Mean Spirited Women

My wife is a mean spirited woman. I say it quite dispassionately. My former wives were mean spirited women too, so I’m not really singling her out.

While I was with my first wife, I was still a young man, and so was inclined to be rather mean spirited myself. Back then I fought fire with fire. Things ended up getting burned. Never build your house on a bed of coals.

By the time I married my second wife I had begun to develop a philosophy of compassion and self-sacrifice. It was a philosophy heavily influenced by Jesus Christ. I embraced the notion that love, if shown with patience and as far as possible without condition, would be sufficient to defeat all evils of all sorts. I was wrong. Or perhaps the love itself did succeed, and it was just the marriage that failed.

Two years into the third time around I simply admit to being at a loss. More and more I am persuaded that just getting out and cutting losses would be the most prudent course. But when has the course of love ever been given to taking the course of prudence?

One thing that has always left me dumbfounded is how the women I have known have seemed to believe that they could say the most outrageously unkind things, make the most damning, hateful statements, yet later be able to pretend that it never happened!

I think now of employing the same sort of harshness in a counterattack, and yet I cannot bear the thought, it makes me cringe to imagine it. Why would I want to willfully inflict pain, especially at the cost of my own integrity, and at the cost of our strength and trust together? I don’t know. Why would they? Why do they?

In the end I find myself alone on the battlefield, with only my own pride to face. And I know not what is best anymore—to bury pride, or to embrace it. I have, after all, already tried both, and neither has made so much as a dint in the woman’s steely armor.

I guess the good thing about being older, and having already gone through the mill a few times, is that this sort of stuff is not the end of the world, as it used to seem. It’s just another mile on the road, another day. You begin to see life as a process of a general failure to thrive. You are no longer surprised to find that love is not pure, or often even very loving. What is most precious, and what has been most coveted, even from the earliest day, was a dream all along—and that, at least, has not changed.

Perfection does not reflect itself perfectly, for a splash as occurred in consciousness, way, way back in the beginning. Now there are ripples, now the waters move and are dotted with rain or nudged by the wind. What is the answer but to look up as often as you can remember to, to avert your heart from a world that is in a constant wavering toward chaos, and fix again upon the dream that is eternal?

Cure Or Curse, Part II

Let me explain.

Yesterday I wrote of the built-in caveat afforded by MS to the MS sufferer, which goes something like this:

I would really like to rake up those leaves in the yard, but the MS fatigue has just totally wiped me out today. Perhaps I’ll feel better tomorrow (or maybe it will rain and render the idea moot anyway).

I would really love to work overtime for the next five days, but my body simply will not cooperate. As a matter of fact, I need some time off (and, btw, you’re required by law to give it to me). Damn MS!

Honey, I absolutely intended to take your car to the DMV and to stop by the bank and to pick up those things you wanted at the craft shop, but I just simply forgot. It all just fell through a hole in my brain.

You see?

Now have I ever used my disease in such an insincere and dishonorable manner? Of course not. God forbid. I’m just saying.

The thing is, there is really no need for dishonesty, for the conditions referred to above—fatigue, exhaustion, confusion, limitation—are baseline with MS, always present. These are the things we struggle daily and hourly against. We may sometimes feel a bit better (in fits and starts, anyway), and we may sometimes feel a bit worse. Sometimes we feel a lot worse.

We may be slow, lazy, and stupid, but at least we have a good excuse for it.

But, of course, people don’t like excuses (when they are, that is, the excuses of other people), nor do we who have MS like excuses, even our own. We make choices on a daily basis whether to give in to our illness, and thus end up feeling guilty and worthless, or whether to press on against the increasing solidity of the wall thrown up in our path by the symptoms which define our disease.

We have, to begin with, our own expectations. As healthy, non-diseased people, we were used to coming at least somewhere near to satisfying our own expectations. Now, with MS, what we expect from ourselves has not changed, but the ability, or anything like it, to live up our expectations has deteriorated quite significantly (kind of like the present economic situation in the US). It would be nice if our investments could reach anticipated goals, as they used to do, but the fact is that the bank is broke, the market has crashed, and our resources are sadly diminished.

The first rule of having to disappoint others is that this comes only after disappointing ourselves.

This is the key most often overlooked by those who do not have our disease. Often I find myself wishing that people would think this through a little more completely.

What, are we happy with being lazy, happy with being weak, happy with being exhausted, happy with being stupid?

Think again, right?

Please try to remember me as I was before. If I seem different now from what I was then, please ask yourself what happened in between. And believe me when I tell you that I'm trying, and that I am trying much harder now than I would have then.