Julie Clarenbach

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Marital Update

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I’ve been missing writing, so I’m going to attempt to do a post a day for a while, just to get back into the habit.

As has so often happened, a spring crisis derailed all of my lovely plans for the year. In mid-March, Catharine got hives. And I don’t mean one or two; I mean all over her body. They landed her in the ER at one point, when her eyes and lips swelled up. She’s taking a 24-hour antihistamine four times a day (doctor’s orders), and for a while the one she was taking turned her brain into Swiss cheese. She’s had periods when they were so bad that she couldn’t focus or think or really do much of anything except scratch and try not to scratch. It is mid-November and she’s had exactly half of one day hive-free. We think we’ve figured out some things, so we’re hopeful things will continue to improve, but it’ll be months before she can back off the antihistamines.

The only good thing this whole debacle gave us was a new psych med that was intended to be a temporary counteraction to prednisone and made her mood better and more stable than she’d experienced in her adult life.

A more stable mood on her part is the only reason we’ve really made it through this period. She’s been less able to be present around the house, especially because she also sprained her knees, and the resulting load on me has made things really hard. I’m at capacity, which means when she asks still more of me, I have a tendency to fall apart. A friend challenged me to do more in the way of self-care, and I’ve added solo movies and trips to the coast with a friend to my calendar, but the reality is that my energy is limited and that is always part of this complicated mix.

So, we’re still here. I’m still struggling to figure out how to have the inner life I want, the writing life I want, in the face of what we’re dealing with. In some ways we’re so privileged, and that can sometimes obscure for me the ways in which we’re dealing with more than most people. I can’t do it all, just because I want to and because I have fewer (maybe? differently) limitations than she does.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and dear friends are coming over to cook and play cards and hang out in PJs, because we’re fancy that way. It’s the first time in a long time I’m feeling anything like the holiday spirit.

Time, Energy, Overwhelm, and the Consequences Thereof

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We’ve been fighting about time a lot. Or rather, we’ve been fighting about the choices Catharine has been making about time, because she has a habit of believing that she’s lazy, that she needs to prove her worth by working, and then overdoing it. And, of course, when you have chronic illnesses crossed with random acute things, “overdoing it” is always a moving target. The ADD makes her thinking really black-and-white sometimes, so she’ll hang on to “I work 20–25 hours a week” even if, say, she’s had hives for three months that limit her capacity, making 20–25 hours maybe a touch on the high side, or a trip to the east coast means she needs a big long stretch of recovery. (And that doesn’t explain why one week came out at 36 hours. I’m not even joking about that one.)

And then, of course, the overdoing it has real consequences. She ends up having to cancel things she’s committed to, because she can’t pull them off. She’s used up all her energy on work and has nothing left for me or the household, so I’m pissy and cranky with her, and she falls into a shame spiral about disappointing me. Her mood gets a little wobbly, and she’s prone to falling headfirst into emotional maelstroms, which of course exhaust her further. We fight a lot. We both feel alone.

We had a couple of breakthroughs late last week, though. One was me pointing out that she seems to engage time and energy the way she used to engage money — as though it were mysterious and magical and would just show up because she wanted it to. After much struggle, money has become real, and money is finite. That made sense to her. It pisses her off that energy isn’t infinite, because we know people who can act as if energy is infinite, but we are not those people. Energy, for both of us, is most definitely finite. And the struggles we have around time are really struggles around energy. So now there’s a sign on the wall, where she can see it from her couch, that says ENERGY IS FINITE. It’s going to take time to sink in, but the concept matters.

The other one was that a persistent sticking point with us has been my wanting her to exercise some reasonable emotional regulation (i.e., try not to hit the kind of upset that takes over the world), while she experienced that as me telling her not to have emotions. I finally turned it around with an analogy, because a family member has worked long and hard on his anger, which used to not infrequently hit the point of him breaking things. It wasn’t telling him not to be angry to also say it wasn’t okay that he got SO angry that he lost control; similarly, it’s not telling her not to be upset to say it’s not okay when she gets SO upset that it makes her oblivious to everyone around her. And that made sense to her, and then we could talk about how to notice if she was getting really upset and how to calm herself back down.

This is the thing — if I just keep talking, if I just keep arguing, then eventually something breaks through. Maybe the timing is right, maybe I find an analogy that works, maybe it’s some weird combination of the two. It’s just exhausting to keep arguing, but I can’t just let it go, because I refuse to be in a marriage in which my wife is oblivious to me and my needs because she’s either overworked or immersed in something else.

And after all of that, we had a really lovely weekend. We both needed rest, deep rest, so after ordering groceries and going through the budget, we spent Saturday watching a Say Yes to the Dress marathon and Sunday reading (I read three and a half books). I’m finally reading Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed (not one of the weekend books), which talks about the cult of busyness and how much I value being able to spend the weekend that way. I mean, my own chronic illness means I have to set up my life that way, but I also think it’s just good to do — temporarily shutting out the horrors of world, reading mysteries and looking at pretty dresses, eating cookies with my love, and trusting that everything on the to-do list will still be there on Monday.

STAR DUST, by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner

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Anne-Marie Smith is a divorcee in the early 60s, when wives are supposed to ignore their husbands’ infidelities. She’s determined to be independent, even though it’s her father’s money that has moved her and her two children from Dallas to this Houston suburb, so she tosses out the movers, throws herself into the job she never wanted to have, ignores the gossip, and resents every offer of help from her gorgeous — and famous — new astronaut neighbor.

Commander Christopher “Kit” Campbell wants only one thing: to go to space. As part of the legendary Perseid Six, he’s been profiled in Life Magazine, he’s part of the team that’s working to beat the Soviets, and he’s also a little bored. There’s a lot more paperwork to being an astronaut than you’d think. When a gorgeous redhead moves in next door, he’s intrigued and hits on her both out of desire and out of habit.

The things keeping our lovers apart are natural outgrowths of their lived experiences. Anne-Marie is suspicious of Kit’s charm, his playboy past, and his intentions, because she’s had her heart broken by infidelity once already. She’s also leery of his fame and the press surrounding his life. As they get closer, she has to deal with the emotional realities of being close to someone who literally risks his life for his job. Kit, for his turn, is wary of the hero-worship her kids naturally have for him and the constant pressure he feels to be larger than life. His focus is on a high-pressure, politically complicated job, and anything other than fleeting encounters are a distraction.

The slow way these two get to know one another and begin to be able to read one another’s moods, defenses, habits, and quirks is believable and well-paced. There’s a fabulous and plot-advancing dog as well as the aforementioned children that help keep things from moving too quickly. The book also includes a cadre of astronaut wives who range from highly organized and commanding through slightly boozy and gossipy to the upright Navy wife. The book deftly limns women whose skills were primarily channeled into supporting the careers of their husbands without undermining their strength, intelligence, or capability.

Part of the fun of this book is the period detail: Anne-Marie figuring out how to book flights using enormous compendia of every scheduled route; how one solves a dinner-party emergency when the dog has claimed the roast and the butcher is closed; what we did and didn’t know about what space looked like and the Earth looked like from space before we got there; the (sadly not all that unfamiliar) different expectations placed on women, both sartorially and behaviorally, than on men. It’s an era that could easily devolve into caricature, but it never does.

This is a sweet book that is well worth your while.

Star Dust is the first book in the “Fly Me to the Moon” series, and as a lure it’s free on Amazon. Click here to get your copy.