A strange connundrum...

Hello Stephen,

How are you today?  I have been very busy all day long, so I'm rather tired right now.  After I write to you, I'm off to bed.

Pete came to me last evening with a rather strange situation, asking my opinion and/or advice about it.  This one honestly stumps me.  Normally, I tend to weigh the pro's and the con's of the problem, and various solutions that might present themselves with varying circumstances.  But this one is really beyond me.

So, I am deferring to you, o great guru of my previous generation...you are wiser and older than I...and though you've never been married before...(to my knowledge)...what would YOU do in this situation?

Pete's first wife had been receiving alimony payments for 7 years.  Those payments have now stopped.  She is now panicking, because she can only find a part-time job, and cannot pay her bills.  She calls Pete every few months, to ask him for money.  He usually gives her some, because he is very generous and she's the mother of his children.

She believes that I hate her, (which I do not), but I do feel for her.  I see some of my own mom in her, they both have some kind of disconnect when it comes to being social, (ha, so do I), they both have an obsession with something inanimate to fill the void---my mom crochets constantly, and his ex-wife makes quilts....not just as a hobby, mind you....they both do it constantly, as though it is their only mission in life, to create as many quilts and baby hats and mittens and scarves as possible.

The honest truth of the matter is this: "I do not hate her. Rather, I fear that I may someday turn into someone like her myself." That is really what it boils down to.  I am empathic to the extreme, so I can definitely relate to what she is going through.  I was also struggling when I was single, (Eric Jong wrote The Fear of Flying in the 70's, and in the book she mentions that it is nearly impossible to be single and female in America (and God forbid if you're black too), because this society we live in does not ALLOW you to get anywhere on your own).

You sincerely and truly HAD to get married in the 70's if you wanted to have any financial and emotional security....and as stupid as that seems to be from back THEN, I am sad to report that this dilemma is still the case NOW.  It's true.  America simply is NOT set up to be very "single people friendly."  I don't know if YOU have ever encountered such things, (being male makes being single much easier, or so it seems), but I certainly have.  I spent 40 years of my life single you know.  I am now 43.  I still don't really know HOW to be married yet.  It's a mystery to me.

I have seen this very clearly from the very beginning of my friendship with Pete:  If he had not come into my life when he did, I may have been unemployed, job hunting, scraping every penny to get by, and then have nowhere to go when my friend David returned from the Philippines with his new wife...(I would have had to move out).  I may have ended up homeless.  It terrifies me even now to think about it.

In fact, it terrifies me even now to think about Pete suddenly being gone from my life....whether dead, or just sick of me and decided to leave.  What would I do??  I have a sense of SOME security now, sure, but that is something I have never had before, and I am certainly not USED to having, (I've lived most of my life without a safety net), so I don't ever want to take it for granted---because what if it goes POOF and simply disappears in the blink of an eye?? Then what the hell would I do??

Well, the situation is not quite as dire as all that....he says that his 2 previous wives were the ones who left HIM...he never left THEM...he tried to make it work and wanted marital counseling, etc., but they didn't.  (Now, as a woman who unfortunately has had a few affairs with married men over the years, this is the typical story I heard a lot). So I take it with a grain of salt. There are always two sides to every story.  Pete is not always a picnic to live with.  There are some days when I cannot stand being near him. So I realize there is more to that than meets the eye, but for the sake of what I'm trying to discuss about his first wife, I'll just take it at face value.

He also tells me that I am on his beneficiary life insurance at his job, so when he dies, I will be receiving 3 times the amount of his current salary from the company that he was making at the time of his death.  I have never seen these papers before.  Whether it's true or not, I don't have any idea really.  And honestly, it doesn't matter.  I just don't want to lose my office skills, in case I have to go back to work at some point, regardless of whatever life insurance I may collect after he's dead.

Now.....having said that.....this is the difference between me, and his first wife.  I am motivated, I am ambitious, and I have self-esteem...and I know that I will have to go back to work at some point in my life.  I'm only 43.  I have a long way to go before retirement age....and by the time I GET to retirement age, I doubt there will BE any Social Security benefits at all anyway.  The future's so bleak, I wanna wear a blindfold.

His first wife, however, got married fresh out of high school, had a baby, then got divorced a few years later...only to rebound right into Pete.  Three kids later, and lots of moving and struggling financially, really took its toll on her.  The stress of it all, I believe, caused her some kind of mental breakdown.  It's never been diagnosed as such, but (according to Pete), she's apparently never had much self-esteem at all about anything, and all her life, she's never been ambitious or motivated to do much of anything.

