Blame

It has occurred to me lately that I have become more and more unhappy, less and less my real self over the past few years.

By nature, I am a person who takes responsibility for when things go awry.  I have always taken on a lot more responsibility than is really mine.  My sister does the same thing.  Our brother, the compete opposite, takes no responsibility whatsoever for anything.  I think it makes sense that all three of us spun out of the same parents/family/upbringing.  Maybe at that point it is a XX vs XY thing.  Maybe a male swimming in that gene pool is different than a female.  Maybe, as the only boy in the family, he was taught a little differently.  Maybe lots of things that are all in the past and the "fault" -- using the term very loosely, since I have long declared that we are what we are and it is useless to blame our parents -- lies somewhere out there.

Anyway, I recently found myself in a huge yelling fight with Bobby and what came out of it for me is that he is incapable of hearing anything negative about himself.  I, on the other hand, am hard pressed to accept a compliment or believe anything too good about myself.  How's that for a recipe for disaster?

When you take a person who defaults to feeling the blame for everything -- regardless of how possible it is that she is actually responsible -- and you pair her with a person who, deep down and vehemently believes that he has no faults (or at least very few), you end up with a very unequal relationship.

For us, that has resulted in several things:
1)  I have very few close friends, because I isolate myself in my unhappiness and my inferiority.
2)  I have low self-confidence because I have had little encouragement and lots of preying on my insecurity.
3)  I frequently turn to wine to escape myself/my situation/my mind.

In this most recent blow-up, I said -- okay, screamed -- just that:  that he is unable to hear anything negative about himself and that he spins situations to make the blame fall on me.  Case in point:  he recently admitted to me -- after 20 years -- that, in his teens and early 20s, he fathered three abortions.

Egregious, I think.

But what I am really hung up on is that he revealed this to me at the most inappropriate time possible -- at my sister's house, during a family party where we were also entertaining friends of my brother's, over Thanksgiving.  No apparent reason for the timing, except to say that he "just had to tell me."  That he felt divinely led to that conversation at that moment in that situation.

Before I can even deal with the morality or immorality of the confession, I am hung up on the selfishness that led him to bare his soul right then, right there.  And I find myself analyzing the selfishness that has framed our relationship -- and apparently his previous relationships.  I see more clearly now that so many of our rough spots have been, not because of inadequacies of mine necessarily as I have always assumed they were, but because of his selfish nature.

Even during this fight, I said to him that I realized I am hypersensitive to his selfish behavior on the tail of his confession, but that I had finally recognized that there is a trend to his actions in thinking only of himself -- in impregnating three different women 20-odd years ago, yes, but perhaps moreso in choosing that time and place to tell me about it.  At a bonfire, with bellies full of wine, with strangers and with family, in an already tense situation at the holidays.  His admission served no one but himself, and as it has played out, it didn't even serve him very well.

His response was to say that he was sorry he even told me.  That he was being honest with me for the first time in our relationship and now I was making him regret it.  I was.  Then, he went on to say that it was apparent that I couldn't accept his apology because I am too sensitive.

Not that his apology, such as it has been, is inadequate.  Or that he has gone on with selfish behavior in the few months since Thanksgiving.  Only that it is my fault that we can't get past this because I am overly sensitive.

See?  That's just not right.  To make it a shortcoming of mine instead of accepting that there are chinks in his armor as well.  It is well documented that I have faults and areas that require work.  My default is kind of lazy and weak.  I try to push past that.  Sometimes I can, sometimes I am not so much.  I have often crawled into a bottle because it is easier than dealing with the reality of my life -- or it at least gives him something to blame for our problems.  When there is alcohol in a relationship, of course it is rocky and unstable and unfulfilling and difficult.  When it's just the two people, blame has to fall somewhere and it CANNOT fall on him.

In years of couples therapy, he has tried to insist that I am clinically depressed and that I am an alcoholic.  What I am beginning to get my arms around is that he is anxious to pin labels on me so that he can not only have no blame himself, but also be the object of sympathy.  Oh, poor Bobby with the psychologically unstable wife.  Bobby, the saint, takes care of his alcoholic wife.  When, in reality, the wife is just dealing the best she can with a warped reality in which she can do little right and her husband can do NO wrong.

So there is no room for selfish or weak or lazy on my part.  I have to get up ready to fight for myself everyday.  I have to demand honesty and shared responsibility.  Or I will disappear forever.

And all this before I even touch on the fact that he got THREE different women pregnant. . . .

Friends

I wish I were a better friend.  I think having realized that I am not a great friend is probably a great step toward becoming a better friend.  I just hope it is not too late.

