Julie Clarenbach

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The Saga of the Blue Plate

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bright green moss on a big stone next to a sidewalkA few years back, we decided we wanted to jettison our kind of boring stoneware and replace it with Fiestaware. Color is incredibly important to me, and Catharine loves it as well, so we didn’t want just one color — we wanted many colors. As it turns out, we never did buy any Fiestaware, because it became an easy thing for people to give us, and we soon had 10 place settings in 8 colors: light blue, dark blue, brick, red, orange, sunflower, light green, purple.

There’s a game I play with myself: will there be a pleasing combination? I don’t get to arrange things directly, either in the cupboard or the dishwasher, but when they randomly end up in rainbow order, it makes me happy.

There’s a version that happens during any given meal, when I grab the top two plates or bowls from the cupboard. Of these two colors, which one do I prefer? The only absolutes are the green (it trumps everything) and the light blue (everything trumps it). Given that I make 98% of our meals, having the color I prefer is a little way of making myself happy in the midst of chores.

The other day this became the center of a … I don’t want to call it a fight, because it didn’t rise to that level, but a tense and hard moment, because Catharine doesn’t like the light blue plate either, and she said, in a moment of emotional wobbliness, that she felt like I was giving her the blue plate to punish her, because when she’s making the decision she always takes the blue plate because she knows I don’t like it.

My immediate response was, oh, you don’t want to start the list of the choices I make to take care of you and make you happy, because you will LOSE. (Just to take one small example, earlier that day I’d bought her flowers because it was our legal anniversary and flowers make her happy, even though I don’t really care about flowers and in our current state, it’s one more goddamn thing to manage. And that’s on top of every other damn thing I do around here.)

We ended up talking about it, because that’s what we do, and I was able to articulate that it was a small way I centered myself and my own needs/pleasure, which is what we’ve been saying we want to do on a bigger scale, but even here in this tiny little way, she experienced that centering as punishing her.

This is one of those moments when she looks like an asshole. And in a different context, such a response could be indicative of someone being abusive or an asshole or whatever. There was a time when we might have thought so as well.

But here’s the difference: When I called it out, when I told her why I was doing it and how she was responding and how that echoes the larger patterns we’re trying to fix, she was able to see it. She could hear my frustration and anger. She could acknowledge the underlying pattern. We could talk about why the pattern existed. She could apologize.

This isn’t how it would have gone five years ago.

Catharine’s ex-therapist mentioned off-handedly once that untreated mental illness can arrest key developmental skills at the point when it starts to take hold. Given that she first remembers being suicidal at 6, there are some early, foundational developmental skills that got held up. That’s on top of what happens when you spend 25 years coping with profound mental illness — those coping skills don’t always serve you when the mental illness gets treated, and undoing 25 years of them takes a while.

The one we can identify most easily at this point (although I always want to do more research, because I like doing research) is differentiation: the understanding that other people are other and that they have entirely separate lives, needs, and inner worlds. And, frankly, the characteristic traits of ADD get all tangled up in here. Sometimes she has a really hard time, in the moment, especially if there’s any big emotion involved, accessing any reason why someone would be acting they way they are other than how it feels to her. So if I give her the blue plate, even if she doesn’t like the blue plate, then I’m punishing her. My experience of that reality is entirely obscured.

We’ve gotten to the point where, when I call that out, she can see it, and she can see it quickly, without a lot of explanation and arguing. This really is progress, even if it doesn’t always feel like it, even if we have to have the conversation.

Also, we’re getting rid of the blue plate.

The Only Way Out Is Through

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orange sunrise sky through dark clouds, behind a sillouette of fir trees and a houseIn so many ways, things are wildly better than they’ve ever been. And that’s why we’re having big, hard, conversations multiple times a week.

Let me explain.

Until recently, we’ve been smack in the middle of some transition or crisis pretty much all the time. But now no one has died, no one has a new diagnosis, we aren’t moving, no one is switching careers or even jobs, no one is going back to school, and while money isn’t everything we’d like it to be, we’re okay. This is a new state for us, things being stable and reasonably sane. When you’re busy moving, or coping with a new illness or diagnosis, or switching careers, or dealing with someone dying, you just don’t have the resources to dig in to the bigger issues. You’re just trying to survive, day by day.

