I am going to gay marry this picture and have its babies and paint all their toenails pink.

(See also. The first link treats the “controversy” with appropriate disdain; the second with a sadly necessary seriousness.)

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/09/divorce_finance_opting_out/index.html

So that gets us to today, i.e., Monday. (Today in writing time, not reading time.) Having gotten the budget shit–which I’d been intending to do for a while, honest!–done, I decided to tackle the second money thing that’s been in the “intending to do” file, i.e., to start on the taxes.

That’s where this whole epiphany thing happened.

I went and got the box–a bright teal-and-orange shoebox, labeled with silver sharpie, because I am trying really hard to be Good and Responsible about this management shit, and part of that includes figuring out Methods that Work For Me, like having paperwork and other grownup necessities Organized in Ways that are Realistic About My Shortcomings (a box to throw shit in) while helping me Achieve My Organizational Goals (not looking like crap). I know you what I’m talking about here.

I’d been surfing the web desultorily (as I type I have another browser window–in fact, a whole different browser–open behind this one. It has sixteen tabs in it of things I want to read, but Not Right Now because I am Going to Do Taxes First. It has been like that for four hours now, I think), and chatting with a couple of people, a friend and my boyfriend. The chats were winding down a bit, and it was still only midmorning, and I’d intended to start the taxes yesterday but all the other goddamn chores that had needed to be done first meant that I didn’t even have the chinchilla shit (don’t ask) in the study/office vacuumed up until 8 pm. In point of fact, I am now sitting, not at my desk, but at the kitchen table, because I never did get to sorting the desk out; it’s actually in a pretty decent state, since I did a major Study Overhaul a few weeks ago, but there are a few “temporary” things on it (a stack of empty frames, the sewing box, some books of potential science experiments for the volunteer work in do in Pseudonymous Kid’s class) that I’d need to move before I could use it.

In fact, as I started going through The Tax Box, I asked my boyfriend’s chat window “omg WHY AM I DOING THIS AT THE TABLE INSTEAD OF MY DESK?” followed immediately by “you’re just going to have to put up with my typing at you because i need a hand-holder”. Because for some reason as soon as I set the box down on the table, I started feeling incredibly anxious. I didn’t really know why; yeah, doing taxes is a pain in the ass, but it’s not necessarily a reason for what it took me quite a long time to realize was actually just straight up . . . fear.

Or, as I typed at the boyfriend in my desperate need for hand-holding, “I hate that the going through the papers part sucks so damn much. It’s not the filing or filling out forms…” (in fact, I sort of enjoy filling out forms, god knows why) “just the shuffling and trying to decide what might be relevant.” And the entire reason I was doing the taxes myself this year was because last year I had a new tax preparer who, unlike the tax preparer before him, did not just schedule an appointment in which she took The Box (at that point a file folder) into her own two hands and sorted through the dusty pile of receipts herself while keeping up a stream of good-natured chitchat and occasionally asking questions like “what’s this receipt for?” Instead, New Guy asked me to come in with the receipts pre-sorted into their designated categories and literally had me sit there while he went through the piles I’d created, adding up each receipt on his adding machine and then typing the result into the designated box on his H&R Block software.

Literally. I sat there for several hours watching him add numbers and type them into boxes. And I thought, “jesus christ, I can do this shit myself next year.”

But here I was, doing it–or starting to–and totally freaking out. Like, seriously. A couple of times I was actually crying a little as I sorted papers first into piles above two sticky notes on the table labelled “2009″ and “2010″ (“2011″ just went back into the box) and then, having bundled the “2009″ pile into categories (“medical,” “charity”, “house”) and put it into the 2009 folder Tax Guy had given me last year. (Again, unlike the Tax Payer of Yore, who had always kept the receipts, bundled them herself, and put them in the envelope with the copy of the return, Tax Guy had just handed them back to me and I’d thrown them back in the box), I sorted the “2010″ stuff into <b>its</b> discrete categories. Crying, as I said, with fear.

And two things happened. First, I remembered something my favorite therapist ever had once said to me: “You’re really very brave.” She had been speaking of the fact that, despite my utter terror over writing my dissertation–and at some of the things I talked about with her in therapy–I had kept plugging away at both. With occasional tears of fear then, too.

(Goddamn 80s bands.)

As my therapy with her was coming to a close–I having finished the motherfucking dissertation and, amazingly, landed a tenure-track job in another city (hell, country) so that I’d have to move–I referred back to that, saying that it had stuck with me and really helped during the hard times, even though “you probably say something like that to all your clients.”

“Yeah,” she said, dryly but smiling. “When we study to become therapists, we take a vow to tell all our clients that they’re brave.” (Her saying stuff like that was part of why I liked and trusted her so much.) “No, I said it because I meant it.”

Anyway, so this came back to me as I started to realize that the reason the stupid taxes were making me <i>cry</i> wasn’t because ugh, taxes, but because for some reason the goddamn things terrified me.

The other thing that happened is that I realized, in quick succession, that (1) having my boyfriend on the line was really helping me keep going; I usually work better–especially at things that, I am beginning to realize, scare me–with some kind of non-intrusive company; (2) in fact, the entire history of my relationship with him (including, not that I am going to go into much detail here, but for the record, my sexual relationship) has taken place in and around the things I am afraid of. And that his role, for me, has been a caretaking one.

