-cut that their significance just hits you right between the eyes."
There's no doubt about it, is there. All my benefit of the doubt was misplaced because there's no doubt. The good periods I latched onto with such hopefulness ... weren't really so good. Compared to the behavior of a healthy husband and father, they weren't good at all. And even if his behavior had been exemplary during the calm periods, we could never relax because we had no idea when the bad times would return.
So. It's bad. It's a bad, failed, abusive marriage. It's not a marriage by any definition except that there's a piece of paper in a file cabinet in upstate New York that says so. And that it says, 'married' on my identity card and on Form 1040.
It’s not a marriage. I don’t have a husband. My children don’t have a father. We don’t have a home.
I should leave. I should get the children out.
Divorce. The word always brings to my mind the day I went home with a girl in my scout troop back in junior hi. Kathy lived over the butcher shop with her mother and younger brothers. She was the only person I knew who lived in an apartment. Maybe that was the only apartment there was, in that upper-middle class town in the suburbs. I realize, now, that Kathy's mom was doing whatever she had to, to have her children in one of the best school systems in the state.
That would be us, wouldn't it. The children would have to leave this nice house for a small apartment. The boys would share a bedroom. I might sleep with Leora. Though, here in Israel, most people live in apartments. Houses with a yard, even a row house like this one, are rare.
I doubt if I would see much of the money that's been socked away into savings over the years. I have no idea where it is. No idea of the amounts. No proof, even, of its existence.
And if Seth were angry enough, he would fight me for custody of the children, wouldn't he. Knowing that they are what I want the most.
I can't leave while he's in this depression, can I? Or whatever has been wrong with him for the past two and a half years.
It would certainly be convenient if he would drop dead and we could get all of the assets and none of the retaliation.
Barring that remote eventuality, I just have to wait for him to get into a better mood and then jump ship before he sinks under again.
But till then ... what?
The book Kay sent me, Dance of Anger, says that you do things to allow the other person's behavior. Seth and I are in a typical approacher-distancer relationship. He gets enough companionship and attention from my attempts at closeness, to fulfill him. His emotional fulfillment allows him to maintain his macho image and push me away.
Even when he slams around and is totally hateful, until very recently I have scurried around trying to love him and make him feel loved. Until very recently, judging from my behavior, he could think that he was the greatest husband in the world. Why should he be nice to us if I'm spoiling him rotten, when he's nasty?
But since February I have stopped approaching. I let him have what he claims he wants.
While I was pretending that I liked him, I partly convinced myself. Now that I have stopped the charade, I realize that any shred of a relationship was coming from me. I never liked Seth. He's just not likable. Sometimes he says things with his dry sense of humor that could be funny if you weren't already dismayed by his sour attitude toward the part of the world that exists outside his own skin. I doubt if anyone ever said, "Hey, I like that guy." I guess we're all selfish enough to only like another person when there is something in it for us. A selfish un-generous person just isn't likable.
But I could have loved him. As you love your children and other family members even if you don't like them much at the moment. You take them into yourself, and embrace them as an extension of yourself, and just assume that you love them, and assume that they will always be part of your life. You indulge their idiosyncrasies.
I have come to love Seth's parents and his whole family that way. Seth's mother drives me crazy at times (as I do, her) but I love her. I have no doubts about that. I want the best for her, and I know that she loves me. She is part of me, and even if Seth and I split up, I wouldn't be able to, and wouldn't see any reason to erase that bond of love with his family.
Seth has never loved us like that. As you know, dear diary, I have been holding my breath for a decade and a half, wishing and hoping that that would happen. But there is no point in hoping. So for my own peace of mind, I am, here and now, stopping the sixteen-year-long race after love.
Another thing I have been doing is to get my hopes up each time he is nice for awhile, and convince myself that by doing everything possible during his nice periods I can prolong them, or make them more frequent.
No more of that. Now I've just got to protect myself and the children from the bad times. I've got to think of him as a boarder in the house. Not pin any expectations on him. Not depend on him for anything. He brings in money as any good boarder does, and helps with some of the chores. If a little sex comes my way, well, the right boarder might provide such perks, too, but you wouldn't go wondering what you had done wrong if he didn't. I've got to get to the point where I expect the bad times as the norm.
Rafi turned four today. The Jacarandas are in bloom all over town, as they were on the beautiful hospital lawns during my weeks there when he was born.
The Dekel family performed a little dance this evening that was totally typical of our interactions. Each person played his typical role in the family ballet, with well-rehearsed perfection.
The children and I had spent the afternoon making and decorating Rafi’s birthday cake. He is enamored of helicopters just now, and had asked for one for his birthday. So Eli and Leora planned and made him an elaborate helicopter cake to go with the present. It involved tinfoil and pink wax pellets and a multitude of little wicks, and frosting in garish colors nearly as thick as the cake is high. It was so much fun. The two big children really made Rafi feel special - asking how he wanted this or that. Rafi is finally starting to talk. It's so much fun to finally be able to tap into his mind! Eli asked if Rafi wanted the helicopter painted in camouflage colors, and then gave one of his patient, detailed explanations geared to his four-year-old audience. Desert camouflage versus forest camouflage. How planes need to be camouflaged from below to match the sky and from above to match the ground. I wonder where Eli comes upon all his information. Leora was in charge of mixing frosting colors and managed to make Rafi feel that he was directing the whole operation. We had such a good time, and it really came out nicely.
