The short life of a blogger

Well, everyone, this is my last post, at least for now. It seems that my posts were getting in the way of my relationship, so I am going to leave it for now, until Steve and I are both in a better place. It's been fun and illuminating to write this. Maybe when I come back, things will seem funnier. Adios and have a great summer!

Sloppy Second Thoughts

So would I do it all again? Well, I can say it's been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I can also say that I love Steve even more than I loved him before we moved in together. I have never felt about anyone the way I feel about him. Can you feel a big but (no, not a big butt, although there's one of those, too) coming on?

In the past month, I've realized that if I knew everything I know now, I would not have leaped. That doesn't mean that I want to end it---I don't. But I'd have done things differently. Steve pushed me until I had no options but to leap right then. Well, I shouldn't say I had no options. But he was very persuasive. I told him that I wanted to wait what was then five years, until Tom was out of high school. He said we had no way of knowing what five years would bring. I suggested three years---Alex would be almost out of high school, and Tom would be well situated. No, three years was too long as well. He told me, "I'm an impatient man. I want what I want when I want it." He moved into the mother-in-law suite they had downstairs in their house. Once he was in that suite, and had told Alex that he was planning to move out entirely, his impatience increased. He made calls to my house phone late at night when I didn't answer my cell. He even made a call to Tom's phone once. He told me that he felt like he'd done everything to move things forward and I still wasn't moving. I steeled myself and told Mark I wanted a divorce. No need to get into all of the details, but Mark wasn't destroyed, just inconvenienced.

Steve, in the meantime, had a talk or two with Ann, but never got anything settled. I went through my entire divorce and moved in with Steve, but things were never spelled out clearly on his side. One of the odd features of all of this is that Pennsylvania used to be a common-law state, and people who lived together before common law marriages were abolished may still be subject to the rules. Steve saw a lawyer who told him there were no grounds to believe that he would accidentally find himself married, but he never followed through with anything. So there is a chance that Steve could be married, and I, who actually got married, am divorced. Sloppy enough for you?

I am actually rather old-fashioned about some things. Back when Steve was courting me, he twice made oblique, semi-marriage proposals. No, they weren't get-down-on-his-knee-and-give-her-a-ring proposals, but he definitely expressed his desire that we be married. "KJM is good," he said, referring to my initials, "but KJC is better." It was my understanding that he wanted to be married when I was free. He even discussed where with me. I remember feeling a little nervous about that because of my credit score, but I guess there is some law now that says your credit score doesn't transfer to your spouse. I expected that moving in together was a step towards marriage, but since we moved in together, there has been no talk of marriage. And, of course, we can't be married until all of his legal entanglements are worked out.

So, one reason I would not leap so quickly again is because, when I decided to ask Mark for the divorce, I did so because I felt like I was not doing my part. I was dragging my feet and Steve had gone through great trouble and pain to hold up his side of the bargain. Well, since then, it seems that Steve has had second thoughts. He has, to my relief, started to do things to make me feel a bit more as if we are a unit. He's added me to his insurance, made me his emergency contact. But I still think he'd rather be back home, miserable with Ann, but not guilt-ridden over Alex. Alex, by the way, is doing just fine with everything. He is excelling in school, has a girlfriend, and seems perfectly well adjusted. It is Tom who has had problems adjusting, because of course, more has changed for him. He is the one who moved houses, at the same time he was changing schools. And I have tried to make him feel comfortable here, but he doesn't, particularly. He's doing well in school this year after a rough freshman year, but he still doesn't seem happy.

