DARK BEFORE THE DAWN II

The other night I woke up at 2:30am and could not get back to sleep at all. Well, after enough drugs and diversion, yes, but I lay there quite a while. I had woken up to find that I had been locking lips with a “wonderful guy”, maybe Tagame-man, I’m not sure any more; the details of that dream are not so clear to me anymore. Its predecessor is, however: I was in my room [which appeared to be my son’s college dorm room] and was standing at the door saying goodbye to two men who were on their way down to the landing – the entire staircase as well as the room painted a blinding white. HE turned around and asked me some question like, Do you want me to discuss something else? And when I said yes, he came back up and I pulled him around the corner and kissed him. Hard. The other guy I could still see through the glass in the door... At least two of us wound up in the bed under the window and then... I saw my wife coming up the walk to the dorm entrance, looking worn down with the weight of the world. And I knew with aching certainty that her sorrow called to me in a way that no pleasure could. That kept me up... although I also spent a lot of time wondering what I was doing in my son’s college dorm... let alone with the guys...

But our conversations continue, often at dinner, and usually pretty well until I have that ONE glass too many, which seems to be my destiny these days. Or until we land in the circular pattern that drives me wild. My wife cannot make a meaningful distinction between my coming out and “acting out” – and this after twenty-six years of fidelity in deed if not in thought and word. [We were told long ago that my core value was Truth, and hers is Harmony; God knows that is pretty clearly on display here.]

Am I completely out to lunch here? I certainly have wandered the blogosphere enough to know that in just about everyone else’s opinion, I am in a stage from which I will eventually awake once I have made peace with myself. And slowly but surely, I am finding out that the guys I thought could be role models and throw me a life-line to stick with it and stay, had chucked it, for better or worse. Well, I am making peace with myself, and myself includes the last twenty-six years of my life. “The Honeymoon Period can be confusing to both partners but one thing is clear — it doesn't last.” Well, our honeymoon was no picnic, so I have no expectations of this being any better, but if we have managed to maintain our commitment over the ups and down [and boy, were there downs] of the last twelve, not to say twenty-six years, why should we not be able to survive this? I am not asking anything of her; she is free to go, or ask me to go, at any point, because I realize that even if I acted in integrity when I married her, I was not acting in truth. Truth sometimes takes a long time to reveal itself [see below] and can be too painful to contemplate closely — one reason that I have skated around the most direct ways to express what I am, to her. I actively try to call a spade a spade, but I have to constantly struggle not to call it a “bloody shovel” which is otherwise my inclination — we are talking about her very tender heart here, folks. She is trying to remain as open and connected as she can, and that is a great gift.

Whether it’s tension or the drug adjustment, I found myself crossing a line the other day. We were at my mother’s with my youngest sister, and something my wife said got under my skin. And I said, “Well, I don’t give a rusty fuck what...” and then noticed the little tableau held in the silence that followed. My mother is 80, and really doesn’t need that, though I am sure she has heard worse in her time, just not at her own kitchen table... I told one of my partners in crime about it by email and she has laid hold of it as a key between us [apparently never having heard the expression before]. So I was talking to my PinC on the phone the other night after dinner, and SHE weighs in with a comment about the kind of language I was using, and I said, “Don’t be such an effing Pollyanna” — Pollyanna being an old accusation, and “effing”, it seemed, a compromise between my need to lash out and the location of the discussion [yes, on top of everything else, and in spite of my recent behavior, I do believe in Rules of the Table, like the Rules of the Road].

Enough for one day... Two nibbles in response to job mailings in the last few days, even if nothing that is likely to come with goodies like health insurance...

Pray for me.