Life

By what yardstick do you measure eight years? How do we assess almost a decade in our life?

Is it by our conquests, our earnings,our trips, our friendships? Is it the series of unforgettable moments we have? Is it by our success? Our failures?

When they are done, do those years really exist?

Two thoughts come to mind, one a cliche', the other a quote.

The cliche: "They settled down and built a life together."

But is anything ever really built, when all you have is this moment to hold.

The quote: " Flying is long periods of extreme boredom puntcuated by brief moments of sheer terror."

Some how both seem to fit.

If I tried to write the story of our married life together, this blog would become a novel, one that was too long and too common in its events to enthrall or too specific to interest the reader. The details of my life are of great interest to me, only the lessons are of use to anyone else.

I can give you the flavor and tenor of that time. After the wedding and short honeymoon we returned to do what all new couples do. We bought a house in the Oakland Hills, I changed jobs and careers, starting a long process of rapid career advancement. My son was settled into a new school. We made friends, had parties, attended PTA meetings, renovated the house.

We went to the Caribbean with my family, a delayed honeymoon that was one of the best vacations of my life. Soon after, we got pregnant, and ten months after that, we had a little girl. Marilyn started working part time, we had nannies. Then after that, she quit working to stay home with the kids. My son and I joined the boy scouts, she volunteered at our daughter's pre-school. Summers were spent with my daughter from the first marriage and our daughter, my son was summering in Texas.

Family dinners, Christmas, holidays, book clubs, parties, outings, the wend and weft of hip east bay life.

Sound good?

Well, that was the surface.

Under it, well, as you expect, there was more going on.

For a long time money was tight, very tight even with both of us working. I learned that she was bad, very bad with money, loving to spend it and very adverse to saving it. We did a lot of budgets, she just would never live to any of them. Before we got together, she managed by getting very deep into debt. We got her out of that, but it was a constant battle to keep us from going back there.

She hated working, and she hated her job. In point of fact, she hated every job she ever had. When we were dating she had gotten fired from her job. I learned later that she had gotten fired from just about every other job she had ever had. When I said before that she quit her job, what she did was to get fired from it, at a time when we were doing better but still needed her income to make the monthly bills.

I remember that day. She called me crying, devastated. I called her boss, called the corporate lawyers, I blusterd and threatened, not to much avail. Her boss was an idiot, that was true, but it became clear that Marilyn had been burning bridges there for some time. (I had met the guy, a fellow former Naval Officer. He was not so much an idiot as an insecure child in a manager suit. Two years later, with a wife and two kids at home, down in Texas, he pulled over to the side of the road one day and blew his brains out.)

The next day I walked into work and bluffed my way to a major raise. That was and remained a pattern throughout our time together. She would over spend, I would bash down doors to get promotions, raises. We would be ok for a bit, and then the spending went up, and we would be back close to being in the hole.

That was a source of a lot of fights. Usually she was contrite right after a particularly bad bonehead money move, but within days she was right back to arrogantly insisting that she deserved what she wanted, and that I was just overreacting.

Much of our time was spent handling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism, with a little bit of pill addiction thrown in. The depression was diagnosed as clinical, and she started taking anti-depressants. They helped a lot, but the side effects were bizarre. Prozac killed her sex drive and shut down all of her feelings. Another one sent her loopy. Finally celexa seemed to work, but she would go on and off it, and when she went off you could see her face turn suicidal.

Alcohol and pills were different. The month before we moved into the new house, she was arrested for DUI, a costly and inconvenient warning flag that she chose to ignore. Over eight years we swung from "I am an alcoholic" to "I am not one of those people"and back. And back again. Twice we worked with doctors to get her off the codeine. I went on the wagon with her a couple of times. It would get better, then worse, then better. But it never went away.

My son drove her nuts, and she him. It was a constant struggle, she could neither connect with him, nor find a way to adapt to him. He pressed too many buttons around her own upbringing and sense of failure. She tried several times to get me to ship him off to his mother, to no avail and no few fights. She loved him, wanted to be loved, but she could never just relax and let it take it's own course. She always cared about him, and was pissed off daily by him.

In the end, it was like we were two families in one house: she and daughter and I were one, and he and I were another.

She dealt with issues by alternating withdrawal from the family and diving in headfirst and going overboard. It was heart breaking.

We fought, like before.

We went to counseling. For years.

Our sex life suffered. There were a few periods where we were on the once a month plan, and it was an issue for me. She developed some real shame issues around sex, which surprised me. We stopped doing some things at her request, and she was none too interested in trying new things. She also felt bad about that, and some of the issues were tied to the drinking and pills. But she also tried to fix it, as if it was not a decision, but something out of her control. Strangely, once she got going she always enjoyed the hell out of herself. One time, after I had coaxed her into it and after we both had explosive orgasms, she said "God I love this so much, what is my problem?"

I got a bit looney myself. I began to expect and fear the next disaster, nervous and watchful in the good times and exasperated in the bad. I started to monitor everything, treating her like a beloved ten year old. She hated and resented it, until the next blowup, when contrition ruled the day. Somewhere, in this process, I became my mother, I am sure of it, reactive and irrationally concerned.

We did not neglect each other. We both took care of relationship business. Example, for my 40th birthday we went to Cabo and had the time of our lives. For her's, I planned an entire birthday surprise day, topped off with a catered dinner with friends.

She was episodic. Life was an erratic sine wave.

It was not just an unending series of problems and disasters. We also had a lot of good times, hours filled with laughter and fun. We accomplished a lot together. We comforted each other. We learned to communicate better and to understand ourselves better, or so I thought. Sex was on the very good once a week plan in the last years. Some things we stopped doing, but in all it was fine, and although I would have liked more, I was ok.

I asked her once, "are you happy?" She told me then that in her old life she had been so lonely, and that now, for all the struggles, she felt loved and full and safe. In her quiet moments she knew full well what she was doing to me, and was ashamed. In my quiet moments I became aware of my own growing neurosis, and tried to change.

Eight years. I remember the bad, I remember the good. I will not tell you it was all roses (though it was way too much wine), but I never entertained thoughts of leaving, and I thought, neither did she. We loved each other, we were family, we were committed.

For better or worse.

In the last years we seemed to be in a good place. I had a dream job at a startup that paid a lot of money and promised more. We had the house we wanted, in the hills we loved, with friends and a life. The sex was good enough, the kids were healthy, the drinking was down. The drama was not so dramatic. We had land under our feet and finally (after a lot of struggle on my part) money in the bank. She had the daughter she wanted, the garden she loved, no job, and time for piano lessons and art classes and book clubs.

I remember that summer we finally took that long driving vacation we had always talked about, loaded the girls and a ton of gear in the van and headed off for Zion National Park and points east. We drove all over Utah, doing crossword puzzles while the girls watched movies and stopping to swim in rivers, climb up mountains, and cook marshmallows over the fire. The girls still talk about that trip. It was amazing. We were friends, we were family.

I never saw the thundercloud on the horizon. Maybe I just didn't want to.