I visit him, and I am a guest. While I did once bring Pseudonymous Kid along, most of my visits have been just me. I get there and my boyfriend has cleaned the house. There are clean linens (real linen linens) on his bed. He does all the cooking. If and when we go out, it’s his decision and his treat. When we stay in, he shops and cooks. Over the years–and it has been years–I started occasionally asking if I could take him out to dinner, but even so I always ask; it’s always a “date,” never the casual decision it is at home with my husband. I’ve started making a point of doing the dishes, most of the time, while he is at work during the day, but it’s always more like “being a good guest” than the kind of normal, the-dishes-need-to-be-done-goddammit situation that happens in one’s own house.

And frankly, in my marriage? And partly because I am now a housewife, <b>I</b> am the one who does the caretaking. The cooking, the state of the house, are my responsibility. Insert here, not the standard “my husband does his part” caveat that blights virtually every personal essay written by an overeducated housewife in the last ten years, but a statement that in fact, my husband, having been the stay-home spouse during my professorial years, and as a result of my reading <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Halving-All-Equally-Shared-Parenting/dp/0674002091″>this quite excellent book</a> quite early in our second-living-together phase and at the beginning of my dissertation phase, does in fact consider housework as much his responsibility (he lives here, after all) as I do, regardless of which of us is the primary parent.

Nonetheless, though I <i>am</i> the Primary Caretaker.  And, since he spends most of his day at work (and, having been the breadwinner, I know how this happens from the other side, so I don’t particularly blame him), I am also the Primary Appointment-Scheduler, Knower-of-Where-We-Shop, Maker-of-Non-Work-Friendships, Decider-of-Where-Things-Go, and so forth. I manage our domestic life.

But that means that when things come up in our domestic life that scare me, I have nowhere to turn. Whether it’s because he’s on a business trip and the toilet has just exploded, and there are little bits of floating turd all over the goddamn bathroom floor but I am already five minutes late to pick the kid up at school and jesus christ how do I make the water stop and do I fix this myself and if so how, or do I call a plumber and how much will it cost and how am I going to pay for it; or because taxes are Big Scary Grownup Things and what if I fuck this up and we get audited or I forget to claim some entire category of deduction and we lose a big chunk of money we should have gotten and could really use; or shit we are behind on the bills and racking up debt again but goddammit we make 50% over the median income for our area and there is no reason on earth we shouldn’t be able to live within our means.

Not too long ago I told Pseudonymous Kid that the real mark of adulthood isn’t being able to drink, or vote, or getting a job, or even getting married or having kids, or any of the things that people usually consider as conferring “real” adult status. The mark of an adult is having an important decision to make and realizing that you are the one who has to make it; no one else can make it for you. For me, that realization came when my beloved childhood cat (who I insisted my husband take a picture of me holding in my wedding dress on the night of our wedding) was dying and I had to decide to put her down. (I did not tell PK that part.) For PK, my definition of adult was frightening; “kids think that when you grow up, you’ll know how to do everything. Realizing that grownups are basically just ad-libbing it is scary.”

The thing is, it’s scary for grownups, too. Or at least, it occasionally is for me. I do it anyway, because I <i>am</i> a grownup (and brave!), but it can be terrifying even so. Taking a tenure-track job was fucking terrifying; so much so that I had what was basically a nervous breakdown. I met my boyfriend while I was at the beginning of the job, and I kept him throughout the breakdown–and the marriage problems that started with that breakdown. I’ve seen him less often since leaving that job; partly because I now live much further away, and because since I am the primary child caretaker my ability to travel is, ironically, much less flexible, but also partly, if I am honest, because I am less desperately in need of someone to take care of me. (A role I think he really embraces.) When my anxieties climb, for whatever reason, my mind turns to him; that’s the role he plays for me.

And the husband, well, doesn’t. I think he did during the first half of our marriage, before I moved away to graduate school. He was a couple of years older, had a job while I was still figuring out what the hell to do after graduation, and his job gave our life together structure. But when I went to graduate school in another state, my life started taking on an independent structure of its own, and when he was finally able to get his job to transfer him to the same area, and then left his job so that we could move to what we intended to be the “rest of our lives”, with my being the breadwinner and him the stay-home father–and when that turned out to be a lot harder than I thought–I was on my own, caretaker-wise.

Whether I couldn’t quite handle what turned out to be several years of constant fear and anxiety, or whether the job I had really wasn’t right for me, I still can’t really say. It doesn’t much matter at this point; water under the bridge. I am much less terrified and much happier in my life these days, and my husband is very happy in his. He loves his job, we love where we live. But Pseudonymous Kid is getting older, and I’m not going to be able to continue channeling my training and vocational instincts into volunteering in and around his school forever. I am finding myself wondering what the next step is going to be, and how to make it happen. And the husband, very much involved with his career, has fallen into relying on my carrying the vast majority of the domestic responsibilities.

And to be honest, he likes being the taken-care-of-one rather than the caretaker (his desire to be waited on and fussed over when he’s sick, for instance, has always exasperated me.) I think it’s been a source of irritation for me ever since PK was born, and I had someone who really and materially needed to be taken care of, and I think that my husband would say that our problems as a couple (or at least a decline in our sex life) started then, too.

Momentary aside: our last couples therapist, who I really hated, clearly thought that “our” problem was basically me. And that I needed to be more understanding of my husband’s feelings/needs. Which utterly infuriated me. If my dissatisfaction and/or lack of waiting sex with him is, in fact, about my wanting <i>not</i> to be the caretaker, it would make perfect sense that that suggestion would push every button I had and only make things worse.

