They don’t solve problems. They don’t clean up after themselves. They don’t lend a hand without being asked and reminded (and reminded).
They think money matters more than anything else. They sincerely believe if’n they don’t/can’t/won’t make enough to support the lifestyle they think they deserve, then we’re morally and legally obliged to make it for them—without neglecting our wifely duties and responsibilities, of course.
As you might suspect, I’m referring to one husband in particular: mine, Tom, assigned male at birth, whose natal day is this coming Monday, the fourteenth.
Tax day.
My late eternal mate, as so dictated by universal soul connection, truly believed that flowers or a box of generic candy absolved him of any and all inflicted pain. ‘Cause, ya know, his day was much harder than mine. Always. The weight of responsibility on his shoulders was more than anyone could rationally be expected to bear.
Back in the day when he was alive, that used to rankle me from nose hairs to toe nails. His daily obligations were to make phone calls to ensure he had drums, horn, and vocalist booked for his main gig... make phone calls to book casual gigs... make phone calls to talk about upcoming gigs, past gigs, what happened on last-night’s gig...
A discerning mind might pick up on a subtle pattern in all that.
All I had to do was come up with the food, the rent, and the utilities, as Dolly P. sang. Get my daughter to and from school, deal with her friends’ mothers, Brownies, principals, and children’s theater rehearsals, costumes, and performances. Do the bookkeeping and pay the taxes. Handle his weekly band-member payroll, make sure his stage clothes were stage-ready, and his laundry laundered and hung or folded in the right place.
He once ripped me a new one because I hadn’t hung his black t-shirts correctly. It took every ounce of restraint to not rip out the long kitchen knife he’d given me for my thirtieth birthday and rip them to shreds.
But I digress.
Later, of course, his mind-numbing burden got even heavier when he opted to finish his long-ignored college pursuits and only perform at an “International Tourist Destination,” the name of which I cannot reveal except to say think fried chicken, boysenberry pie, Steve Martin, and Peanuts® characters. If you’re not familiar with the reference, fret not—it’s inconsequential in the extreme.
My beloved loved being a principal player at said unnamed tourist destination, since he could study in a little alcove offstage without having to change of out his costume. It was so great, he only had to make phone calls to friends and fellow students and professors and his mother....
As Robert Wolff once wrote an entire tome about, if’n I’d only known then what I know now, I mighta coulda recognized my late husband had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), not bipolar disorder, as everyone in his family supposedly had. Looking back, in fact, I suspect they were all mis-BISAC’d, as we’d say in the book biz—victims of the psych world defaulting to a manic-depressive, aka bipolar-disorder label because shrinks hadn’t yet nailed down the ADHD symptoms/causes/treatment buffet.
Both states of being—aka breeds, aka conditions—are born-with-it, hard-to-live-with-it, difficult-to-be-around-it neurodivergences. Both lay claim to excessive talking, hyperactivity, and obsessive compulsivity. Both can manifest violent actions and words, both are genetically based, and both are historically treated with beatings, disparagement, and other punishments.
Just speculating again, I’m thinkin’ maybe, possibly, in some cases, both might sometimes provoke atelophobia, an uncontrollable intense fear of being wrong, imperfect, or making mistakes.
Not that I ever saw any evidence of that kind of thing in my husband or his paternal line.
Or my father’s. Or mother’s.
Or in me or my daughter.
Scusa, sto divagando (excuse me, I digress). Again.
Neither divergence is curable so far, despite millions of sufferers suffering through myriad pharmacological “maybe this’ll work” trials-and-errors. And with that, I certainly empathize.
I once sat through an endless ninety-minute luncheon listening to doctor after healthcare professional after national-organization bigwig explain multiple sclerosis’s similar history. Our captured audience was treated to an overhead-projector slide show that matched the handouts beside our salad plates, and we got to take home brightly colored flyers touting the latest books attesting to the same information, but at eye-crossing length. My takeaway (besides the quite yummy carrot-cake dessert) was:
We used to think MS was XYZ... but then research showed it was more likely WTF... until Doc Frankfurter in Transgender, Transylvania posited it might be Getouttahere. But now we know it’s actually G-flat (G♭) to the raised 7th.
Trust us, we’re professionals. We know what we’re talking about.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I love science so much and can never get behind any religion, even the one of my own tribe. Science is fluid, constantly experimenting, questioning, seeking new answers to replace outmoded ones. Science is always active, wondering, growing, pushing.
Religion is static.
“We have a book. Thou shalt not question nor modify the book! The book is the answer, the whole answer, and the only right answer, so help you deity-of-my-choice, or I’ll stop the car and draw my sword on you!”
Shades of atelophobia...?
Ergo, my this-incarnation husband likely treated me like shit—which he admitted when not in the act of said treatment—because the concoction of severe musical dexterousness, severe intelligence skewed by an ADHD hard-wired brain, and our tribe’s inherent severe arrogance/guilt/aggression/reticence made it impossible for him to readily access the feminine aspect of his psyche.
Severe, adjective. Psych-speak indicating extreme ability coupled with extreme nonconformity.
Not that that ran in either of our families, either. And not that said adjective was ever used as a weapon to make any thusly labeled individual believe their nonconformity was a not trait but a character flaw of their own making, which they could readily correct—given their associated gift(s)—if’n they but willing to try harder.
Nay, nay, I am not going down that fucking rabbit hole today! Fie, I say! Fie!
Back to The Story of Tom and his sporadically nonbinary capacity to connect the dots between what he felt, heard, learned, observed, and needed to do, too-often obscured by everything he feared, misinterpreted, and didn’t quite get. Toss in a crapload of FOMO (fear of missing out), a few heaping spoonfuls of gender dysphoric denial, and the urgency both forged and diluted by severe self-medication, and you get—
... a gentle soul with a bombastic personality, a loyal partner who never learned how to love, and a devoted father who scared the crap out of his also-severely-gifted daughter.
And so I duly check off yet another box on my “look the shit of my former-ness in the face so I can reconcile, forgive, and release across the board” mental-health form, signed, dated, and submitted in triplicate. He and I are still soul-mated onaccounta love is eternal, as we already proved through multiple lifetimes. And ain’t that another bitch? Turns out Love is not only eternal (as we’ve proved through multiple lifetimes), it’s also theoretically-yet-incontrovertibly intentional.
I suspect my life would be at least two bytes and a participial more gooder if’n I wasn’t so fucking aware of those multiple lifetimes. I don’t consciously remember them, of course, but my psyche retains their threads, like fibers stretched, wrapped, woven in, around, through my non-conscious.
Which, in case you didn’t know, cannot be voluntarily accessed.
Yet which apparently can be involuntarily sensed.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it ain’t always easy being green.
But the real question is: do I feel any better at all after all that mishegoss?
Yeah, I do. In my world, deconstruction, not confession, is good for the soul.
Thanks for tagging along with me.