On top of that, Catharine’s anxiety wasn’t well-controlled until January. Until it was, we had no idea just how much her anxiety, and the meltdowns that went with it, were running the show. Until we weren’t having to manage her being anxious to various degrees every minute of every day, we couldn’t address bigger problems because any attempt brought the anxiety rushing to the fore, and then we had to focus on it.

So it’s because things are going so relatively well that we’re now mired in such difficulties. Thirteen plus years of un- or under-treated mental illness combined with a hell of a lot of transition means there’s a lot of shit to unpack, a lot of patterns to rewrite.

And — I’ll be honest here — sometimes I’d really like to know when we’ll get to the “things are really good” part. Things are so much better than they used to be, and we’re still so far away from what I want things to be like. Some days I feel at peace with that, confident that we’ll get there. Some days my anger that we aren’t there yet turns into despair that we’ll never get there.

As a friend of Catharine’s says, “the only way out is through, and the only way through is art.” So I write.

I write because all those years of anger and frustration and resentment need to come out into the fresh air so they can dissipate. I write because there are so many layers, so many intersecting things, that writing is a key way for me to untangle them. I write because I need to center my own experience for myself.

It’s not that I don’t also express these things to Catharine. I do, and she hears me, and we’re working through it all, slowly. But part of writing is throwing off the shame of having stress in my marriage, of not having a perfect relationship. It’s letting go of being the protector, making sure no one could think anything bad about her. It’s showing up to the messy, complicated, beauty of what healing looks like, for both of us.

Well, This Week Sucked

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bright green evergreensIt’s been a really hard week.

My work has been really stressful in an emotional way, so I’ve been a little quieter, a little more tired, and a little more fragile than usual. Catharine had her own work stress, which got magnified by taking her morning meds late one day (and possibly having missed them the day before, but we aren’t sure) and missing her evening meds that same day. It’s the equinox, which is notorious for exacerbating mood issues, and I’ve been both PMSy and feeling extremely sensitive to the wonky moon stuff that’s been going on.

It’s meant that she’s been particularly melty — our term for being prone to crying, freaking out, and generally losing one’s center. It’s meant I’ve been particularly unable to deal with said meltiness. It’s meant we’ve had some questionable meals, which hasn’t helped. (Sometimes being a grownup is deciding ice cream with blueberries and chocolate chips is as good as dinner is going to get.)

It’s at times like this that our particular attachment cycles — her anxious, me avoidant — go head to head, and, if we aren’t careful, can spin us into a terrible place where she is a drowning person of neediness and I’m a resolute rock of anger walking away while saying “fuck this.” This is not how we want our marriage to be.

Weeks like this happen, sometimes. They probably happen more often to us than to families who don’t live with mental illness or chronic illness or similar things, because they’re just less sensitive to the vagaries of life, but weeks like this happen. They’re no one’s fault.

But what does get to me sometimes is the implicit assumption that I’m the one who is going to pull us out of it. I’m the one who’s going to “be the bigger person” (what is that metaphor, even?), who’s going to work against my own attachment style, who’s going to put aside, hopefully temporarily, my own needs for care or solitude or quiet to reach out and help quiet her anxiety so we can get to a better place.

Someone has to do it, sure. But this assumption — which is an assumption we both fall into — is born from a pattern in which she is the Identified Patient and I am the Caregiver, and that pattern, which was built in the early years of our relationship, which were also the early years of her diagnosis and recovery, is central to the imbalance and the inequality we’re trying to get past.

This pattern assumes that she is incapable, instead of unskilled. (Hey, recovery takes a long time, especially when it happens after two-plus decades of untreated major mental illness. There are lots of skills to learn/recast, because in some ways it really is a whole new world.) It assumes I am capable, instead of potentially depleted and most definitely limited. It assumes I am the rescuer and she the one who needs rescue. It assumes she is the weak one and I am the strong one.

Every single one of these assumptions is a problem. And every single one of them shows up regularly.

Yesterday we had it out a little bit. I fell apart after too much noise broke my fragile composure, and she started to leave in a huffy sort of way, and then we had one of those fights that’s at least as much crying as fighting and things got better. Later in the day we had another emotional conversation that cleared the air further. Right now she’s at the coffee shop and I’m at home on the couch with my computer and a cat. Chances are today will be markedly better. I’m crossing my fingers that this week will be better than last week. It’s easier to work on these patterns when we aren’t both a complete mess.