As I was taking pictures of the finished creation, the phone rang. The giggles froze in the air. It was probably Abba. I ran upstairs to answer. If it is Seth, the children will be hoping he's calling to say he'll be home late, and they tend to cheer and screech, "Yay! Abba’s taking the late bus!". I don't like to risk Seth's hearing that, so I try not to have them near the phone when I talk to him.
Not wasting time on a salutation, Seth announced, "We're going for falafel for Rafi's birthday. Have them ready when I get home."
"Wait a minute!" I blurted before he could hang up, wincing that it had come out sounding like a command, "You know, Rafi can't really eat falafel so well." He still has that strong gag reflex that kicks in whenever he tries to eat anything with little pieces. "Also, Eli and Leora had falafel at school for Jerusalem Day."
"So?"
"So maybe, since it's Rafi's birthday, he could choose what we eat."
"Sure," sarcastically, "He can decide anything he wants, Shlomit, as long as it's falafel. You just make sure they're ready." Slam.
I hoped I hadn't wrecked the evening by trying to save it.
OK. Totally typical so far. Then I went to the totally typical next phase - playing diplomat. Being the buffer between Seth and the children. Trying to make everybody happy. Every mother finds herself doing this, but I seem to do nothing but. I plastered my village idiot grin on my face, and came downstairs to where the children were. "Hey, guess what! That was Abba! We're going out tonight for Rafi's birthday!"
Faces fell. "But the cake," Leora wailed, "We want to eat at home so we can have the cake for dessert."
"Great!" I added the dashboard doggie nod of the head. We're having fun, here! "We'll go out for falafel, and then come home and eat cake!" Nod, nod, nod, nod, nod!
"Leora and I had falafel at school, Ima. Maybe we could order pizza. You like pizza, don't you Rafi?"
I broadened my grin and raised my eyebrows to indicate what a fantastic time we were all going to try to have tonight. "Oh ... well ... uh ... Abba specifically mentioned falafel ..."
OK. Now we all knew the score.
"Oof!" Leora oofed. "Why does Abba always make us eat falafel? He knows Rafi chokes on falafel. Call him and tell him we have to eat something else. Rafi, you don't want falafel for your birthday, do you?"
Rafi looked at me to see whether he did or not.
Typical, typical. Seth commands. I try to work it out so Seth is satisfied, without making the rest of us miserable. Leora tries to set us all straight. Rafi watches. Now it was Eli's turn:
"Leora, wait. The important thing is for this to be a nice birthday. It's not so important what we eat or who decides what we eat." Gee, why can't his father have these insights? "If we make a fuss and try to change Abba's mind, he'll be mad, and even if we do eat pizza, it won't be any fun. Let's just do what Abba wants."
"And then come back home and have Rafi's helicopter cake!" I reminded them.
When Seth got home, courageous Leora very nicely and reasonably explained to Seth the reasons that it made more sense to go out for malawah or to have pizza delivered. Eli, pained look on his face, said, a few times, "Leora, no. Leora, it's OK!"
This time Goliath won, though. Seth stood there with his arms folded across his chest and stated, "Unless it's falafel, I refuse to eat anything."
Someday Leora will be a lawyer. For now, she's just a little girl, so she responded to Eli's pleading looks and said, "OK." So we went out.
Seth was ... grim. As usual. Ordering falafel is an ordeal for him. He thinks the guy will cheat you out of a falafel ball if you don't watch carefully and double check everything. I don't know how many falafel balls this constant vigilance has earned us over the years, but going out to eat with Seth is a tense, unfriendly experience. In fact, if I know anything about Israeli psychology, someone who acts friendly is more likely to make the guy behind the counter feel generous.
We finally got our order and sat down. Rafi was picking out his cucumber, and in the process tore the pita and showered salad all over the table. Leora ate a few bites and declared that it wasn't as good as the falafel they had had for lunch. Luckily, I had only ordered a half, and managed to eat most of hers. Seth was performing his normal mealtime routine - growling at the two of them for wasting good food, shaking Rafi when he coughed salad all over the table, glaring at the near-tears expression on Eli's face as the poor child tried to force his own food down. And of course Seth was beaming me his hate look - I guess it was my fault that Rafi was choking and that Eli and Leora weren't eating, and that poor Eli was afraid of Seth and mortified to have all this happening in public.
Finally we were finished, and it was a relief to get up, clean up the table, and go. We were all thirsty - getting drinks at these places costs almost as much as the food - and the children wanted to get home to the birthday cake.
