Mediation Has Ruined Me

I’m finding fewer and fewer good reasons to justify being upset. I still get upset, but I’m noticing that in order to maintain it for any length of time, you have to keep giving yourself a pep talk about how wronged you were; and those talks are seeming less and less convincing to me.

I know most people are really good at those. Some people can take a tiny incident (some incidents are actually so tiny nobody notices it but themselves) and keep cheer-leading their hurt for years, decades!

I think being a mediator has ruined me for upset. Over and over I see people resolving their differences, discovering the moment of misunderstanding, uncovering the positive intention which was missed, letting go of the grudge and finding Love right there underneath.

My grudge-muscle is atrophying. Still all these people around me continue begrudging me and others as if it were normal. Well, it may be normal, but it sure ain’t healthy!

The Edge

Elise and I keep moving our relationship to a further edge. How many times have we gone beyond any known horizon with our truth telling? Those quiet conversations, usually in bed late, late at night, or early, early in the predawn morning.

The foundation of my home, is now, therefore, afloat, way out to sea. Grounded, I am, now in the deep waters of the soul. Mated there, soul-mated. 

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is the closest locale there is to my own true epicenter. It isn’t a place. You can’t get there, the traveling was done in moments of truth-telling, and now the place I live is no longer a place. I live in Elise’s understand of who I am, and she lives in mine.

If she were to die (first - we will die), I think I would be set adrift. The journey would begin to unravel like my other, mundane memories, and I think all I would know is that I am not home, but I would not know how to get there from here. Half of here would be gone.

My book proposal is DONE!

The book, Tired of Having the Same Old Argument, is born. Its infant stage, a book proposal, is DONE!

This week it will take its first step, out of my hands and into the world. Into the literary world of agents, and then publishers, and then book stores, book mailers, and finally it will find its new homes, with readers who will translate the pictograms in black and white first back into sound, and then thought and then finally, back into understanding - my understanding about love and marriage - and the cycle will be complete.

This kind of writing, trying to hand what I understand to another is new to me. It’s not at all like the poetry or self-reflective prose I’ve written for years in writing groups. Those groups let me form words in the moment and pin them down like butterflies, and then just admire the natural beauty of it all.

This writing is more like stone sculpture. Elise and I went to the Accademia Gallery in Florence that has some of Michelangelo’s unfinished work. You can still see the huge stone block and the heavy hammer blows he used to cut away what was not wanted. In some cases, his chisel made it all the way in to where the hand or an elbow should be and unable to resist it, he changed to a lighter hammer and a smaller chisel, and he carved not just flesh, but veins beneath the skin appear. So incongruous a quarter inch from rough hewn stone, and yet so completely convincing you can see the pulse if you stare.

Writing non-fiction seems just like that to me. You block out ideas, hammer them down to the paper, and from time to time, polish some perfect moment right down to the pulsing life of your original thought.

Then the polishing begins. Chipping away the not-quite-right, turning a sentence around and round until the words recede and the living meaning is all that can be seen.

After months of polishing, the few chapters I have finished say as close to exactly what I wanted to say as I can imagine. I’m sure the reader will agree. I can feel it.

The question is: will those employed in the business of publishing, agree?

Managing Manager Fatigue

 

My marriage, like many, has a manager, a social director (and in my case, let’s call a spade a spade) a queen.

I worked with a couple this week who were having some of the same management issues we have from time to time, what I have come to call: Manager Fatigue.

The Manager is generally the person in the marriage who has strong preferences, and who likes to plan. At the end of each week, Elise emails me a list of options, and I get to pick which ones most appeal to me. This arrangement works just fine for me - like many managed spouses, I’m easy. Frankly, just being happily married is enough for me, and then getting to do any kind of fun stuff, is icing on the cake.

But every once in a while, I think it happens about every 3-6 weeks, Elise suddenly comes down with Manager Fatigue. It usually happens when she is scanning the Philly Fun Guide, with its thousands of events. She just gives up, “Why do I always have to do all the planning? How did I get that job?”

These outbursts used to take me by surprise - I thought our system worked pretty well. What happened? And how did I suddenly become the slacker in a system that she set up?

But I’m a pattern finder, and eventually I recognized the pattern here. Managing meets a lot of Elise’s needs, but it is also tiring and requires a lot of mental work. That’s fine when she’s relaxed and able to focus on the fun she’s planning, but when she’s fatigued or stressed; or sometimes if it’s just gone on too long and so doesn’t meet her need for fairness and teamwork, it switches into a problem.

If you’re in such a relationship, and you’re the managed partner, here are some tips:

• Ÿ  Every once in a while, plan something, set it all up, and surprise your manager with a fait au complet. You can’t do this too often, because it will seem like you’re horning in on their territory, but you can do this preemptively, best right before Manager Fatigue sets in. I like to get a whole week of credit out of it. On Monday I’ll say, “Don’t make any plans for this weekend. We’re all booked up.” On Tuesday she’ll start trying to get more info (Managers love info) by saying something like, “Well, how am I gonna know what to pack if I don’t know what we’re doing?” I’ll respond with just a tantalizing hint, like: “Just make sure you have a bathing suit.” On Thursday I’ll say something like, “Our plane reservations are all set.” A carefully doled out set of hints like this will not only make for a happy Manager all week long, it can stave off Manager Fatigue for weeks.
• Ÿ  Doing little things which are usually the Manager’s tasks can keep your Manager happy and unfatigued. Elise takes out the recycling on Friday morning. If she’s had a busy week, and I’ve noticed, especially if there is a lot of recycling, I’ll sometimes take it to the street Thursday night. If she notices and says so, I’ll just say, “I noticed you’ve been busy this week, so I thought I’d do the recycling this time.”
• Ÿ  You need to understand that asking if there is anything you can do, does not help with Manager Fatigue, because although you’re proving yourself to be a willing serf, you’re still requiring that they Manage you. This is a mistake a lot of managed spouses make.
• Ÿ  Another frequent mistake is believing your Manager’s resistance to your substitute managing. If you make breakfast for them one morning as a way of helping out, don’t take it personally if they have things to say about how you did it. Of course they’re going to complain that you overcooked the eggs, or forgot the toast. That’s their job - to manage. If you take the bait and argue, you lose all the benefit. Just agree that you didn’t do it the way they would have, but remind them, “But isn’t it nice to be served your breakfast without even having to ask?”

 

Look, you chose a Manager, so you must like being managed. It’s just that like any expensive sports car, they are a lot higher maintenance than the salesman at the dealership ever let on. Still, with a little routine maintenance, you can manage your Manager and then take them out for a ride.

[This blog entry has the seal of approval of my Manager :-) ]