Now, maybe as PK gets older (and needs less caretaking) and I find a damn job, my husband and I will settle into a more equitable distribution of caretaking roles, and things will improve. I wouldn’t be surprised. And maybe, as my need to be taken care of becomes less acute, my relationship with my boyfriend will shift a bit too. I suspect so, actually, though not (I hope!) because I will “need,” i.e., want him less. If anything, I think and hope that learning how to take care of my own damn self (or, more realistically, recognizing that I already do), even when I’m scared, will help me become more the kind of person I’ve been all along; that is to say, more the kind of person whose emotional (and sexual) needs and desires don’t belong to anyone, being first and foremost my own.

(Aside #1: I hasten to add that I also love my husband, even though he
pisses me off a lot. For that matter,
my boyfriend occasionally pisses me off too, although our
relationship is such that I almost never tell him. But he knows
anyway.)

(Aside #2: since I’m just laying it all out there and since my
husband and his family DO NOT READ THIS BLOG or DAMN WELL BETTER
NOT BE READING THIS GODDAMN BLOG, and in the interests of Full
Disclosure, I feel that I must confess that while I love both my
husband and my boyfriend, I am not, in fact, having sex with both
my husband and my boyfriend. Actually, I’m not having sex with
anyone in the last year, since I haven’t been to visit the
boyfriend since January of 2010. But I have to admit that the truth
is that I am having sex with the boyfriend, when I see him, but I
am not having sex with the husband. This is a whole ‘nother kettle
of fish that I have told very few people about. Though by the time
we get to the end of this epiphany, you will see that maybe it
isn’t, entirely, a whole other kettle.)

(Aside #3: If you didn’t already
know about the boyfriend, or even if you did already know but
didn’t know about the not-having-sex-with-the-husband thing, and
are tempted, on account of either or both not-knowings, to chastise
me in comments or even in your thoughts for being a Total Whore and
a Terrible Wife, you can get stuffed.)

So. With those rushed and anxious little confessions out of the way, let us proceed.
PART II: NOW IT’S MY TURN TO TALK

Let me start right up front by admitting that I would probably not want to be married to me. Because when I get anxious or stressed, I become a control freak and a hardass. Then again, I <i>am</i>, basically, married to me, and yeah: not a picnic, which is why when and if it becomes clear that the hardass shit I’ve been laying on myself is misplaced and belongs elsewhere, I am very firm about putting it where it goes.

So with the spreadsheets out on the table, I felt the need to say out loud the things that the spreadsheets probably already made quite clear–and to explain, while I was at it, some of the things I’d been saying in my head.* In other words, I sort of read my husband the riot act. In short, I told him:

• That we, as a couple, have a choice. Either we
  can cut back on necessary expenses–internet, cell phones,
  groceries (“which clearly I am capable of
  doing”)–or we can cut back on savings, or he,
  specifically, needs to cut back on his discretionary
  spending.**
• That I am unwilling to cut back on
  savings, because saving money is important to me. Which means we
  can either cut back on expenses (“for instance, I could
  start buying Pseudonymous Kid used clothes rather than new ones***) (look at me whipping out the mommy card!) or he can cut back on things like going out to lunch.
• That ultimately, it is up to him, and I will figure out how to do what needs to be done but that frankly, if he feels like his desire to
  spend money on going out to lunch is more important than buying new clothes for PK, or (some other, slightly less obnoxious example but I forget what it was now), then I will look down on him and
  “lose respect for him as a family man.”
• And that, while I am at it, I have kind of lost respect for him over these constant money fights, because I think it is “contemptible” that he is “constantly” complaining about not having
  enough money “when, in fact, we are, frankly, rich; we
  pay our bills every month, we save a thousand bucks a month, we
  live in a house that cost almost half a million dollars. And every
  single financial decision we have made, we made together. If he
  wanted to live alone in an apartment and spend all his money on
  going out, he could have made that decision, but he made the
  decision to have a family, and to buy a house, and that means that
  those are the things we are spending money on instead. And that
  frankly it seems to me as if he wants to have his cake and eat it
  too.”

Obviously I can be a stone bitch when the chips are down.

Or rather, putting my internal good girl to the side for the moment, I am not mean, but I am pretty damn blunt if and when I feel like trying to be tactful or kind or give the benefit of the doubt has failed to communicate something that I think needs to be communicated. Because, while I know damn good and well that most of the quotes up there landed squarely in the husband’s gut, I really do think that he is in the wrong here, I think that he has had plenty of opportunity and hints to figure this out, and I think that the problem is important enough that it needs to be addressed squarely.

Let me step aside from the story here to say that at this point in my life I think this ability to take a gut-punch is probably the biggest
factor in whether or not a marriage survives. (As is the ability to
refrain from throwing them; you’re gonna do it sometimes, but if
you do it every time a conflict comes up, you’re an asshole and any
sensible person will leave you.) The husband and I have each taken
and thrown a few in the last few years. I suspect that they are
part of what we collectively call midlife, and I know that they are
part of any marriage that lasts for very long. I also suspect that
they are part of any marriage that is worth having.

