Month: July 2010

Did “the gay thing” sort of make the divorce easier?

One of the big developments of the 20th century in family law was the no fault divorce. It represents a major shift in the thinking of the courts about the promise of marriage. That shift is this: if one person wants a divorce, then the courts will grant a divorce without any need for a further reason.

This can be counter-intuitive because the popular notion about divorce is that someone is to blame. Normally the adulterer. What about a gay adulterer? Is it an easier betrayal to realize that the reason your wife was unfaithful is that she didn’t like your gender? I don’t know. Nobody can know because intensity of feeling is subjective. Anyhow, neither TGT nor the adulterty factored into the legal proceedings because it was a no-fault divorce done under the collaborative divorce rules. Our divorce happened mostly through preparing for a series of conference-table discussions. Although I was heartbroken and angry, none of this was reflected in the proceeding, the papers, or the outcome. Basically my feelings were my problem, not the courts. If you just said to yourself “as it should be” then you’ve been swept away in the contemporary jurisprudence on family law. Your corresponding self from 30, 50, and 100 years ago might not have agreed. Your corresponding self might have said something about getting justice against the party who broke the sacred marriage vows. And if you said something more like the 2nd thing, then it shows that the sweep of history is incremental.

Anyhow, this isn’t about legal theory. This is about whether TGT somehow made my divorce easier. Was it a comfort to know that there wasn’t some scuzzy guy she liked better? I don’t know. Is some scuzzy gal that she met on the internet really an improvement? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I was shocked and heartbroken. I was never surprised.

I will say this, however. When my ex-wife moved out, she was rejecting everything about the perfect life that she had built for herself with the adoring, faithful, white-collar husband; the shiny new house in the suburb; and the two cherubic kids. Her reasons on the last are unclear and a bit inconsistent, like the woman herself. But the fact is, I am glad to have custody of my kids, I am a loving and devoted father, she remains involved in the kids lives, and we have transitioned from spouses to amicable co-partents at arms length in a manner which has been a whole lot better than my own parents or many other divorced parents that I knew.

There are various groups set up for straight spouses, the most prominent being the Straight Spouse Network and there is even a celebrity pop-psychologist champion with three names (Amity Pierce Buxton) and a rival (has a new book out, but can’t remember the name). And I joined them for a while but quickly lost interest. The reason why is because these groups all deal with the strangeness of discovering that your ex is gay. At some level, its because the most straight ex-spouses think that its strange it be gay. Its an uncommon reason to get divorced, statisically speaking. But it’s not a strange reason. Take TGT out of the equation and my divorce is simply a case of a wife waking up one day to realize that she’d made a terrible mistake in her life about what she thought she wanted once the things she thought she wanted started to happen. So first she got passive aggressive about undoing her own project, then she just bolted. That’s a familiar enough story.

The (so far) good outcome is a little more strange. In part I attribute this to doing a collaborative divorce. In part, I attribute this to being a liberal and therefore morally superior to you conservative haters (suck it! … this is a joke, why don’t you relax?). But in part, I think its about TGT. She wanted a different life. Were she not gay, I’d wonder “why cant we both change together?” and I’d also be critical of her desires. And, in fact, outside of TGT, she’s made other life choices since living on her own, that I am critical of. I’ve noticed though, that because she’s not my spouse and its not my problem, these choices piss me off a whole lot less.

ok, now some relevant tmbg lyrics:

URNX
URNX, NI, IMNX
ICTV
ICTV
ICTV, NICU
ICU, ICU, NUROK

Purple toupee is here to stay, after the hair has gone away

The kids gone, I worked really late last night. It wsz so late that it seemed reasonable to go straight to the Karaoke place in my business suit, to grab a Miller HL & sing some 80s tunes.

It was the songstress princess’s night off (see 1st post to understand who she is, hereinafter SP for all intents and purposes) and she blew the doors off each number, getting the crowd into it, and was an all around rock star. Even better is that we got to hang out, joke around and stuff.

Insert wistful sigh here.

The deal with a lot of the attractive 20 somethings who hang out at this place (and even the not so attractive ones, but SP is both beautiful and wild) is that after a few minutes of conversation the severity of the generation gap and the extent to which the person to whom I am speaking is a vapid head case all becomes harshly clear. After over a year of going to this place, this is not the case with SP. She is sharp and witty. Her engaging sassy banter is one of the most enticing things about her.

I’m not a total fool, though. I can’t pretend like her life isn’t the typical Holly Golightly mess typical of the single, no college degree having, struggling 20 something. But unlike many of her contemporaries, adversity has made her reflective, and she is a whole lot more self-aware; and far cooler.

What really tips me off that I am hooked on her? It’s my combination of:

a) sticking my foot in my mouth
b) pratfall-like clumsiness
c) FB stalking her

and, Sadly

d) not trying to contact her when I’m not physically at the Karaoke place

What comes with reaching your 30s, having watched yourself and your friends go through their failed relationships, is the realization that mutual attraction is not enough, and a one-sided attraction is the musicial “The Fantastiks.”

I think this is what my dream about SP (See May 23rd post) was telling me: I have nothing good to offer this person.