I know lots of great women and I think I would like to be better friends with them, but I am not entirely sure how they do it.  It seems that a lot of women I know spend a big old bunch of time chatting on the phone and that is a big problem for me.  I just don't like it.  I get distracted, I get to thinking that there's something else I should be doing, I start doing it, I am not paying attention to my friend on the phone and then I get lost in the conversation and say something dumb or irrelevant or trite.

I don't want to do that, but it is a hard habit to break!

Last week, I was walking at the mall -- yes, mall walking, not shopping -- with a friend I have known since I was three years old.  I have been good friends with her, for all intents and purposes for about the last 15 years.  I still forget her kids' birthdays and I never send anniversary cards.  We don't borrow each other's stuff or drop by each other's houses unexpectedly.  Real friends do that stuff, don't they?  Anyway, we're mall walking and she is telling me about how concerned she is about her older son's social morays and habits and problems and I'm listening and I'm thinking and I'm sharing similar stories about my son (which is how I try to help -- sharing similar experiences that I think make it clear that I understand although recently I've wondered if it really makes it seem as though I am turning the conversation around to being about me, which I really don't mean to do but I wonder if I come off that way).  And we're walking and walking and I'm listening and sharing and listening and pretty soon I have that niggling little thought at the back of my mind that if I walk by the same Bath and Body Works, Foot Locker and Sprint Store ONE MORE TIME I'm going to scream.

So I say, "Okay,  we have to stop.  I'm bored."

"Oh, I'm boring you," she says.  "I've talked too much.  I'm sorry."

I didn't mean that at all, of course.  I was referring only to the number of times I had read the same damn sale signs in the stupid windows we were passing.  I just said it wrong.  I don't think real friends do that.  Real friends probably keep traipsing past the Foot Locker and around the ATM and by the Electric Cigarette kiosk (why????) without noticing because they are so engrossed in their friend's tale of woe.  Or happiness or angst or whatever.

I can't.  It's not that it always comes back to me or that it should, it's just that I have forgotten how to put myself out to be a friend to others.

I don't send Christmas cards.  I often don't say, "No, YOUR hair is always perfect," when someone compliments my hair.  Sometimes I don't even listen when someone answers my casual "how are you."

I don't want to be a bad friend.  I want deep and meaningful adult relationships.  I want to want to work out and vacation and borrow and lend with women.

Is it too late?  At 49, can I begin to be better?  I hope so.

Yesterday, a church lady friend (using the term loosely, of course) called me.  We discussed the church business we needed to, and then she started asking me about stuff in my life.  I answered her questions and made a real effort to ask her stuff back.  And guess what?  It kinda worked.  She shared with me some stuff about her husband that is tough; about her kids that is common between us (although I forgot  that her son is older than her daughter -- this friend I have known for YEARS and our kids acolyte together -- the kind of thing that comes naturally to a good friend, I just completely biff on); some concerns about a situation at our church.  And it was good.  And I made an effort -- I know it shouldn't feel like an effort, except maybe at first it's okay if it does, kind of like starting any new habit -- and it was good.  We chatted on the phone for, like, half an hour.  Like lady friends do, right?

Okay, so I have a baseline.

And today, I am going to mall walk with a different friend.  And my best friend from high school -- to whom I hadn't spoken in almost two years until I ran into her at a restaurant the other night -- just texted me.  So the harvest is plentiful.  There are wonderful, interesting, helpful, funny, smart women out there who may just be looking for a wonderful, interesting, helpful, funny, smart friend.

Like me.

I just wish I had started earlier and didn't have to feel like the new kid on the Kindergarten playground. So, here's to putting on my big girl panties and making new (better) friends.  Even if I have known them for 45 years!

Dog Person

I am not a dog person.  I know dog people.  I even like some dog people.  I am okay with my own dog, as a matter of fact.  But I am not a dog person.

The problem with this -- actually, there are lots of problems with this, but I am going to focus on one (for now) -- is that my dog is TOTALLY a me dog.  Our dog is crazy about me.  Like, if she were a person, people would talk about how unhealthy her attachment to me is.

This would be sweet and kind of fulfilling for a dog person, which, as I have stated and re-stated, I AM NOT!

My husband and I decided, when our kids were of a certain age, we should have a dog.  A woman I knew had just had a litter of Cocker Spaniels and I thought that seemed like a reasonable-size of dog, if we had to have a dog, which, apparently, we did.

Amendment to the earlier statement:  I am not a dog person and I am REALLY not a big dog person.