Which brings me to my second reason. Tom. I talked about making Mark unhappy, but I didn't fully realize how much everything would unsettle Tom. Steve tries, he really does, but he is so torn up by the idea that he is not living with Alex that he usually barely tolerates Tom. He chastises him for things that he should just let slide. A small example: We had dinner for Jenna (her husband was supposed to come but had to work) and my friend Sally, who'd come down from New York. Tom was happy and engaged, especially seeing Jenna, whom he likes a lot. It was great to see him so happy. I put guacamole and chips on the table right before we served the rest of the meal. I probably should have put it out sooner, maybe in the living room, but I didn't. Tom, who loves my guacamole, took a chip and dipped it. Steve immediately said, "Tom, wait until everyone is served to start eating." Tom said, politely, "I'm sorry, I thought it was an appetizer." I said, "I did, too." Steve said, "Well, it wouldn't be on the table...blah blah" Then, "Jesus Christ!" And Tom was deflated. Not a huge deal, but just enough to make him feel uncomfortable. And to make me feel wracked with guilt. Alex does a couple of things I find a little rude, but I try to make him feel comfortable. Whenever I tell Steve this, he just gets mad. He cannot get the idea that maybe he should be cutting Tom some slack until Tom feels more comfortable. Instead, he seems to take Tom's discomfort as a slight, so it keeps escalating. Back when they first met, Tom really liked Steve, because Steve was trying to win Tom over. So if I had to do it over again, I would put Tom's well-being ahead of my own.

Reason three has to do with that cliffhanger I talked about---Steve's time in San Francisco. I am not going to go into all the details---yet, but you have probably already figured out that he met someone there. This is not a nameless one-night, or two-night stand, this is a woman he talks to, texts, and IMs daily---or at least did until recently. I asked him to stop communicating with her (in e-mail, my favorite way to have difficult discussions, LOL), and he sent back a sort of "code" e-mail that implied he would stop. But usually when Steve makes oblique references, it means he's not doing what he's hinting at. And given that this was after almost a month of his knowing just how much this bothered me, I am going to guess that he hasn't stopped communicating. I can't find out, though, because he has put a password on his phone (that's how I found out to begin with) and has changed all the passwords he so freely gave me a couple of years ago, for his e-mail, computer, etc. I don't think she's that important to him, but I also have discovered that I am not important enough for him to do anything that he doesn't want to. And that's the big reason I would not do it again. I leaped because I wanted more than anything else in the world to make this man happy, because I was absolutely, positively sure that he would do the same for me. And now I know that he would not. So my love for him is permanently tinged by the fact that I am more hung up on him than he is on me.

Coffee Talk

Don't you hate cliffhangers? Especially when they aren't resolved quickly? Don't worry, I'll get to San Francisco. And Las Vegas, too, for that matter. But I started sounding like too much of a sad sack, when really, I'm not like that (ha! you say). So I thought I'd talk about something near to my heart that I love. Coffee.

Coffee actually plays a big part in Steve's and my romance. We met at Starbucks and then Panera (free WiFi). We both absolutely loved coffee, but Steve was the connoisseur. He was the person who turned me on to Starbuck's African blends. He bought Kenya, then I found Sidamo, which has just a hint of citrus in it.

So much of our romantic history has links to coffee and coffee shops. We met, as I said, at coffee shops when we were falling in love. After he started a new job in Princeton, I would drop Tom off and then go to Starbucks and buy him a double-cupped Americano (and me a Skinny Vanilla Latte) and take it to his office. We would sit in the parking lot for a few minutes before he went back into work.


When we decided that we had to go give it one more try at our respective homes, for the sakes of Alex and Tom, we said good-bye in a Starbucks. We agreed not to communicate for six weeks and then decide what to do. I cried, he had tears in his eyes. The next morning, he called me shortly after I dropped Alex off at school. "Come to me, Katie," he said. He was waiting at Panera. I did. I could not not meet him. After that, we still agreed that we would make a decision on the appointed day, we just wouldn't go "cold turkey." We agreed to meet, yet again, at Panera, if we wanted to continue seeing each other. I got there, my usual early self. I sat and waited. He is usually not ridiculously early the way I am, but he is always on time. The appointed meeting time---9am---came and went and I started to get panicky. It was really only about 9:07 when he showed up, but in those seven minutes, my whole life flashed before my eyes. I could not bear life without him, I thought. I wondered how long I should wait. We'd agreed not to call, but should I? Well, at 9:07, he came running in with roses. He'd wanted to commemorate the occasion, but he'd gotten into a slow line at the market. When I saw him, with his distinctive, jaunty walk, coming across the street (I was sitting at a window), my heart leapt, I broke into a huge smile, and I felt as happy as I'd ever felt in my life.