As the children started talking with great anticipation about helicopters and cake, Seth announced, "Now, we're going to get ice cream."
Thinking maybe I could get my suggestion in before he had made it clear that he meant cones, so he wouldn't have to admit he was taking my idea, I said, "Great! We'll stop at the supermarket on the way home and get a liter of ice cream to eat with Rafi's helicopter birthday cake!"
"No we won't." Disgusted glare. "We're getting cones," Seth growled, and he headed up Herzl street. The children were whispering their disappointment, and I was trying to point out that the ice cream place was sort of on the way back to the car, anyway - being glad none of them have studied geometry yet.
Seth wound up eating Rafi's cone, and I ate most of Eli's and Leora's. I don't even like ice cream. Certainly not when it's a warm, sodden second-hand mess. Is it any less a waste of money to force it down my throat - an unpleasant experience and calories I don't need - than to just leave it for the cats who patrol the dumpster? And since it was Seth's idea to get us ice cream we didn't want, how is it my responsibility not to waste it?
Of course, by the time we got home, Rafi was too tired to have his cake and present and the cards the big children made him last night, and nobody was in the mood for a party anyway. So we'll have it all tomorrow.
Does Seth think that because he spent precious money on food, and spent time conducting a family outing - something that's unpleasant for him - that he's doing something positive for the family?
Is he trying to get back at me for taking the children out for Eli's birthday a couple of years ago? On my initiative, we went for pizza then, and Seth made sure that the evening turned into a shambles.
Seth only sees how our family functions when he's here. The happy constructive times together, like what we had this afternoon decorating the cake, don't happen when Seth is around. As far as he knows, the family he has is the one he was with tonight.
Kay sent me an article recently about a family's emotional 'bank account'.
A healthy family builds up a reserve of potential for emotional support. Through talking and sharing and helping and empathizing. Everybody makes deposits to the 'account'. By helping with chores, cooperating with decision making, cheering up someone who's down, complimenting a family member who has accomplished something, or just by greeting and smiling and being nice.
In any family, there are times when one member or another needs special consideration. Someone might be ill or depressed or going through a rough period - because they hit an awkward age, or are starting a new school or job, have lost a friend. Or maybe it's just a birthday or special occasion and that child deserves to feel especially loved.
In a healthy family where the reserve has been growing over the years, these 'withdrawals' go smoothly. The family rallies, and no one else suffers because one member needs extra TLC.
In a family where everyone has been selfish over the years, there's no reserve. Any member's crisis must be weathered on his own, and throws the whole family into crisis.
There can be a run on this emotional bank. If family members feel they'll never get their investment back, they'll stop making deposits. They'll just each make sure to get whatever they can. Each family member will look out for number one. Why praise a sibling's painting if your poem went unnoticed because a chronically difficult member of the family was soaking up all the attention?
Yesterday's birthday excursion is a perfect illustration of how we make deposits and withdrawals from our bank.
All afternoon the children and I were making deposits. By the time Seth called, we were all high on camaraderie. Rafi felt special, and Eli and Leora felt pleased to be the big siblings who can help their little brother feel special. I was beaming, just from watching the interactions. We were all proud of the cake that had come out so well.
Then ... enter Seth. Needy Seth. I was about to say that he couldn't stand to see us happy - couldn't stand to see all that emotional health / wealth pooled there, and decided to take some for himself. But I don't know if he was even aware of our mood. He was in his usual bad mood, and didn't tune in to our good mood at all.
He came into our emotional bank by force and demanded, at gun point, that we empty the coffers. He wasn't happy until we were all just as miserable as he was.
But, no. Here, the analogy to a bank breaks down. Because even after robbing the bank, Seth was no richer than before. For him it turns to Leprechaun gold. Or else he has a hole in his emotional pocket. He's insatiable. He drains us, and yet is not, himself, ever filled.
Poor Seth. Poor all of us.
A few weeks ago Seth said he would like me to go to a mixed folk dance group with him on Tuesdays, instead of going to my women's group with Haggit at the community center on Mondays.
The first week was very nice. My parents met each other at a folk dance club in New York, so dancing together has very romantic associations for me.
The next week, Seth tired out after half an hour and we went home early.
The week after that, he was too tired to go at all - after I had passed up the chance to dance with my group the night before.
Then for a couple of weeks, I asked him, each Monday, if we were going to dance on Tuesday, and he said sure, if he felt up to it. But each week he had a different excuse, and we didn't go.
So, I just told him that I certainly don't mind dancing twice a week, so I'll go to my group, and whenever he wants to go together, the next night, he only has to say.
I haven't heard any more about dancing together, since.
When I went back to dancing, after a month, Haggit asked where I had been. I thought a minute and said that sometimes Shalom Bait (peace at home) is more important to me, and sometimes it's more important to dance!
It was so nice to get your letter. I'm glad our vacation plans will fit in with yours. There has been a change at this end, though, since I wrote; Seth found out that he won't be working at the lab in the US, so we'll all be together for the whole month of August.
