My New Life started in 2021

My New Life (In Old Books) or Is It My Old Life in New Books?

I can hardly believe that I am now nearly three years into my second retirement. Finally, after all that time, close to eight years in total, I feel ready, comfortable secure enough to do what I imagine many other people do at this time of year:  look back at where I’ve been and what I’ve accomplished and also try to look ahead to what might enhance the value of this time, its quality and purpose, along with, best case, its joy and happiness or, at minimum, its feeling of satisfaction.

One of my more annoying and detrimental personal habits, which I have lately come to recognize in my early senior citizenship, is that I have often been a slow learner, perhaps more correctly, a late bloomer.  Maybe that’s a trait that comes from being a true Taurean.  As an old fart, looking back now, I might have advised my younger self to set goals, to have dreams and aspirations, or to at least have some type of design or plan for my life.  Alas, over most of the prior half century, I have been more often driven by the philosophy of the late, great John Lennon, who advised us all, just before his own untimely death, that “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”  Here and now though, with the luxury of having a lot of free time on my hands, I can start applying my hard-earned and slow in coming self-knowledge to a new and probably more achievable design for the remainder of my life.

Unpublished Draft Post written in 2017 or 2018

I wrote all of that way back in 2017 or 2018.  Back then much of what I was reading and trying to implement for myself, my life and my future had to do with goal-setting and plans and efforts of that ilk.  Given the turn of events in my life in general and in the world in particular it’s clear that anybody who thinks they can live their life on that basis is at least pretty delusional and possibly even insane!  About (Created May 2021, Updated September 2021)

When I started this new blog, which apparently and coincidentally seems to have really happened at the beginning of the year, I said on the very first post

Over the last few years I have written some vignettes for a series of memoir classes. Out of the process of figuring out what I want to leave behind for my daughters to learn about me, why I am the way I am today and why I raised them the way I did, I discovered that many of my memories are tied to the places in which they occurred, be they real or imagined.

While that is still true, I guess I could also add that, given the thoughts I started this post with, besides teaching my daughters all about me I may also need to teach me about me through my blogs more than through a memoir alone.  I want to belabor both these points at this time and in this post.

First, the bit about the past informing the present for both them and me.  Much as I have tried not to rehash my marriage and my divorce and everything that went before each of those events, I can honestly say (and my daughters and my friends will attest to this sad fact) that I have not been able to stop myself from doing that over the past year.  It is my hope, though, that whatever I have to say about that here will, best case, be the last time it is a subject of any posts this year or the main subject of my thoughts and feelings at any time going forward.

Again, looking back over the past couple of years and, yes, even farther back than that and indeed even wider than that in the present, I can see that I am not the first or only one to realize that it makes no sense to put the effort into developing goals or planning life around what one may expect or anticipate and continue to try to convince oneself that these goals are (1) achievable or (2) really what one would want to achieve if possible.

To get some perspective on this dreaded looking back exercise, I of course went to the written history of the thing.  As a sort of old school old fart correspondent, this consisted mainly of emails and texts written and received.  I had already reviewed a lot of what I had received but after finally getting back to doing this catch-up exercise on my sent emails I can see that the marriage probably entered its final death throes in 2019.  Reading between the lines of what I wrote, especially to my spouse, I think I see where our mutual resentment started to build as I got more and more involved in more and more activities outside the home that made me happy. 

At the same time, it looks like he was getting more and more morose and out of sorts.  I base this guess on what was a clear and mainly continuing pattern of his atypical, at least for an adult male who could be considered by some to be in the prime of his life, sleeping and active periods.  Like a stubborn baby or an average really old person, he slept during the day and worked on his hobby at night. 

Throughout that pre-pandemic year we became more and more like “ships passing in the night” with those passages most often occurring in the late morning or early evening.  In the evenings we at least both tried to indulge one of our fewer and fewer common interests by watching TV programs, sports and movies together.  But in the mornings when he came up from his mancave to my woman cave in our split-level home, he would usually find me in front of the computer, often just playing games.  This latter exercise had been going for some time before and when this part of our macabre marriage death dance started, I would get up, come around my desk, sit in my rocker-recliner and we would try to have a conversation, a check-in about how and what each other was doing.  I think we both noticed that I made this effort less and less, until his attempts to do this started declining, too.  Maybe the patterns and comforts of our lives had moved so far away from each other that they and we were beyond reconnecting.

Another probable point of resentment, I’m guessing, is that I did not participate as actively as he wanted or expected me to in his (unrealistic) dream of making a business out of his hobby. That was where his time and our money went while a lot of my time and our money went into reading and traveling and socializing.  I know I’d expected him to enjoy those last activities with me.  Over time, though, his enjoyment of and interest in doing either had ebbed so low that I had begun to know better than to even ask him to join me because I knew what his answer would be.

There were other stressors that year that in retrospect could have brought us closer together but in the end seem to have had the opposite effect.  That was the year that Daughter #1 got married and Daughter #2 started medical school.  Both of these momentous events turned into wedge issues that drove us farther apart from each other. 

Here I can add that another longtime festering wound in our relationship was how differently he treated our children.  Again, these differences and disparities became more and more glaring over the years, though I can’t really pinpoint how far back they began and of course I don’t really know the reasons why.  My guess is that he took for granted or accepted or expected #1 to be totally like me and therefore “perfect” while he presumed #2 would be totally like him, an imperfect and stubborn addict who would always be “less than” in the eyes of everyone that mattered, including himself and possibly, in his mind, even me.  I surely had reached that point by the end of that year. There is no better indicator of this disparity, and how it finally blew our marriage apart for good, than summarizing his participation in the life of Daughter #1 and his withdrawal from participation in the life of Daughter #2 over the last six months of 2019.

And just to be complete and to add to my disappointment, I’ll have to throw in the monkey wrench that entered our relationship at about the same time.  That was the necessity for someone to devote more time and effort to taking care of my mom.  I’d expected my husband, who’d said and even written over and over, over all the years, how much he loved and appreciated “Mom” to do just that.  He’d also warned me, based on the similar trajectory he’d endured with his mom, that I’d have to figure out what to do with her sooner rather than later by this time.  

It also just dawned on me that he’d handled most of that without the help of his one remaining brother just as I found myself in the same situation vis-à-vis my one and only sister.  Wouldn’t you think that shared experience would have made a better and possibly even average person more sympathetic and helpful to one’s most beloved spouse rather than drive said simpatico away? Oh wait, in fact and reality it seems to reinforce what he finally told me, after I told him I didn’t think I could continue to live this way. 

In a nutshell, that was that we should have separated fifteen years earlier, based on his presumption that I would not move two thousand miles away from home (and Mom) when his job relocated.  I did it because I didn’t want to break up OUR family.  I can see now, as I should have seen before, that he just didn’t care about that.  It also clarifies what he first told me and repeated in those six months.  “You are number one for me.  I am number five for you.”  That first part was a lie though possibly the last part had been true for quite a long time.  I’d always said he knew me better than I knew myself.