The rest, as they say, is history.

So, now we are living together, and work schedules and the fact that we don't have to steal minutes out of the day to see each other has meant that my bringing coffee to his office slowed and then stopped. But we still enjoyed long, leisurely mornings on the weekends, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times in bed. I told you in my previous post that I'd been touched that Steve started jumping out of bed to be the one to make coffee and get the paper---I tried to split it 50/50---until I realized that while the coffee was brewing, he was chatting to women with names like "SexKitten4U" online.

But something else stopped the whole coffee-sharing experience, and it's one of those things that make you feel foolish, but wistful at the same time. Steve decided one day to give up coffee. I know I shouldn't take it as rejection or feel insecure about it, but I am, as you probably know by now, a little crazy. It was so much a part of of courtship, and one of the best parts of my weekend mornings. Not that I still don't have coffee---Steve still runs down to make it (see paragraph 6). And he makes himself, or I make him, tea. But it's not the same. We no longer share opinions about new coffee types. We don't give each other the Starbucks MP3 of the week (you get those in the stores). His giving up coffee has sort of eliminated a whole bunch of Christmas stocking ideas, although I've tried to switch over. This must be how drinkers feel when one of their crowd goes to AA. I'm assuming Steve quit because he was over-caffeinating himself at work. But that's one of the mildly annoying things about this. He would not tell me why he quit. He used to buy 1/2 regular/ 1/2 decaf to put in his coffee maker. When you do that, you're drinking about the same amount of caffeine as you are in tea. But he will not go back to it at all, even for a "special occasion." And even though I know it's stupid, it does feel a little like a rejection, as if he suddenly stopped liking some movie star whose movies we used to go to. Mark, by the way, never liked coffee---or tea. He has never drunk any grown-up beverage. He doesn't drink water. He drinks Coke. So I think maybe when Steve and I were learning about each other, I attached more importance to the coffee because of that. Here's a grown-up, I said. And, more important, here's someone who likes what I like.

Oh, well. I should probably give it up anyway.

Sex, Fidelity and Trust

I've thought about this whole subject a lot over the years, and with all the stories in the news, it seems particularly timely today. What do we see? Men cheating, people condemning, and families shattering. If you saw the Sex and the City movie, there was a really good, if extreme, example of a smart, independent woman---Miranda---almost ending her marriage over her Steve's indiscretion. For those of you who didn't see it, Miranda had pretty much stopped having sex with Steve because she was tired and stressed. The last time they had sex, she told him to "get it over with." A short time later, a tearful Steve confessed that he'd had sex with someone else. Just sex, nothing else. Miranda moved out. She said that what she couldn't get over was the breach of trust. Well, that seemed all wrong to me. Steve was horny and he slept with a woman. His relationship with Miranda was important enough that he didn't want to keep it secret from her, so he told her. That doesn't really seem to be breaking a trust. If you've seen SATC, you know that Miranda (and the rest of the women on the show) have had a lot of sex with a lot of different men over the years. It always seems odd to me when women who've had casual sex act like just that sex act is so much more important than everything else that goes into making a marriage or a relationship.

Also, it seems fairly obvious that men and women are hardwired differently. Even though there are a lot of powerful women out there these days, you don't get that many stories about women having sex with men other than their husbands. When you do, it's usually one other man and they are having an emotional affair because something is lacking in their marriage or relationship. There are no female equivalents to Bill Clinton or Tiger Woods because women, generally, are more naturally monogamous. Both sexes are programmed by nature to be the way they are. Men are supposed to spread their seed; women are supposed to stay and protect their offspring.