But back to Our Story. Other, much less hard-to-take things were also said. The husband, to his credit, did not punch back at the time (though later his frustrations led to some out-of-bounds nastiness towards both me and Pseudonymous Kid–nastiness which, again to his credit, he later apologized for unreservedly).

In the end, the husband agreed that he needs to cut way the hell back on his lunch expenses, and he went grocery shopping with me Sundah so he could pick out various and sundry things that he will eat for lunch. I put his lunch picks into a bag for him when I unloaded the groceries, and he took the bag to work Monday and, to my knowledge has not bought lunch this week.

We’ll see how it goes; there are, of course, lots of other little petty pieces of flotsam and jetsom floating around in our marriage. In fact, the money issue itself, although it’s become the central issue for now, is, I think, itself just a really big chunk of debris. I’m not sure whether the wreck itself is the lack of sex–I think the husband would say so–or something else.

<b>I</b> think it’s something else, but I admit that I haven’t really managed, despite our circling around these pieces parts for a number of years now, to figure out what exactly it is. We’ve tried (a number of) therapists; we’ve made a lot of big changes; we’ve ended up in a setup that is completely unlike what we said we wanted back in the beginning, but in which we are each, I think, individually quite happy. But the relationship itself is clearly in the throes of . . . something.

From talking to friends in similar situations, I’ve come to believe that while the specific nature of the something probably varies from relationship to relationship, the general outlines–fighting, lack of sex, a feeling of crisis, the occasional thought of the d-word–are pretty common. At the moment, I think that a couple either splits up or they hunker down and ride it out. Or, if they are not the hunkering type, they figure out what their specific something is and try to address it. If they’re successful, they probably stay married. If not, they either sublimate for a time (until the kids are older? until one or the other gets ‘caught’ in an affair?) or else they split. It’s not clear to me yet which we’ll do. I think for now we’re hunkering.
Later: Part III.

*Come to think of it, that need to articulate
things is probably part of why I blog/write these essays, too. Huh.
Extra bonus mini-epiphany.

** Obviously there is a fourth option: I
could get a job. That he has never once said this–nor, I believe,
even thought it–is greatly to my husband’s credit. And yes, I have
said this to him in so many words.

*** I do not actually have big snob issues over used vs. new clothing; I’m mostly just not wanting to spend the time to comb through thrift shops in search of kids clothes that aren’t screamingly gender-identified. Mostly I buy PK’s clothes on sale from Target (tshirts), Old Navy (jeans), and the few retailers (Hanna Andersson, The Children’s Place) where I can get clothes that are well-made and available in solid gender-neutral colors. And he wears what I buy for two to three years, because I buy it damn big.

PART I: MONEY TALKS

As those of you who read this modest little diary know, I have of late been quite frustrated with my husband vis-a-vis money fights. And occasionally other things. Like his travel schedule, which had gotten to the point where it was basically “every week, coming home on weekends to unpack, do laundry, and repack before leaving again” until I sort of had a fit about it last month, and he seems to have made a fuss at his boss about how he kind of needs to spend more time at home because The Wife is Growing Increasingly Unhappy with his Travel Schedule. Although he is going to Las Vegas for a short trip this coming week, but we have made plans for Pseudonymous Kid and I to go with him on Friday and spend a family weekend at the incredibly fucking awesome Atomic Testing Museum and possibly either the Hoover Dam and/or Red Rock Canyon/Lake Mead/some other outdoorsy beautiful desert locale. Assuming we can figure out how we are going to pay for this this evening.

But I digress. The point is money, and fighting about it. Which we’ve been doing a lot of.

So anyway, Friday was payday, and there was consequently an argument about money. Which led me to finally do something I’ve been intending to do for a while: create a couple of spreadsheets based on our respective checking account statements so far this year (we having made a New Family Budget in December) in order to figure out what we are each spending money on, after bills and groceries and savings and such are accounted for.

The upshot is that I am spending my “disposable” money mostly on Pseudonymous Kid and various things that could be considered “household” expenses: books and new clothes for PK, a $40 (but so pretty!) hand-thrown ceramic butter keeper so that our butter can live on the counter (and thus stay soft and spreadable) without going bad, stuff like that.

I’ve spent a couple hundred in two months on eating out, which I am immensely proud of, as this used to be my biggest frivolous expense, but I have made a serious and apparently successful effort to cut back. (Not to mention that “eating out” almost always means “buying ice cream with PK after school, or taking him to dinner because the husband is out of town and Mama has gotten behind on the dishes and can’t handle cooking tonight.”)

The husband, in contrast, has spent $600 on eating out the last two months–not including eating out while he’s traveling for work, which I put into a separate category. (Yes, I am sounding accusatory here. It’s my fucking blog.) Mostly he spends money on going out to lunch at sit-down places with friends at work. He also took out about a thousand bucks over the course of two months in cash, which I can’t trace, but he says (and I see no reason to doubt it) that he mostly spends that on eating out, too. His other expenses are buying shit at Fry’s–blank cds, sometimes for work, sometimes not, or an occasional $50 splurge on cheap DVDs or used video games for PK or the like.

(We also each took a short, separate vacation this year so far, but I didn’t count those expenses in the spreadsheets because I wanted to focus on our usual spending patterns rather than the exceptions.)

So basically the upshot for me was that I have actually spent under budget according to my allowed “discretionary” allowance, and he has gone way, way over. Way over.