I can't imagine what he'll do for a month, not working. I'm nervous that he'll just sit in on my time with everyone I haven't seen for two years. Instead of joining in with a conversation, he so often just takes pot shots at each sentence I utter, in a barely audible undertone. It's very distracting, and it makes me more and more careful of what I say - like writing a letter knowing it's going to be censored. If its desired effect is to make me say hardly anything at all, and cut conversations short, it succeeds!
The last time he did this was last month at the parent-teacher conference after Rafi's birthday party at day care. Little asides to me in English after each thing I said to the teacher. Sometimes just a tisk, but after a few put-downs, that's enough to make me read the worst between the lines. I don't mind that he disagrees with me. That's davka what people converse for - to exchange ideas. But appropriate behavior would be to say out loud, "I don't agree ..." or "I think ..." and then everybody would be involved. I wonder what it looks like to other people that there's this little half-conversation going on, from which they’re excluded.
I'll have to confront Seth with this, sometime before next month.
Things are easier for me at home now that I have been distancing myself from Seth emotionally and involvementally (new word?), but I'm still uncomfortable to be with him in public. Some friends from work invited me to a ballet at Ceasarea, and since Seth likes ballet, he'll be coming, too. I'm so different with Seth from how I am at work, that it will be strange being all together. Ah, well, we'll mostly just be watching the dancing, right?
Well, that's it for today. Time to get the children up for day camp. Love, Shlomit
Don't hemorrhoids seem like the affliction of an old man? I suppose I should feel sorry for Seth, but it just seems such poetic justice. I've been suffering with his anal personality all these years - now finally he gets to suffer with it. The one part of his body he'd most like to pretend didn't exist, is the one he has to focus on. The other reason I don't feel sorry for him is because of the crummy way I found out about his affliction – a phone call from his mother.
I guess he still thinks I don't know about his problem, because he'll say, "I'm going downtown on my way home from work," and then some new procto-something medicine appears in the bathroom.
Back when I was in college, if someone came back from a trip to Israel, other kids who had been here would ask, first thing, “Hey – how did you like the toilet paper over there!” The answer was always, “Paper? You found toilet paper? All I ever saw over there was toilet cardboard! Ouch! I still haven’t fully recovered!” Tissue was unheard of. What you found on the roll was coarser than a paper towel. Stiff scratchy gray stuff made from recycled newspaper. If you examined it, you could see snippets of words and sentences. A corn cob would have seemed sissy stuff after using that Israeli TP for awhile.
Gradually, though, of course, Israel caught up with the rest of the civilized world, and they started selling tissue here.
But Seth has stuck with the heavy duty (no pun intended) stuff. I think he is terrified that the soft tissue will tear and his finger will go through. Maybe that was his main reason for coming to live in Israel – the industrial strength toilet paper. The thick TP is way cheaper per roll than tissue, but of coarse (pun intended) a roll only lasts a couple of days because the stuff is so thick. A feature of every Israeli bathroom used to be a hanging pouch thing to hold half a dozen extra rolls, because they get used up so fast.
By now, there’s only one stall at the shuk where he can even get the recycled newspaper. I don’t know if they’re even manufacturing it anymore, or if there’s a warehouse full someplace waiting for the Dekels to slowly empty it out. (I wonder – when that source dries up, will he just cut the Jerusalem Post into squares for us to use?)
Well, when we came back from the US, this summer, Seth brought a roll of soft TP from the hotel where we had the family reunion, and he put it on top of the toilet tank in our/his bathroom. When the roll on the holder was finished, I put 'his' roll on, but he snatched it away, saying that he didn't want everybody using it (meaning me, since it's our bathroom) and the soft roll went back up on top of the tank.
So Seth uses the soft TP while his wife and little children still use the cardboard. It’s no wonder all three of my children were toilet trained at day care long before it caught on at home. Their reward for using the toilet at home was to get their little tushie scraped raw! And I don’t need to describe what that stuff does to an oft-blown runny nose, when one of them has a cold.
Well, last night, while I was sorting laundry on our bed, I heard Seth explode and start swearing and growling and muttering, there in the bathroom. When I opened the door a crack to see if he needed help with something, I saw him standing there holding his precious hotel TP – totally sodden, and dripping into the toilet. He had knocked it off its perch into the bowl.
Poetic justice. I didn’t laugh at that point, of course, or I wouldn’t be alive to write this.
I was just so so glad I wasn't the one who'd knocked it in!
It serves him right, if you ask me. Don't the rest of us deserve soft TP, too?
Such creepiness. If he’s going to decide to economize by buying scratchy TP, he could at least use it himself, too. He’s so good at finding special dispensations for himself.
To move on to his other end, Seth has a perpetually stuffed-up nose and can't taste anything unless it's really sweet or salty or sour or spicy. I feel sorry for him, because I love all the subtle tastes, and I feel cheated when I have a cold and can't smell or taste.