So, a Cocker seemed like as good a choice as any.  I had a Schnauzer growing up and, although I didn't especially like that dog either -- but she adored me, come to think of it -- she was a good size for a house pet.

Bobby and I decided the Easter Bunny would bring the puppy to our children, so we drove three hours on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday to pick out and pick up our new dog.  I held the puppy for the three hours driving home and I guess we somewhat bonded.  I mean, come on.  Even people who don't like dogs like to snuggle with a puppy every now and again.  So we get home, the kids are sleeping and we take the puppy to the crate we had hidden in the basement.

Puppy commences crying.  Again, even a card-carrying non-dog-person doesn't want to hear a baby crying in her basement all night.  But I couldn't let the puppy sleep with us.  Even I knew that was a precedent we did not want to set.  So I compromised.  I moved the crate up out of the basement to the laundry room, hidden between the washer and dryer.  I turned the dryer on for some heat and noise and tried to go back to bed.

Baby continues crying.

Mom (that would be me by default) ends up spending the night on the floor of the laundry room, fingers in the crate for puppy to snuggle.  Hey, I didn't ever break down and let the puppy sleep with me, right?

The next morning, while my precious children are distracted with the egg hunt in the backyard, I pulled the puppy out of the laundry room and introduced him to his new kids.  They were overjoyed with their new puppy.  Who really only wanted to cower behind my ankles.

The damage was done.  I had a new appendage.  And the kids, offended that "their" new dog didn't seem to want anything to do with them, distracted themselves with the other goodies the Easter Bunny had brought and resigned themselves to sharing their house -- but not their hearts -- with the new resident.

Oh, I guess maybe they tried to play with her.  As I said, no human is immune to a cuddly, fat puppy.  Especially when she's sleeping.  But for the most part, I was the one to feed her, take her outside, reward her for going outside, bring her inside, keep her from chewing everything leather or wood or fabric once she came inside. . . .

And sleeping on the floor of the laundry room all the while.

Then the kids went back to school.  And my husband went back to work.  And it was, for real, just me and that dog.  Scout, she had been dubbed.  Just me and Scout.

I had read about crate training and figured that was a good idea.  Warehouse the animal for hours at a time, take her out to go outside, put her back in the crate, walk away.  Really, the dog likes it, the books said.  They are den animals, the books said.  They need to be alone, they really like it.

Damn books.  They have never tried to get something -- anything -- done in a house with a caged, crying puppy.

So, I contracted a Puppy Whisperer.  I needed someone to teach me how to raise this animal.  I mean, my son and daughter had made it to elementary school without any major catastrophes, but this was, literally, an entirely different animal.

Puppy Whisperer told me to take Scout out of the crate, attach her to a leash and attach the other end of the leash to my beltloop and go about my day while the kids were at school.  When they came home, they were to take her on walks, play with her, generally attempt to imprint themselves on the tiny dog brain in any way possible.

So, I did.  All that.  At 75 bucks an hour, Dog Whisperer is One To Be Obeyed.

About a week into this ridiculous situation -- children insisting that Scout WANTS to watch TV with them after school, pulling the puppy around the block -- I am not making this up -- on her little bottom because she would sit and not get up if it meant leaving my side, or sometimes carrying her around the block, Scout and me actually attached at the hip -- I was complaining about my new life to a friend.

"Oh, no,"  Rhoda said.

"That's something dog people do,"  Rhoda, mother of three boys and three dogs, said.  "You are not a dog person."

Too little.  Too late.  Thanks, Rhoda.

So, fast forward eight years.  For the first five or so, she lived in her crate when I left the house.  She slept in her crate.  If I ever just didn't want her at my feet, I could put her in that crate.

And then she didn't.  And I couldn't.  She just flat refused.  Howling, crying, chewing on the bars of the crate refused.  So, now she sleeps in my bedroom.  On a leash on a rug on the floor -- next to the expensive lambswool and velvet bed that Santa brought a few years ago.

If I am at home and a visitor comes to the house, she goes absolutely nuts.  Barking, growling, running around the house and then standing resolutely between me and whoever dares trespass.  If I am not home, any and all strangers are welcome to come into the house, gather up any and all of our belongings -- save the chair she is lounging on -- and skeedaddle.

If I want to take a bath, she will guard the door so none shall pass.  If I want to take a nap, she is suddenly very sleepy.

It's a lot of togetherness, even for a dog person.  Which, did I mention?  I am NOT.

