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Random Thoughts: Decompression Chambers

02.18.2013 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

I go to an alumni event, with lots of people my high school – older men mostly, as the school was for much of its history an all-boys school. One of the men is divorced, and another – happily married – is talking to him about it … and suggests that he and I might make a nice pair.

I recoil, rather awkwardly, at the suggestion. Nothing personal, I say.

I have the same feeling when I see the match.com emails – I no longer subscribe, but the emails still show up daily, with the same guys in them that I winked at a year ago. I try to visualize myself meeting someone – someone who actually manages to show up and is employed all at the same time – and even if I pretend this is possible, which I know isn’t likely, I have trouble mentally fitting that someone into my life.

It’s not that there’s no room.

No, that’s exactly it.

There should be enough room, but whenever I open the door for someone and say, hey, come on in and let’s share our space, somehow it’s only my space that ends up being shared, and shared, and shared, until there’s no room left for me at all.

I become very small, and compress myself to fit whatever space is left.

My life is some finite quantity. I want to fill the rest of it myself.

I’m just not sure what I want to fill it with.

As long as I can remember, my life has been filled with wanting. I wanted to be married. I wanted a family. I wanted a child. My life has never been filled with me.

Categories // Random Thoughts Tags // random thoughts, reflections, single, wisdom

Metaphor for a Marriage: What’s in a Name?

01.23.2013 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

A few years into our marriage, I discover online genealogy and open an ancestry.com account. It’s exciting for me, in a nerdy kind of way: I have piles of family history and photographs from my grandmother, and now I am able to start seeing the old documents, solving mysteries.

I tell The Departed about this, and he tells me he’s very interested too. Very interested. He starts building his own tree on an ancestry account we suddenly share, using notes from a website built by a distant cousin. Not only do we share the account, we share a tree, which means I receive endless “hints” from ancestry for all the thousands of people he has added, many of whom seem to be only marginally connected to him.

He spends night after night on ancestry.com, for months on end. I notice that although he has any number of lines that simply stop – he doesn’t know where they go – he never seems able to make progress on them. He likes to talk about his ancestors at great length, but after a while it becomes clear: There’s nothing new here, no progress is being made.

I wonder what on earth he’s doing for all those hours on the computer, but I say nothing.

I spend time on ancestry too, sometimes working on my own tree, sometimes helping friends and others with their own lineages. Helping other people seems to help me get new ideas when I get stuck – and I start meeting people who help me, both online and at the library.

The Departed complains: Help me with my genealogy. You always help other people, but you never help me.

This isn’t precisely accurate. We often discuss genealogy over dinner, to the dismay of The Child. He tells me where he is stuck, and I make suggestions. All my suggestions are met with either an explanation about why they won’t work, or else why the approach that he’s planning actually will.

I stop  making suggestions. Instead, I help other people, who say things like Thank You. One woman cried and hugged me when I told her she was eligible to join the DAR and explained it to her. Several people sent me thank you notes in the mail with Starbucks cards inside. I help lots of people, and gratefully receive help from still others.

One day, though, I am stuck on a problem, and bored, and so I start poking around the ancestry tree. I find one of his people’s names, “Harint.” She’s someone’s wife, and when I go look closely at the source of her name – an old census – I can see it’s just poorly indexed. Her name is “Harriet.”

This makes more sense. I fill in the rest of her married census data, and notice that on one of them, her father is living with her and her husband.

I fill in her maiden name, and the data starts to bubble up for Harriet. I am able to track the line back about 50 years, from Oregon to its Pennsylvania origins, locating gravemarkers, death certificates, and the like.

The Departed comes home, and I tell him about this. You wanted my help and I’ve helped you. Here, see, I fixed her name. The indexer just couldn’t read the handwriting and wrote Harint. But it’s Harriet.

It could be Harint, he says. You’re making an assumption.

Harint is not a name, I say, but in any case. I try to tell him all the things I have found by looking a bit more closely; I have a pile of documents and want to show him how neatly it all ties together.

No, he says. It’s not a usual name, but it could be a name. You don’t know that it’s not a name.

Okay, I try, if you look at the other censuses where she’s living with the same husband, you’ll see it says Harriet.

Maybe it does, he says. But one census says one name and another census says another so either one could be right.

I’m tired. This tires me out. I have twenty things that say Harriet, Harriet is a name, and I have a lot of other data I can’t get to – her last name, her father’s name, her death date and gravemarker. I can’t get to any of it because he keeps stopping me to argue this point about “Harint.”

I hand him the pile of papers and say, You’re welcome. I won’t be helping you any more.

You just don’t like it when I challenge you, he says. You think you know everything, and you always have to be right.

I walk away. It’s the only way to end it.

 

Categories // Scenes From A Marriage Tags // marriage, reflections

Metaphor For A Marriage: Kitchen Knives

12.13.2012 by J. Doe // 4 Comments

When The Departed left, my father was visiting, so he extended his visit for a bit to help deal with things – lock-changing and lawyer-finding, but also making sure The Child and I ate properly.

He cooked a lot.

He started grumbling. Your knives are all dull, he said. How do you do anything with dull knives?

I realized he was right, and in fact I had complained about this from time to time.

The Departed got me a chef’s knife for my birthday one year, and an identical knife in a slightly smaller size for Christmas.

Problem solved.

Except all the other knives taking up room on the magnetic strip were no sharper, and the new chef’s knives rapidly grew dull from near-constant use.

You need to sharpen your knives, said my father.

Oh, I said. I think they do that at the hardware store. I saw a sign there.

You can do it yourself, he told me. Didn’t The Departed ever sharpen your knives for you?

That’s a husband’s job, he said.

I’ve had two husbands and never saw either sharpen a knife, I told him.

He got a little annoyed and searched the kitchen. Finding no sharpening block, he bought one the next day and showed me how to use it.

Seems simple enough, I said.

A few days later, my father was boxing up what The Departed’s called his “shop,” a stall of the garage that largely unusable for anything other than what it was used for: A garbage collection area on top of a tool graveyard. Among the debris, he found a sharpening stone.

He brought it inside, furious. Of course he had one. Of course he never used it. Of course it could not even have been found if you actually went to look for it. It was buried in among piles of screws and drills that don’t work.

He vented a bit more, then returned to the task in the garage.

I mention all of this, because I was reminded of it when I recently made my Candied Orange Peel. My paring knife had become a bit dull, so I went looking for a sharpening stone.

In the back of a recently-purged kitchen drawer, I found a red gadget marked with the name of a knife company. I inspected it closely, and it would appear to be – yes, a knife sharpener. It worked great.

The problem: A house full of dull knives, yet containing two sharpeners.

The solution? Buy more knives.

Categories // Random Thoughts, Scenes From A Marriage Tags // marriage, metaphor, reflections

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