Seth’s physical problems mirror his personality. His hemorrhoids parallel his OCD. His myopia makes it impossible for him to focus on anyone other than himself. His anosmia mirrors his lack of sensitivity to what’s going on around him.
Seth knows he is impaired in this respect, and yet when he cooks, he cooks for himself. Not for the rest of us with clear noses.
Seth states that he doesn't taste any difference between fresh bread and the five day old bread he makes us eat toward the end of the week. I believe him. But does he really think he's right and the whole rest of the population of Israel is deluded? Guess so.
Just about every week, Seth makes a big batch of coleslaw, because cabbage is the cheapest vegetable. His coleslaw has always been too salty for my tastes. I refrained from commenting until once, about a year ago, when it was so extremely over-salted, that I thought it would be obvious to him. I took a bite, and my whole body called out, "Don't swallow that!" As though you tried to drink a glass of sea water. I suggested that he use a teaspoon instead of shaking the salt from the bag. Oh-oh. I dared to suggest that Seth do something.
Since then, to punish me for that infraction, the slaw has gotten saltier and saltier. Seth asked angrily, a few months ago, why I don't force the children to eat it, and I admitted that I don't think it's good for them. The benefit they would get from the cabbage, as starved as we are for vegetables, isn't worth the salt intake. By now his slaw has gotten so salty that even Seth can't eat it straight, but eats it in a sandwich as you would eat Marmite or anchovy paste. If I'm eating a tossed salad, I'll put in 1/4 coleslaw as a seasoning. The taste is good, except for the salt.
Well, last night we were at a wedding, and there was coleslaw. I took a bite and found it to be too salty, and left it. Seth took a bite of his and crowed, "See, this is almost as salty as mine! This is how it's supposed to be!" Nora, sitting with us, said, "Are you kidding? This stuff is way over-salted. I took one bite and spit it into my napkin."
Last year, after Rafi's birthday party at day care, the teacher sat down with us to chat over a cup of coffee. She and I talked, but Seth, instead of joining in the conversation, sat there muttering comments in English, every time I opened my mouth. "You sound just like Nora!" or "Oh, right!" or "You're trying to make it sound as though Eli was an early talker!" or “Sure, because your children are always perfect!”
I found it really hard to talk with the teacher, with this little running commentary going on. I was trying to continue the thread of the conversation, and at the same time process his mutterings.
And I can imagine how strange it seemed to Zvia, who couldn't understand what he was saying.
When Seth is around, I try not to say much to other people in his hearing, but in this case the teacher was sitting there talking directly to us, so I couldn't very well sit there with my mouth shut, as I guess Seth wanted me to. Plus it wasn't just small talk - we were discussing the progress OUR child was making in day care.
Soon afterwards I found out that we would be spending our whole vacation together, visiting his family and mine. I like to talk to his family and especially to mine, and I can't, when he's sabotaging the conversation. So I told him, before we went, that I would like him to not do that thing with the asides. Either join in the conversation, or say nothing. I teach my children not to be obnoxious and claim my attention when I'm talking to other people. Didn't he ever learn that?
So we were in the US for the month of August. We were together the whole time.
Then last night Seth announced, out of the clear blue, "Well, I hope you're happy! All the while we were in the US last summer, any time you started to talk to somebody, I made sure to leave the room!"
Actually, I hadn't noticed. But why take it to such extremes? Other husbands and wives manage to converse with people successfully.
Seth came home in a bad mood again last night and just started scrapping and pushing and picking fights until he had all three of his children in tears. Then he grabbed Newsweek and stomped upstairs yelling that he can't hear himself think, with the racket.
I wonder if he really just wants to be off by himself, but thinks he needs an excuse.
So. The new action-Shlomit followed him upstairs.
"Seth," I pushed the bedroom door open as he was trying to close it. "Seth ... I was thinking ... maybe we need to reorganize things in the house so you can have a den. Plenty of men have a den where they can just get away from the noisy family from time to time.
"Maybe we could finish off the attic or, for now, we could outfit this room. It's big enough. Put your lounge chair up here. Build you plenty of bookshelves, get another TV just for up here. Another computer, maybe. And ... we could even put a little kitchenette in the walk-in closet. A little refrigerator and maybe a microwave.
"If you want, it could be off limits to the children. Even to me, if you want ...” I couldn't tell from his expression what he was thinking, so I plunged ahead.
"So that you ... so that when you're ... you know ... when you're just not in the mood to be with us, you can just come up here."
"Forget it, Shlomit. I don't want to be isolated from the rest of the family!"
"Well, when you feel like being with us, you can be! This would just be for the ... other times."
"Forget it." He closed the door I had been holding open, and I went back downstairs.
Doesn't he think he's already isolated from the rest of the family?