So I thought I had it all figured out. Here's the problem with infidelity, I said. We expect men to conform to a way of life that is not natural to them. There are, of course, some men who adapt quite happily to a monogamous lifestyle. The benefits outweigh the costs. But I'd say most men, or at least most highly sexed men, at some point either resent their partners because they are keeping them from sex with someone else, or, more likely, cheat on their partners and lie and cover up. It's the lying and covering up that break down the relationship, not the sex. So Steve and I struck a deal fairly early in our relationship. (I still have the e-mails discussing some of it.) He said that sharing was the most important thing, in general. He'd also told me, early on, that he couldn't even pronounce monogamy, much less practice it. Our deal, therefore, was that if he felt like having sex with someone else, he should do so. The only two things I asked was that he wear a condom and tell me about it. Now, I am a fairly insecure person, so it seems masochistic to ask him to tell me about sex with other women. But if he tells me, he takes the fear out of it for me. She might have longer legs or fewer wrinkles, or a smaller ass, but he's telling me about her, which means I am important and she is not. He could also continue his pornography viewing and chatting with women online. Although I didn't love it, it didn't really bother me more than a lot of other things we do that annoy our partners.

The trouble with deals like this, of course, is that we each have our own ideas of what's included. My approach was a sort of Weight Watchers approach. If you've ever been to Weight Watchers, you'll understand this. Their idea is that too many people go on "diets" and see them as all-or-nothing propositions. So if you fall off the wagon, you think your diet is over and you just chuck the whole thing, probably ending up gaining more weight than you lost. So for sex, I was thinking something like If he's on a business trip, in a bar, and starts chatting up some woman, he should just go for it without feeling likes he's betraying me or ruining the relationship.

We have a very good, very frequent sex life, so it didn't seem that there would be much need for him to actively look for more. Well, I was wrong. He is, it seems, a sexual glutton, and some of it has been beyond my capacity to overlook. We will have sex on a Saturday morning and he will go downstairs to make coffee for us. Nice, right? That's what I thought until I realized he was chatting with women and viewing pornography immediately after we'd had sex. That's a little disconcerting. He also left a chat up (and yes, I know I shouldn't have read it) that talked about setting up a meeting with a woman. He told her I wasn't sexually adventurous. I thought that probably he was just chatting and wouldn't really meet, but my curiosity got the better of me, I put an ad on Craigslist, and ended up making a date to meet him. He showed up and started laughing when he saw me. "If you like pina coladas..." He said he was 90% sure it was me because of some of the chat/e-mail exchanges. We talked about the part of our agreement that he was breaking---the "tell me" part. He says it's more exciting not to tell. Well, I don't want specifics, but there's a difference between not telling and hiding, and he seems incapable of the transparency he said he desired. He went to Chicago on business and I told him to pick someone up while he was there, try to get it out of his system. He says he did, but I'm not 100% sure. He may have just been humoring me.

I do think there is something other than sex going on here. This has been a hard year and I think we each have had some problem adjusting. I also think he has always compartmentalized everything. He and his wife seem to have gone their own ways almost from the beginning, and he told me repeatedly that he and Ann share none of the same interests. He wanted to share; he craved a close emotional relationship unlike anything he'd had previously. But I think he is also scared of getting that close to someone and his way of dealing with it is by keeping a little part of himself hidden from me. So, I reasoned, I just needed to be patient and things would work out. And even if some of it was ego bruising, it was just what I'd said didn't matter---casual sex.

And then he went to San Francisco on business.

Tom

I go back and forth in my thinking about Tom and what effect this whole thing has had on him. For the most part, he seems fine. He has good friends, he's doing fairly well in school, and he is, in many ways, a very mature, together kid. But he used to be a very happy kid, too, and he doesn't seem that way to me, at least not at home. There are a lot of things going on here, of course. He's sixteen---aren't most 16-year-olds sort of permanently pissed off at their parents? Also, a lot of his friends's families have a lot more money than we do. That means that he spends more time at their giant houses than they do at our townhouse---I feel perpetually behind in hosting. This would not have been any different if we'd stayed in the house with Mark; it was smaller than this place is. We probably should have thought more about entertaining and other things when we rented the place, but to be honest, it took Steve so long to find something he liked that I just jumped at it. And it is in a great location; it just doesn't have a basement or any other space for easy entertaining.