Now, part of the wayness of the overage, it must be said, is attributable to his having bought me a new laptop (!) for Christmas and an iPad (!!) for my birthday in January. So I realize, and I said this to him as well, that I am coming off as kind of an asshole for saying this, but first of all, dude, it is just flat-out fucking irresponsible to buy expensive gifts that we cannot afford. And I say that as a woman who bought her niece $200 boots for her 16th birthday last month–but I still stayed within my budget, because I took it into account with my other spending. (To be fair, I have the power to do this by cutting back on groceries–I spent about half what we’d budgeted. But then, since I do the goddamn cooking, that’s kind of my prerogative, arguably.)

But even without counting $2000 in expensive computer stuff, the husband was well over what he is “supposed” to be spending: in addition to his discretionary money, he’s been asking me (every paycheck) for “extra” (which I’ve been providing) and he’s been using the credit card that we paid off at the beginning of January; I paid it off again this weekend, to the tune of $1020.

To be honest, was relieved to see the results. Not just because it’s always gratifying to be in the right, but more importantly because part of the undercurrent of our fights about money is always me worrying a little bit that maybe I am being irresponsible, as the primary money-handler and bill-payer–after all, I spent $200 on boots for Niece last month–and maybe that’s why he’s on such a short leash, money-wise. Maybe the budget we worked out for groceries and bills was grossly exaggerated, and I am actually spending far less on the bills than I think I am–after all, I did pay that bill late last month–and maybe I’m somehow allowing myself a lot more spending money than he has. And it is frankly a huge relief to be able to see that I am not, in fact, being a greedy conniving bitch, money-wise, or arguing with him in bad faith by taking advantage of the fact that I do the bill-paying to elide or cover up my own financial indiscretions.

Which, it turns out, don’t exist. We do get the same goddamn amount of spending money. And I do handle mine a lot better, managing to entertain myself and Pseudonymous Kid–plus clothe him and pay various school expenses–on less money than the husband finds inadequate for entertaining himself alone. (Okay, <i>some</i> of my relief is petty competitiveness. I’m only human, and we <i>have</i> been fighting a lot.) Hurrah! Not only am I suddenly guilt-free, but (more practically speaking), we are now better able to figure out where we’re having trouble, budget-wise, and to figure out what we want to do about it.

Tomorrow: Part II

If you did read that other blog, you may read Lance Mannion‘s blog too. (If you don’t, check it out: Lance writes some pretty good stuff). Lance happens to be an old blog friend of mine, and he’s in a bit of a financial bind at the moment–so I offered to help him out by asking our common acquaintance to donate if possible and spread the word if not.

If you can afford it, please donate through paypal to lmannion109 at ya-hoo dot com. If you’re not a paypal fan, his snail mail addy is Lance Mannion, PO Box 263, New Paltz, NY 12561.

If you can’t, you can pass the word around through your own blog, or simply click through to his and visit some of his advertisers–which is, of course, the way he (and all bloggers who carry ads) would prefer to do it.

And thanks.

That’s been this week, which has been awesome. Before Christmas break, I was far more likely to wake PK by talking/pulling him into an upright enough position that I could pick him up (he currently weighs a little over 77 lbs) and carry him into the living room, where I would deposit him on the couch and he’d curl up under a blanket with his head on a pillow–but at least in the living room I can see him and keep chanting “get up, get dressed” as I walk back and forth and make his lunch. This week he’s been much more self-starting and we’ve agreed that since he hates the constant nagging, I will forego it as long as he gets himself moving at a reasonable pace.

This morning, however, like I said, I overslept. And he was a lot groggier than he has been. Obviously we’ve both had a couple of nights where we were up a little later than we ought to have been, last night in particular. I offered to carry him to the living room: no. More negotiating/pleading. I offer to help him get dressed: no. I offer to make him a cup of tea: no, then yes. I ask him to get dressed while I’m making it: no.

“Look, I overslept a bit. I need you to cooperate here.”

“Exactly. YOU overslept. It’s YOUR fault. Why do I have to make up for it.”

This seems to be the emerging theme of PK’s nascent adolescence. And it’s kind of annoying. I got mad and said something pissy about how that would be fine if he lived in a goddamn vacuum, but he doesn’t.

“Okay, fine. Get yourself up and off to school.” I stand up and leave the room. I turn around as I reach the doorway with an afterthought. “Oh, and I’m going to put the water on for your tea. Which is apparently the kind of thing you do think it’s okay to be interdependent about.”

Digression: yep, apparently I am that kind of a mom. My authority is primarily verbal, and while I can definitely leverage a certain amount of intimidation (“Mama, you are scary when you’re mad”), for the most part his stubbornness and my reluctance to just whip out the “BECAUSE I SAID SO GODDAMNIT” speech (which is probably why it’s effective when I do) means that I pull a lot of this martyrish manipulative “let me list the stuff I do, just so you have a context in which to place your lack of cooperation here” stuff. My only saving grace is that I’m angry, rather than weepy, when it happens.

And it works. I put on the tea, pour myself some cold coffee, stick it in the microwave, get the hot cup and sit my pissy ass down on the couch. I open up my laptop and realize it’s not actually as late as all that: I slept past my preferred wakeup time, to be sure, but it’s still just barely 7, and PK does have a reasonable amount of time before school starts. Plus today is the husband’s day off, so the car is available if it comes to that.