Now, in most wives' diaries, this entry would sound like this:
"I've been writing for a couple of weeks now that we're hoping Seth will be made head of the project. He is certainly the most logical choice. I knew he would be finding out today, so I made a nice dinner - not too fancy, in case it didn't go as we're hoping. When he came in the door, he gave me a thumbs-up and his happy smile told the whole story. I gave him a bear hug and told him I'm so proud of him. 'Guess what, children!' I turned to them, 'Abba is the leader of a whole group of people, now! The bosses above Abba know that he is really good at making decisions about the experiments. Come give Abba a big hug to show him how proud we are! It's a good thing we made that smiley-face cake this afternoon, isn't it! We can celebrate! Eli, go check in the ice box if there's a bottle of fizzy wine so we can do LeChaim!"
Right?
Well, with us, things don't go that way at all.
A decade ago, when Seth went incommunicato, he said it was so that problems wouldn't be made to seem more real by putting them into words. I'm sure there are problems of that type. A one-time offense, or a misinterpretation that will blow over if you just ignore it.
But I didn't realize that the policy was going to extend to a plain and simple transfer of information.
So often, when I try to tell Seth something about the children's school or health or just something a sibling is planning or doing, or something that happened at work, Seth sings his "Not Interested" song. He used to just say, "I'm not interested." Then he put a tune to it and sang, "Not Intres-ted." to the tune of the NBC network chimes. Now he usually just hums the tune, and I know to stop talking even mid-word. I've been conditioned like a rat in a psych lab.
Eli said, a few weeks ago, that it's actually possible, sometimes, to have a conversation with Abba. His technique, he informed me, is to just say, "So, Abba. How's work, lately?" And then Seth will sometimes start to talk about work, and all you have to do is to keep him going for awhile. Say, "So, what happened, then?" or "So, how can he fix it?" or "Wow! So much improvement just by moving that one lens!" or "Too bad they didn't listen to you!"
It has been a dry couple of weeks as far as words from Seth go. Nothing wrong with that. But if it stretches too long, I'm afraid he'll go back to being depressed all the time. So last night, in the shower, where I have a captive audience, I tried Eli's technique. I said, "So, Seth, anything new at work, lately?"
He said that he hadn't been doing any actual work for the past week - he's busy doing performance evaluations. I didn't know what he meant. I had thought that it was the bosses who had to sweat over performance reviews. Though, when I worked at Xerox, they had us write up the main things we had accomplished. Maybe at Seth’s lab they do it that way.
"It took you a week to write up your review?" I said, to keep him going, realizing too late that it might sound like a criticism.
"Well, I have to do it for everybody in the group." He sounded annoyed. At me or at them? Maybe they have to be done in English, so he helps everyone?
"Why don't they do their own?" Everything I say sounds like a criticism. I should just let it drop.
"Well, I'm the project head, now. I do the reviews for all the people under me."
"You're project head, Seth? Wow! That's great! Wow! Your mother's going to be in seventh heaven when you tell her!"
"I told my parents."
"Oh ... and were they excited?" Stupid question, but I thought Seth was probably proud to have been made a manager. I wanted to keep the conversation going in case he wanted to brag a little.
"I guess so. I don't remember. I told them a couple of months ago. When they were here at Passover."
"Oh." More like five months ago. Ever feel like a deflated balloon? "Ah. I thought maybe this was recent ..."
"No. A few months."
"Oh."
I know he doesn't like me to come home and talk about work, but I think I've always let him know that I'm interested in his work. Isn't a big promotion the kind of thing a person would want to share with someone who will feel as happy about it as he does? Seth can't really enthuse to his colleagues at work, because all of them were either in the running or they weren't, and now he's the boss and that distances.
Golda Meir once told the Arabs, "Your worst crime against us is not killing our sons. It's forcing us to kill your sons." Not only does Seth not love us, he has always cheated me of the opportunity to love and cherish my husband.
So, what do I say, now, I wondered. Instead of worrying about how it will sound, I'll just tell him what I'm feeling.
"Seth, I feel badly that you didn't tell me. I wish you had shared your promotion with me, so that I could enjoy it with you."
"OK. Now I've told you."
OK. Now he's told me.
Was Seth reluctant to tell me about his promotion because he has effectively prevented me from being considered for advancement at work, and he feels embarrassed?
Back in my first job here, when everyone else was working overtime and crazy shifts, he demanded that I be sitting in our gloomy silent boring apartment with him. (I tried to work the word 'home' into the last half of that sentence, but it just wouldn't go in.) When Menahem left the group, they brought a new group leader in from the outside. Someone they could rely on to be there.
And all those nights when he was working that second job, when Leora was a baby. Advancing his career at my expense and that of the family.
And when he refused to take time off to take care of Eli when the poor little boy was sick with hepatitis and mumps, so that I could work a few days. I missed a month of work.
He would never consider getting someone in to clean the house, or getting a dishwasher, or letting me use the clothes drier on a regular basis, to lighten my load so that I could work more hours.
Then he chased me back to work so unceremoniously when I took that year off to recuperate from Rafi's birth, that I'm not really working in my field, now, but rather, plodding along, doing technical writing instead of enjoying the eurekas of programming.