So Tom stays over at his friends' houses and then comes home and sleeps the day away. I never know how much is surly 16-year-old and how much is that he feels out of place down in the living room with us. When Alex comes over, he spends some time downstairs with us, watching TV, etc. Tom, who lives here most of the time, spends that time in his room.

This is one of those things that I should have understood/thought about more fully when Steve and I decided to live together. Steve, and especially Ann, run a much tighter ship than I ever have. I also tend to make allowances for circumstances, probably too much, while Steve does not, particularly. Well, he makes allowances for Alex, but not for Tom. That's to be expected since Alex is here so little (Ann is a master of making sure it's as difficult as possible for Alex to be here, while pretending to be accommodating.)

Tom was a remarkable young child. This is not just mother love. He got noticed wherever he went. He talked exceptionally early for a boy and was very good at starting conversations with everyone. He is still amazingly good at interacting with people. He is not quite so good at working hard. A lot of things came easily to him when he was younger, and although he's getting better, he still does not see the relationship between work and reward. If you criticize some writing or something that he's done, he takes it as a personal criticism of him. But that's really just with me---he's great with his teachers.

The thing I feel guilty about is that I did what many people in bad marriages do---what my own mother did. I compensated for the lack of a relationship with my husband by paying an incredible amount of attention to Tom. So now, when I have a normal relationship with Steve, Tom feels like he's not getting enough attention, even though I still do an incredible amount with and for him---well, more for him these days, but that's his choice. He'd rather have Mom drive him and his friends to the movies than go to the movies with Mom. But for Mother's Day, he went with me to see Iron Man 2.

These relationships with our kids are part of what make Steve's and my relationship so much more difficult. Our relationship has to be really great to compensate for all the upset we've caused ourselves and others. It's a pretty tall order. But so far, most of the time, I still think it was worth it. And most of the time, I think Tom will be just fine, we'll be just fine.

The Other Side

My only post that has excited comment (except from my friends) was the one about Steve's anger-management problem. So here's the flip side. First, things always look worse in print. You grouse to your friends or something and someone makes a joke and it's not that bad. You write it down and it sounds much, much worse. Steve has read some of my stuff and, just as I would do (and I do this a lot), he skipped over all the nice things I said and ended up being hurt by the bad things.

So here's my confession: my temper is different from Steve's, but just as ungovernable. At the risk of sounding too much like a granola eater, we are both Pisces, and we are both subject to mood swings. We're also too sensitive to the other's moods. We both get frustrated. I am just somewhat more insecure than he is, so while he gets mad, I get whiny and needy and apologetic and he says, "Why are you always apologizing for everything?" "Sorry," I respond.

This is a vicious circle. Part of what frustrates me is Steve's shutting down; becoming emotionally unreachable, not telling me things. I go along, asking questions and trying to find out what's going on. Eventually, usually fueled with wine, I blow. And I am horrible when I blow. Tom says that there's another person inside me who comes out. I have a different voice and say whatever I can, true or not, to wound. I throw things. I am just not as strong as Steve, so I've never broken a door. So then Steve says the reason he does not tell me things he thinks I won't like is because of my "vitriol." And I say horrific,you-can't-take-them-back things when I do yell. This last time, I impugned the size of Steve's manhood. Any guys who are out there, here's a secret: that is an incredibly easy target for any man except, probably, a John Holmes. In fact, almost everyone fits in that "average" category, both men and women. For the record, Steve is somewhat to the right of center on the bell curve, at least in my experience, but he's still, I guess, close enough to the center for it to be a sore point. And here's a point on which he's a far better person than I: He may yell, or reprimand, about stupid stuff, but he has never made a personally hurtful comment to me, no matter how angry he's gotten. And there is plenty he could say---I am fat, for instance. And he has never made me feel less than sexy and desirable when I am with him. And since I desire him more than I've ever desired anyone, shame on me for saying something like that to him.