PK emerges from his bedroom a few minutes later fully dressed and goes directly into the bathroom to brush his teeth. The kettle starts to whistle and I say “your tea water is boiling” rather than getting up to make his cup. He comes out and says “I know,” goes back and finishes brushing, goes and takes the kettle off. He comes back to the living room. “What day is it?”

“Friday,” I reply, realizing that this means his homework is due and that we haven’t actually gotten it done.

“Shit,” he says. Then, in the actually-growing-up-this-is-my-problem-to-solve mode that he falls into more and more often lately (especially when I’ve gotten pissed off), he says, “I’ll have to take it to school and finish it there.”

“I guess so,” I reply.

He goes to look for his workbook. Which, since we’re coming off the two-week break and he didn’t have homework for at least a week beforehand and his room didn’t get cleaned over Xmas, he can’t find. Eventually he comes out with the textbook.

“Is that it?”

“No, this is just the sort of explaining-things book. I can’t find the homework book.”

“Huh, that’s too bad.” I’m reading Facebook.

He goes back and looks some more, still can’t find it.

“I still can’t find it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I did do a quick sort of clean-up of my room, though, at least.”

“Okay.”

He stands there at a bit of a loss, then sits down on the other end of the couch. “Mama, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Okay, yes, sometimes I am an asshole.

“For before.”

Sigh. “Thanks. I’m sorry I got so mad.”

He picks up one of his Xmas books, a history encyclopedia, and starts reading.

By now, of course, it is definitely time for him to be leaving for school, or for me to drive him. But this seems to be going pretty well, as a do-it-yourself lesson, so I don’t say anything for about ten minutes. If he asks, I will either help him find his book or take him to school, but I’m not in the mood to help him think. Finally, I can’t stand it any more.

“So what are your plans for the day, then?”

“To go to school and be anxious about not having my homework done.”

“Well, school starts in about three minutes.”

“Oh shit!” He puts the book down and the next thing I know, the back door has slammed and he’s gone to get his bike.

My little boy is growing up.

The other day, driving back from visiting the snow (Pseudonymous Kid loooooooves the goddamn snow), in our nearly 300k-miles hand-me-down Saturn wagon, Mr. B. and I were talking about whether, when/if we replace it this year, we are going to go the Volt route or take the all-electric plunge.

My husband pointed out that there’s a third option: we could get him an electric bike for his commute to work–about 25 miles–which would ensure he gets the exercise he really should be getting, what with his high blood pressure and his late father’s health history–and just go carless altogether.

Which you know, really is possible, even though we don’t live in a proper city. I could use more exercise as well, and Pseudonymous Kid would surely benefit from learning to make biking his primary method of transportation while he’s still a kid. He’ll start middle school next year; soon his friends will be allowed to move about on their own, too, and there’ll be less call for rides in order for him to have a non-school social life. Downtown is a fairly easy bike ride. The central bus terminal is about four blocks away, at the mall, and new Trader Joe’s is going in right behind it. The fancy-pants health-food grocery where I buy our petted-to-death meat is pretty close, too, although it’s kind of an unpleasant ride, what with traffic–but it’s doable, certainly. And finally, my husband rents cars often enough for work that we occasionally get a “free rental” certificate, which would make the relative cost of renting vs. owning an even better deal than it otherwise would be.

It would, of course, take effort and will power. But then, so has being a one-car family for the last ten years, and we’ve managed that just fine.

I got up early this morning and realized we are out of coffee. I can see the wind whipping the neighbor’s palm trees around, and there’s a bit of rain. Having read an article recently about the benefits of pre-breakfast exercise, I briefly considered that I “should” bike to Starbucks, which is about half a mile away.

Instead, I took the car.

“Tedra, did you pay the mortgage this month?!?”

“Um, yes.”

“The credit union says it wasn’t paid.”

I am elbow-deep in boiling sugar water and orange peel. “Take a number and I’ll call them back tomorrow.”

“No! This has to be dealt with now!”

My husband gets incredibly stressed out and accusatory about money things. It tends to piss me off, since I’m the one that handles the bills. “Look, I can’t deal with it now. I have to get online and check the account or call the [other] bank and see if I can figure out what happened, and I’m in the middle of something else.”

My husband takes the phone into the other room with him. Obviously he’s going to try to handle it now even though he’s not the one with the records. I roll my eyes and turn down the simmering orange peel, wash my hands, go over to my netbook and log into my bank account. I pull up the record that shows that the mortgage payment to the credit union went through on Dec. 6th, complete with confirmation #s and everything, and take the netbook into the tv room, where he is cradling the phone on his shoulder while looking at his computer screen and trying to figure this out.

“Here,” I say dryly, putting my netbook in front of him. “I paid the mortgage on Dec. 6th.” I go back to my cooking.

I can hear him saying things like, “well, I’m looking at my wife’s account right here and it says it went through. $2700.” Pause. Rising, angry voice, “what do you mean? I don’t understand. You said we hadn’t paid the mortgage and now you’re saying you can see that payment? . . . That was the last month’s payment?”

“Sweetie, please take the number and tell him I will call him back tomorrow. I have to figure this out and the bank is closed right now.”

“No! He wants to deal with it right now!”

I’m thinking that the poor bastard who placed this call is probably really wanting not to deal with this right now, but I don’t say anything. I go back into the tv room and take my netbook back. I pull up the records of the additional $450 mortgage payment I made on the same day, and the record of the mortgage payment I made at the beginning of November.