Technical writing for a software house is interesting and rewarding. You’re called on to understand complex systems and then spoon feed the knowledge to the reader. It's like organizing a jumbled closet, which I love to do.
But programming is my passion. To work out a tricky algorithm. To strive for elegance. To track down that elusive bug. To work out ways to streamline CPU time or resource usage. To have a challenge and meet it. You’re not supposed to use tricks, but who can resist? To have someone else look at your code and ask, what the heck, and as you explain, to see comprehension creep over their faces. To write a module to control a piece of equipment, and see it responding as you wanted it to.
The best is to wake up in the morning from a half-dream about your program, and then, over your morning coffee, to have a solution slowly form to a problem you have been bashing your waking head against for days. Your own CPU went right on processing the puzzle as you slept. You’re on your way to the bus stop and your feet stop in their tracks as you realize that last night’s inspiration solves not only the problem you thought you were working on, but it also cleans up that clumsy storage crunch solution you patched together a month ago. That little 4D array that you actually saw in four dimensions in your dream, will already have the pointers organized exactly as the plotting routine needs them! The chest-bursting feeling you get when it all finally comes together and sings – you just don’t get that in technical writing. I haven’t had a eureka at work for three years.
What profession would I have followed a century earlier or later? Would I just not have had a passion, or would it have been directed in another direction? I know that 90% of the people who go to work every day hate their jobs. I feel fortunate that for thirteen years I was head over heels with mine.
And now, because Seth doesn't help with the children, I have cut back to working two-thirds of a shift. Obviously, I could never be placed in a position of responsibility if I’m working such short hours. Whereas Seth has been working overtime as a regular thing since Leora was born.
And, of course, if we do split up at some point, which is seeming more and more likely, he'll be getting his nice healthy salary, and I'll be raising the children on my puny one. As an official single parent, instead of just a virtual one, I won’t be able to concentrate any more effort on my career than I do now.
So I guess Seth realizes that the glory of being made a manager is, as Gomer Pyle used to drawl, ‘ill gotten gains’. It's due as much to my efforts as to his. He could have done it without me, but not if he expected to keep the home fires burning, too.
But then, if he feels guilty, why didn't he just come home and present me with a bottle of Champaign, and say, "Thank you for all the sacrificing you did over the years so that I could advance in my career, Shlomit! Now it's time to see what we can do so that you can also get the job satisfaction you deserve!"
Yeah, right.
If he said anything like that, I'd be upstairs feeling his forehead instead of down here writing this.
I was reading over that entry, and stopped at the paragraph about our first jobs in Israel, where I mentioned that I earned more than Seth did. Is that the key?
Was he just bummed out that I was earning more than he was, even though he had that hard-earned Ph.D. under his belt?
I’ve always assumed that it increased our compatibility – that we’re both professionals. That we live and communicate at the same intellectual level. But maybe he would have been happier with a typist or a checkout clerk.
He doesn’t attack my work-life nearly as much now that I’ve downgraded to technical writing. Maybe he thinks of me as a glorified typist. And he knows that he types better than I do. ;-)
At one of our sessions with Sandy, Seth said that instead of complaining about mean things he does, I should learn from his example and act the same way. I rejected the idea of stooping to his level, but maybe as a survival technique, it's not a bad idea.
All through the years I have shared information about myself and the children, even though he usually just sang, ‘I'm not interested!’ Since that belated revelation about his job promotion, though, I don't bother sharing information, and you know what? It gives such a feeling of power! You have something you could share but you don't. It's something mean that you're doing to the other person and he doesn't even know it.
I guess it's what Seth has been getting high on all along.
Now that I've decided to make life more normal around here, I'm going to relax my policy of obeying Seth to the letter. Start to crawl out from under his thumb. I'll look for things that are having the biggest ill effect on me, yet shouldn’t matter so much to Seth. The obvious target is all the little games he's playing - and making me an unwilling participant of - without ever explaining his rules or his reasons.
One game that comes to mind is the way we pay the bills.
Basically there are two ways you can pay bills - gas, electricity, phone, city taxes, water, schools, etc. Most people arrange a standing order for the bank to pay bills from their checking account as they come due. Otherwise, the bills come in the mail and you go to the bank or to their local branch office or to the post office and pay.
Seth has found a better way. As each bill comes to the house he looks at it, takes a pen, draws a circle around the due date and puts the bill into the napkin holder on the book shelves, along with the bills already there, in order of due date. Easy, right?
Oh, then my job is simply to check the napkin holder each day, and if there's a bill to be paid on that day, simply run to wherever it has to be paid, and simply pay it. ON THE TO-BE-PAID-BY DATE. No earlier. No matter if that day I or one of the children is sick, or there's a teacher's meeting or ballet or a doctor's appointment or speech therapy or whatever.
Last Monday I had to pay a bill at the post office on the day when pension checks are issued. Every retired person in the city was there in line for the postal bank. Normally, of course, you would say "skip it, I'll pay it another day," but of course, this was the PAY BY date, so I didn't have that freedom. So that was an afternoon lost to studies or anything else. I stood in line and the children sat on the floor in the corner with their markers and coloring books.