So, anyway, I thought it was sort of a commentary on male-female relationships that the two people who commented here were so different in their take on things. As a matter of fact, for a minute, I thought maybe eastcoastbilly was Steve, but he wasn't. I think, to a certain extent, this is the Era of the Woman. So our feelings and wishes are legitimized, and men, acting the way men act, are the "bad guys." Look at Everybody Loves Raymond, or most other sitcoms of that era. The woman is right and the man is wrong, even though they are playing entirely by the woman's rules. So the woman who comments doesn't see all the good things about Steve I've put in previous posts and sees something about his bad temper. The man homes in on the thing that's important to men---sex.

I will talk about the whole sex thing more in another post. Right now, I just want to say that Steve really is a good, generally considerate person, as am I. But we both bring a whole lifetime of baggage and failed relationships. If we were emotionally healthy people, we would probably not be where we are now. I yelled and screamed and did something Steve has never done to me---thank heavens---I pummeled him around the head and shoulders. I was so frustrated and hurt and mad before I blew. But the good thing is, I think, that we both care---even if it takes destructive forms sometimes. With Mark, I was sort of in a coma for years. I never got this upset because I'd just shut down. The only person I cared about was Tom. So I wouldn't trade my relationship with Steve for anything---overall, it's the best time I've ever had.

My Work

So I've told you all the bad decisions I've made, but I haven't talked about what I'm doing now, work-wise. I am an adjunct instructor at a community college. I edit books as a freelancer as well. This was another bad decision I made, by the way. My plan was to finish grad school when Tom was small and then get a full-time teaching position. I didn't take two things into account: 1) Mark lost his job and I could not keep paying for my doctoral studies, so I am somewhere between an undeclared master's degree and a doctorate; and 2) it makes no sense to go back, because there are pretty much no full-time positions out there. Unless you have some weird specialty that is currently in demand.

Instead, I get to go teach my classes for about a fourth of what the full-timers make, with no benefits. The consolation is that the education industry is so screwed up that I have a whole lot of company. Regardless of what the union tells you, here is the truth: Adjunct instructors, some with excellent credentials and some with dubious credentials, make up about 75% of the instructors at community colleges. The other 25% are full-time faculty. So that the college is not accused of getting around paying benefits to adjuncts who are really full-time, we are only allowed to teach 75-80% of the load of a full-time instructor. A part-timer, therefore, has about 12 class-hours, or 3 classes per week to a full-timer's 4 classes per week. The adjunct must be observed, and must follow minimum guidelines for paper assignments, etc. The full-timers, for their 25% additional class time, are paid about four times the salary and receive incredible benefits. Once they make tenure, they are never reviewed or observed and cannot be fired except under extreme circumstances. They can bunch their classes so they are only on campus two or three days a week. And they never have to retire. I don't know why they don't retire anyway, because education is one of the last places where you can still get a defined benefit pension, and it's a really good one. But a lot of people evidently want to keep coming to their offices, even those who don't want to work, so there are no full-time positions opening up.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it drives me crazy! It turns out that I am a good teacher. I care and I work hard to make sure my students learn. For three classes, I probably work about a forty-hour work week (this will go down somewhat as I teach the same classes over again). But I can't live on what I'm paid for that work week, and the guy in the next office is making quite a nice living and giving fewer assignments so he doesn't have to grade. And it's all your tax dollars! A big part of the reason for all of this is that people have been sold a bill of goods as far as education is concerned. Everyone thinks they need degrees, but they have no interest in or ability for real, college-level study. So they come to us---thirteenth grade. When they get out, many of them are surprised to find that everyone out in the real world knows it's thirteenth grade. They can't get jobs that go instead to the graduates of Stanford or even the good state schools. And if they do well enough, they can go to those state schools for their last two years (the community colleges are two-year schools), but they find that, lo and behold, a lot of their credits don't transfer because, again, everyone knows that "college math" at the community college was what people were supposed to learn by ninth grade. So what is the purpose, then? To give a few people who would be otherwise unemployable really cushy jobs. And to keep kids off the streets until they mature a little.

And since I know all of this, I am a part of the problem. But, hey, would you want unemployment to go up even more?