Let me digress here briefly to explain what that extra $450 was for. We got a similar call last month which took several days and hours on the phone to resolve and led to a fair bit of stress between me and my husband (and this blog post, actually). The upshot was that there’d been some “supplementary tax” (thanks, Prop 13!) of $5000 that I’d mistakenly conflated with the regular property tax and assumed the credit union was paying out of the mortgage; since I didn’t pay it, it went to the CU and they did indeed pay it–out of escrow. So I’d underpaid the November mortgage which had magically gone up in order to recoup the escrow money. We amortized the missing $5k over three years, plus another $1500 which I understood at the time but no longer remember the reason for, and our mortgage is now about $450 more than it was two months ago, so when I made the December payment I also made an extra $450 payment for November.

And now the credit union is calling three days before Xmas and freaking my husband out about the possibility that we’re three thousand in the hole. My husband is yelling at PK to turn the tv off, PK is yelling that he was there first, I’m turning the orange peel back down and going into the tv room to call PK into the kitchen and explain to him that Papa gets very stressed about these money things and it really would be best if he would just pause his movie and find something else to do for a while, please. PK grumpily complies and I ask Mr. B. if I can have my netbook back to check the recipe I’m using. Of course I can’t, so I leave the room again.

This is the kind of situation I was talking about in the previous post. I am being the calm, non-reactive wife despite my husband’s rising stress level and his yelling at PK and me; I’m trying to get him to disengage from the problem and let me handle it when I can; I’m deliberately keeping my voice calm and accepting the way he is doing things even though listening to him say things like “you just told me I have to talk to a mortgage specialist. Now you are saying I need to talk to escrow. But I don’t even know what that is. You are the one who called me, and you’re telling me you don’t know why it shows that my account hasn’t been paid, but I want to know what is going on!” is making me want to just hang the phone up myself and then explain to him the difference between the guy going down the goddamn list and making the calls after banking hours and an actual goddamn banker.

But I’m not doing those things and I’m successfully managing to fake a calm and assurance that I’m not entirely feeling myself–what if the payment somehow went awry? I’m down to about $100 in my account right now!–in a futile attempt to reassure my husband and forestall the possibility that he will unleash his frustration on me and we’ll get into another goddamn fight about whether or not I handle the bills correctly (but he doesn’t want to start paying them himself, and frankly I don’t want that either, since it always takes him three days and means there are piles and piles of paper all over the room that no one is allowed to touch).

After about an hour, he gets off the phone and says that he was given the number to call tomorrow. I bite my tongue and say only, “okay, good.” He says he will make that call tomorrow and solve the problem before I wake up. I am fine with this, since I hate dealing with phone calls and as long as I don’t have to listen to him shouting on the phone I don’t care.

This morning (okay, more like noon–sue me), he comes into the bedroom and wakes me up by saying that he just got off the phone with the credit union and they can see that all the payments were made, and they will call him back in fifteen minutes after they try to figure out what happened and why they’re showing a problem. I ask if the coffee is made. He says it is, so I get up.

Fifteen minutes later I am making PK a sandwich (“I’m hungry, Mama”) and my husband is asking me, in his stressed, accusatory voice, why haven’t they called back yet?!?

“Um, because it’s taking longer to figure out than he thought? Because he’s at work and has other things he’s also trying to do? Because he didn’t set a timer the moment he got off the phone with you? God. Find something else to fret about for a while.” I am losing my temper.

“I’m going to call them back.”

“Go ahead.”

He calls back and asks to talk to Sam in the mortgage department. I hear him leaving his number and asking Sam to call back. I bite my tongue.

Sam calls back.

In the end, what apparently happened is that whoever told us we were short $450 for November miscalculated by about $25. So we were about $25 short for November, which they deducted from the December mortgage payment. But apparently, since the December mortgage payment was now itself short, instead of crediting our account they put that payment into “an account they don’t call limbo, but they might as well,” my husband says; basically it just sits there until, apparently, someone from the collections department calls to ask why the hell we haven’t paid our bill this month. My husband, of course, wants to pay the missing $25 right now, while he has Sam on the phone, but they can’t do it via a debit card–he needs my checkbook. No, I can’t just use the online bill pay to do it. He wants to pay it right now. I go to look for my checkbook.

My husband, who now that the problem has turned out to be no big deal, is feeling kind of abashed, says “that’s okay, honey–I found mine.” Only his doesn’t have any checks from our current bank, which took over when our old bank failed during the great financial crisis of ’08. I hear him explaining to Sam that the bank told him (two years ago) that those checks would still work. Then he calls to me and asks if I have any checks from our current bank.

“Yes, I’ll look for my checkbook. I’m not sure where it is, though, so it might take a bit. . .”

“That’s okay, I’ll just do this.”

Sigh.

The moral of the story is that banks and credit unions are evil homewreckers. In both senses of the word.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.  For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).

Glenn Greenwald (who I often find really quite irritating as a writer) gets and deserves enormous credit for doing the important and necessary reporterly work here; he emphasizes, for instance, that Manning has not been convicted of a crime and appeals, rightly, to a variety of important issues, including Manning’s rights as a U.S. citizen (which are clearly being violated), international law, humanitarian concerns, and so on. All important things that I have cared about since I was basically a kid, and that I think everyone should care about.

