Epiphany, Part III

PART III: I CRY OVER THE TAXES, BUT NOT BECAUSE OF THEM

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.