This seems like a typically harsh self-assessment. Do I have nothing to say for myself? Surely, there are good things about me. I’m a professional, a good father, witty, caring… am I not? All of these things are bad things in the context of “things that would help SP.”

I’m chained to my job, in the service of my children’s future.

My kids will always come before any gf.

I use my wits to keep away people who might hurt me. And I am not sufficiently thick-skinned about having hurt feelings.

Moreover: I’m not handsome anymore. I’m not up on culture. And, importantly, I don’t feel young.

This is something of a litany re-hash (also known as a familiar refrain) but that’s how one establishes a theme.

I don’t feel young, though. Man, that’s hard to get used to. This must be what it’s like to go bald, to look at the place where there was once hair and realize that it’s not coming back because something died a little inside you.

Coping with Girl Scout Camp

I work a 9/80. This means that I work nine weekdays out of ten. I am supposed to take off every other Friday. This past Friday, I put in a full day of work so that I could deal with my job instead of my feelings about my daughter heading off to camp tomorrow.

I called my ex-wife to hassle her about a document that she has until August to give me, but I’ve been asking for since mid-February and even filled it out for her in June. All she had to do was sign it. She hasn’t so, I’ve been hassling her. But I think I am just hassling her to hassle her. I’m getting off topic…

For maybe the 1000th time, I reviewed all of the documents that I need for my daughter’s camp. I helped my daughter pack. I put her name on everything, but I also made her pack herself, just so she’d know where it all was. Last weekend, we spent 3 hours at Gander Mt. looking at rain coats. I got matching high-visibility rain coats for both kids.

I also had a mini-anxiety attack.

My son is also going to Florida with my ex for two weeks, in order to visit the grandparents. When my daughter comes back from Girl Scout Camp, I will put her on a plane to also be in Florida with her grandparents. I’m used to the grandparent visit, but I still have the feeling of amplifying cycles of panic; the feedback loop of shouting and crying that drowns out my internal monologue until all I can do is bite down on a pencil and grab my knees until my body stops shaking.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Girl Scout Camp because my Boy Scout Camp experience had some terrible elements. No, nothing like that. C’mon, not everything is a Catholic priest! Here is the story:

I earned the swimming merit badge at Boy Scout camp, in the summer between 5th and 6th grade, only to watch helpless as the Scoutmaster lost the paperwork and repudiated my achievement. When you earn a merit badge, you get paperwork was in triplicate, attesting to what you’ve done. Over several weeks, I brought my Scoutmaster one of the original copies. I did not make any duplicates. After I had given him all three copies, he said he never remembered me coming to him on any previous occasions.

People sometimes ask me why I didn’t make more copies. People ask why I didn’t just do it again, since now I could swim. That is not the point: This was my Scoutmaster. He was supposed to be responsible. I trusted him. I trusted him, despite other previous incidents when I was at risk and bad stuff happened to me. There was the time I got lost on a hike because a 5th grader can’t keep up with a former marine and a bunch of big high school boys with years of hiking experience, There was the time I passed out at the Memorial day parade because I was standing at attention in a wool “Smokey the Bear” hat and long sleeve dress with the troop’s bass drum strapped to me under the 85 degree noonday sun, after leading the 1.5 mile parade march. There was the time when I got really sick, after my Scoutmaster let me pitch my tent on top a puddle of water that I didn’t notice but he did. After all those previous times, I thought that he was “building my character.” I couldn’t pretend that there was a character building lesson within losing my paperwork and pretending like he couldn’t remember me submitting it to him.

So that it’s clear: the swimming merit badge was hard. I was very proud to have been able to swim so far and tread water for 15 minutes. When all evidence of that accomplishment disappeared in a wiff, the Scoutmaster gave the exact correct impression that he did not give a shit about me.

As a denouement, my father, saw fit to blame my quitting Scouts on my mother’s “brainwashing” and make it an issue in their divorce. The judge decided it was one of the reasons that “the best interest of the child” was to teach me a lesson and write a paean to how willful, obstinate, and terrible I was rather than ordering my abusive father to stop holding my college tuition for ransom and/or to deal with his self-annihilating anger.

Despite this bad experience, I love to sing the camp song from Boy Scout camp. And at random times, I will do the camp cheer. And I can tie knots. What knot do you use if you have two lines of different widths? What knot do you use for a tent pole when you want the line to be adjusted as needed? What knot do you use when you want a fast knot to tie two ends of the same line together in order to secure an object in a manner that is quite secure? If you don’t know the answers to this, and furthermore can’t tie a sheet bend, tent-hitch, and square knot: I think less of you. I really do. Seriously, you must be completely incompetent with anything practical.

Immersion in work, bickering, and obsessing over details are not the only ways I cope.

I took the kids out for Denny’s and Baskin Robins last night. I took them to the Museum of Natural Science today. I cooked them breakfast and dinner. We played Lego Harry Potter for the Wii and watched both Toy Story movies. This also made me feel much happier.

I tucked the kids into bed, then came out here to write this entry. After I am done, I am going to check on them, and kiss them. Then I will have a glass of water and go to sleep.