But there’s another thing I care about as a mama, which is new(ish) to me and seldom, if ever, part of public discourse around stories like this. As a mother, I read this article, note that Manning is twenty-two years old, and find it impossible not to imagine my son in Manning’s position. And doing helps me, at least, move beyond righteous indignation to responsibility, urgency, and the kind of felt understanding of the horror of this situation that in the past I could only access through fiction: Kafka’s stories, say, or Orwell’s 1984. And then, usually, the sense is more of identification with the victim, which is different (and maybe less powerful, I think) than a sense of responsibility towards him.

It’s too easy–and too impossible–to imagine how I would feel if my bright, indignant, justice-oriented, fierce, idealistic, and stubborn son had, as bright, justice-oriented, idealistic young men occasionally do, joined the military*; been assigned a job where he had access to this kind of information; realizing that some of the information really does constitute evidence of criminal activity by the state; grown increasingly convinced that he needed to blow the whistle (and, in the process of doing so, convinced himself that some of the less criminal, gossipy and embarrassing information should be released too, because “they deserve it”); and gotten all this shit to Wikileaks.

I think we can all imagine that kind of indignant sense of righteousness. We’ve probably all acted on it at some point, by complaining about friend A to friend B, warning a co-worker about some managerial bullshit, etc.

But imagine that Manning is your son: a young man, newly adult, who maybe irritates you sometimes with his righteous idealism but of whom you are also quite proud, knowing that the self-aggrandizing aspects of his personality will soften a bit with age and experience. He’s a good-looking, friendly kid, maybe a little cocky, but with enough charm that he usually gets away with it.

And he’s done something huge about which you have mixed feelings, let’s say. Not just because you’re afraid he’ll get in trouble, but because you can see both the idealistic argument that justifies his action and the pragmatic one that condemns it. Yes, on the one hand, we are citizens of a democracy. Our country should not commit war crimes or break international laws. We should be informed about the things our leaders are doing, about the truths of war. Whistle-blowers are heroes.

On the other hand, it is also a fact that governments, institutions and authorities often have to do things that would be difficult or impossible to do with full transparency, practically speaking. Idealism and openness are important checks, but they can also be enormous hurdles to action and, paradoxically, they can actually make it impossible to find out important information.

But whatever, whether you think he did the right thing, was well-intentioned but foolish, or deserves to be fired and punished, he is your son and you love him and you know that while he himself and the world may see him as an adult, he is still in many ways a kid.

And now his government, and yours, is keeping him in solitary confinement. Without having tried, much less convicted him, of a crime. You cannot hear from him, you cannot talk to him, you cannot find out how he is doing. You know that he is forbidden to exercise. That he is denied many basic comforts. That the treatment he is receiving is almost certainly driving him mad, figuratively and quite possibly literally. That many, many countries and psychological experts and military experts and scientists and even our own leaders have asserted that the treatment he is receiving is a kind of torture. You’ve read books like The Castle and 1984 and you have always thought of this kind of thing as fictional or, at worst, the sort of thing that happens (happened?) to people in Nazi concentration camps or Japanese POW camps or under Saddam Hussein or Pinochet or in countries that you always told your son growing up he was lucky he did not live in. You know that part of his own pride in joining the military was a sense that he was doing so because America does not treat its own citizens like this, that when we commit human rights abuses (which maybe we do once in a while, by mistake, or have done in the past) we eventually correct them. That we have systems in place to protect against this sort of thing. Or maybe he (and/or you?) believes we aren’t as exceptional as we’d like to believe, but at the very least we do uphold certain principles even if we often fail to honor them. At the very least we believe in the freedom to insist that we live up to those principles.

But now your son is the one being tortured. By his own country. And you can’t see him or talk to him or find out if he’s okay. You literally can. not. find out if your son is okay, and there is no one on earth that can help you because your government, the most powerful government in the world, is in the way.

Not a paranoid hypberbolic fantasy, or a metaphor for taxes that are too high or the fact that you can’t buy liquor on Sundays, but a literal fact that’s happening to your own personal son.

I wouldn’t feel righteous. Or indignant. Or any of those high-minded, noble feelings. All I can imagine feeling is panic. And despair to the point of suicide, along with the feeling that you cannot possibly allow yourself to die or despair because you cannot allow yourself to abandon the son you cannot help.

Come to think of it, the only novel I can think of that captures that feeling is Sophie’s Choice. Styron was married in 1953 and published it in 1979. He had four kids. I bet at least some of them were born before he wrote the book.

*In PK’s case, it’s easier to imagine him working in a civilian public service job of some sort, perhaps in intelligence or diplomacy or government, since he has a prejudice–which I am happy to encourage, but don’t tell his father this–against the idea of performing military service. This despite the fact that my husband was in the service for over a decade, now works as a civilian for the DoD, and is absolutely happy and proud of his work. I doubt that my husband, who could very easily have access to the kind of information Manning released, would do what Manning did; my husband is far too conscientious about the importance of classified information to do that kind of thing. But PK, whose dislike of authority is part of why I think he would never join the military, is not a big fan of rules, and I can easily imagine his deciding that the rule of secrecy, in this case, is a matter of state self-preservation rather than actual necessity.

Update: So here’s a statement from Manning’s lawyer with the specifics of his treatment in detention. Apparently he is allowed to write and receive visitors, but only under extremely controlled circumstances. And I can’t imagine how fucking crazy-making it would be to have to answer some kind of bullshit roll call every five minutes.