I stalled for several days, and then last night after the lights were out, I spoke up in a voice that didn't sound like my own, hoping I hadn't misjudged his relatively calm mood.
“Seth … we need to talk about something … about the way we pay the bills. I … well, it’s just that I work so hard to schedule my time so that I can get everything done, and … there are so many things that are beyond my control, that it's frustrating enough. And in the case of the bill paying, well, you seem to be taking something that should be within our control, and making it into a … a problem for me. I'll do the bill paying if I can be allowed to fit it into my schedule. Or else, if you really think they must be paid on the very last day, well, then maybe you could take it over. Or else just have them paid by standing order. We need to … make it more … efficient.”
I waited, in the scary silence, for his response. Each second that passed allowed more frightening possible reactions to play across my imagination.
Finally, he sat up and growled, "You just blame me for everything!" He snatched up the Optical Society Journal from his bedside table and stomped downstairs.
I called after him, "No I don't, Seth!"
But then I lay there wondering if he was right. I do blame him for this, and for the problem of my not having enough time to oversee the children's homework. And for the fact that our house is so ugly and barracks-like, and for that light-fixture with all the penises, and for the kitchen that smells like garbage, and the garden that's neglected and doing so miserably, and the fact that so much of the yard is bare dirt that gets tracked into the house, and that we eat stale bread and over-salted food ...
I lay there in the dark feeling guilty. I really am a complainer. Even though I had brought only a few of these to Seth’s attention, I did blame him, in my heart.
But this thing with the bills IS legitimate, because it's something he arranged, so he should take the responsibility for how it works out.
And he was the one who insisted that I go back to work, and now won't help with homework. And he commanded that only he's allowed to take out the garbage. He decorated the house without taking me into consideration, and I'm convinced he bought the light-fixture BECAUSE I said it's gross. And he decided to be in charge of the garden, and he dumps the disgusting dish water on the poor thing, to save water (while he luxuriates in half hour showers). It's his policy that we use up all the bread from Friday before we can buy new, and he freaks out if I put it in the freezer. He cooks and refuses to take our tastes into account.
By now I was angry. Consistently, he has made all the rules, and now he has the chutzpah to not want to take responsibility for any of it.
This might be the first time I've been mad at Seth. I'd been sad and disappointed and lonely, and frightened, and puzzled, and regretful and pitying, frustrated and just about everything else. But all these other emotions are paralyzing.
Anger spurs you to action.
Maybe they put him in charge of the group at work for the same reason I let him be in charge at home. It's easier just to let him have his way.
We were at Ruthi's kibbutz over the weekend.
They served peas in the dining hall. I finished a huge portion and as I rose to go back for more, I asked if anyone else wanted seconds. All three children scrambled to their feet clutching their plates.
When we came back to the table with our plates piled high, Ruthi said, "Wow. Do your children always like peas so much or did they just work up an appetite on the hike to see the sheep?"
I said, “I don't know if they've ever had them before. Not since day care, anyway.”
Ruthi said, "What? You don't eat peas at home?"
Seth intoned, righteously, "No, I don't buy peas because Shlomit hates them."
"I do?" I mumbled through a mouthful.
"You once said you don't like peas. So since then, I haven't bought a single pea."
I just blinked at him.
Maybe he assumes I have absolute preferences, as he does. If he dislikes something, he's insulted if anyone is misguided enough to like it. It drives him crazy that the children, his own flesh and blood, love licorice.
Maybe each shopping trip on which he doesn't buy peas counts as a decision I make, and then it's his turn again. I suspect that he doesn't really like peas much himself. He knows I'm not crazy about milk chocolate, and I haven't noticed him ban that from our cupboard. Vegetables aren't his forte anyway – he's also never bought broccoli, green beans, limas, radishes, squash or a dozen other vegetables.
It's creepy that Seth was patiently carrying on this decade-long demonstration that I wasn't even aware of.
Yesterday, Seth picked up a video tape from the table and mused, "Think how much information is on this little strip of plastic. Four hours, times scans per hour, times pixels per scan. And then for each pixel they have to store the x and the y, and the color value."
Without thinking, I answered as I would answer anyone else talking about a technical subject – if I were discussing this at work, or with the children. "But they don't have to store the x and y for each pixel, as long as the beginning of the scan has some kind of synchronization code."
Seth started arguing his original idea with such anger that I found myself backed up against the sofa, trying to get away from his shouting and gesticulating. I kept saying, "It doesn't matter! It doesn't matter!"
He finally stomped away muttering, "What do you know! Who made you the expert!"
He really knows how to make you hesitate to differ with him!
Leora told me yesterday that Abba must have thought I was perfect when he married me, so now any time I make a mistake, he figures I did it on purpose, and that's why he gets so upset.
So I guess I should take it as a compliment when he's upset with me!
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Copyright 2020 by Shlomit Weber
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