In case you are not convinced, just let me add this last little story:  About a year ago, I wrecked my car. That's a whole 'nother post.  Suffice to say, I totaled my convertible and, along with it, my right leg.  Five hour surgery to reattach my foot; six days in ICU; then I'm home -- in a wheelchair or on a walker -- to my everlovin' canine limb.  She takes one look at me and immediately lies down by my side.

Sweet, right?

Eventually, I have to get out of bed to go to the bathroom.  I finagle my way around out of the covers, swing my legs off the edge of the bed, align myself with my walker and begin to hop -- slowly and painfully -- to the bathroom.  Scout right by my side.

Hobbling.  With her right back leg lifted.

Really?  The dog absolutely cannot walk.  For, like three days, she keeps this up.

My husband just about lost it.  "Oh great," he says.  "Now the dog has bone cancer," he says.  "I can't handle it.  It's too much," he says.

I arranged to have a friend -- Rhoda -- take the dog to the vet.  I waited at home for news.  About three hours later, the phone rang.

Vet:  Mrs. Fagan, we have done every test we can think of on Scout, and can't find anything physically wrong with her.

Me:  Umm.  Okay.

Vet:  Let me ask you, has anything changed significantly around your household recently?

Me:  Umm.  Other than the fact that I can't use MY right hind leg, either?

Vet:  Yeah.  That'd be it.  This is psychosomatic.

Me:  Umm.

**DIALTONE**

I don't know if he hung up or I did or if Scout somehow figured out how to disconnect the call now that we were on to her.  I just know that, at that moment, I knew, dog person or not, I was going to have to figure out how to accept and love this animal as -- not just part of my life -- part of me.

But I am not getting another one.

I am NOT!

Umm....

Here We Go Again

So, it's a new year, and with the chugging of Champagne and the falling of balls (in Times Square, not a comment on my husband) (or son), comes my insatiable need to resolve.  And among those resolutions is perpetually my promise to write regularly and in a disciplined manner.  Not necessarily for anyone else, but for me.  It is one of the few things I really come by naturally, and I just keep not trying.

I don't really have anything useful to share.  I don't really think most people with blogs do, though.  I can't seem to get interested enough in anyone or anything to follow any blogs so I don't really think anyone would follow mine.  I don't even think I knew others could see these ramblings until today.  I noticed someone from Mombai had actually commented on one of my posts.

Things that make you say, "huh."

How boring (or fascinating) is that person?  What could she (or he) possibly have gleaned from the goings-on of a housewife in Kansas?  And then he (she?) was moved to comment.  Did this Mombaian actually read my entire rant about buying a mattress?

Huh.

I really want to write for me.  I guess I don't mind if others read along.  I just don't think I am comfortable with people I know reading along.  But maybe I will be if I write anonymously for long enough, consistently enough.  Maybe I can gain the confidence and consistency I crave if nameless, faceless people read my ramblings.  Maybe, then, I could have the courage to write more frequently, more publicly, more.

Huh.

It bears thinking about.

So, for today, here's what I know:  I love my house, I just think it is too cluttered and I worry that I may be verging on hoarder status.  I am crazy about my kids.  Period.  Right now.  They both do things that make me nuts on occasion, but sitting here right now, with them back in school after 11 days, two holidays and a pink eye scare, I am crazy about my kids.  I love and like my husband.  Usually.  He has some stuff that absolutely irks me, but I do, too, him.  Sidebar, I had WAY TOO MUCH to drink on New Year's Day night.  No reason, no one else, just me.  Dumb.  He was so put out with me on January 2, rightfully so.  I said to him then, and I still hold to be true, "I know I am so lucky to have you and sometimes I think I just try to sabotage it."

He replied, "Me, too."

Just that.  "Me, too."

What a gift, that.  Accepting my apology, accepting his own culpability.  Forgiving (while not forgetting or expecting me to forget his shit).  Moving forward.  Together.  I love and like that.  A lot.

I like my friends, but I think I need to work on that area of my life.  I need to work to strengthen friendships with women.  I am so reticent to put myself out there.  I don't call, I don't make plans, I don't just check in, I don't chat.  I think I should.  I hope I will.  Resolved.

I can be so much more organized, in my closet, in my kitchen, in my job, in my volunteering, for my kids, about holidays and birthdays, with my family, for my mother-in-law. . .  the list goes on and on.  But it all comes down to organization.  Everyone wins.  Even me.

My friend, Susan, says for her it all comes down to energy -- her buzzword for 2013.  That's good, too. But I think I'm sticking with organization.  And pray it works.

So, house, kids, husband I have my head around.  Job is good.  Friends are okay.

My prayer and my goal each day is that I will be good and okay and organized and everything will get better as I get better myself.

Happy New Year!