He says that she left HIM for her quilting hobby.  She just shut down, did nothing at all but sit and sew all day, the kids had to make their own dinners, the house was always a mess, she just didn't care.  My own mother had a nervous breakdown about 10 years ago, and she no longer does much of anything except sit in her nightgown all day, crocheting and watching her crime shows on t.v.  That's it.  She'll come upstairs to show us her new crochet creations, but her bedroom is a huge mess all the time, she hasn't even fully unpacked her stuff nor gotten her things settled and straightened...she just doesn't seem to care...all she wants to do is live in some illusionary world where she feels she has some control over what she's doing with her life...as paltry as it may be.

I see this in Pete's son Nathan sometimes too.  He takes after his mom.  He is afraid of jumping into life, (we all are at first...he's only 25)...but he also doesn't quite know how to motivate himself, and has a hard time accepting it or allowing it when others try to help him get motivated to do something for himself.  Like his mom, who sits and sews quilts all day long, he would rather sit and play computer games all day long, than to work and make real money by getting a welding job (that he went to college to earn a degree in), instead of just settling to be a pizza delivery guy.

It's a phenomenon that I truly do not fully understand.  I've NEVER had the luxury of doing something totally mindless like that, in lieu of having responsibilities.  I always had two jobs...one full-time, one part-time in the evenings.  Always.  Twelve to fifteen hour days were my normal thing, at work.  I am lucky if I can get a few pages read of a book before I fall asleep at night.  So, this is an odd thing to me, to see people I know who do these things.  One might even call them 'lazy.'  But, I think there's more to it than that simplistic label.  I believe they allow fear to control their lives.  Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of accomplishing something great, fear of accomplishing nothing...they seem paralyzed by fear.

I've felt these things too, in my life.  But I never let it paralyze me to the point of becoming a zombie.  Even after 9/11 ended my life in DC, I had to get out there and get busy finding a new job and moving back to Michigan.  I didn't have TIME to sit and wallow in fear.  I had nobody else to depend on.

That seems to be the key to this whole thing.  Pete's ex-wife was always dependent on others.  Even now, she lives with her mother.  She's never been able to fully depend on herself at all.  There was a short time where she had a job outside of the home, when she was young...but 3 kids came along, and that ended.

So....should Pete give her more money or not?  This is really a tough thing to consider.  Enabling someone to remain in their life-rut is not a good idea.  She'll never pay back a dime of it.  She'll continue asking if he continues giving.  But......she has nobody else to ask.  She has no other safety net.  She only has her kids, and the ex-husband to rely on.  But, she sat on her ass for 7 years, collecting alimony, and not bothering to try and get a better job, or go back to school to earn a degree, or anything.  She waited until the money ended, a full 7 years after the divorce, and NOW she is worried.

I don't know how to answer Pete, when he asks me what I think he should do.  I told him last time that she would be calling again in the fall, and he said, "You pegged it...she called."  I could see it coming a mile away, even though he disagreed with me about it at the time when I said it.  Women have intuition like that sometimes.  We're not just made up of smoke and mirrors ya know.  Though, some women cling to that smoke and mirrors crap because it's all they've got.

We interrupt this blog entry to add some nasty tabloid GOSSIP....

Case in point: the chick from the reality show who is boffing Neal Schon...(whatever her name is)...she has apparently just LEFT HER HUSBAND TO BE WITH NEAL!!  It was in the headlines today...no idea what Neal is doing with HIS new bride of 2 months...I guess they should get an annulment.  BUT, here's the kicker, STEVEN TYLER of Aerosmith has ALSO been with that same exact chick!!! She is apparently a total WHORE who likes to get jiggy with rock stars....who ELSE will come forward next?!

So Neal is getting Steven Tyler's sloppy seconds!! Is that NOT a total HOOT?!  Talk about poetic justice.  Sloppy seconds who just left her husband for Neal....can you say, "He's gonna bolt right out the door?" Yep, cause honey, that's what I see coming a mile away.  She's a stupid wench and deserves to fall from the "grace" of her reality t.v. show (15 minutes of) "fame." Now she'll fall without a husband too, and Neal won't be around to catch her either.  He'll be on to the next one. Or, MAYBE, just MAYBE, Neal is sick and tired of paying alimony to all those other wives he's cheated on---so now he's latching on to some rich t.v. star to have her carry HIM for awhile!!  Ya never know!

But I digress.

Anyway, people get into patterns.  Neal is in his pattern, and will never change it.  He has no self-esteem enough to be monogamous to someone.  He'll keep searching and searching and going through women like they are pairs of socks, tossing them to the floor when they get too comfy, and buying more.  He is in a life-rut, he's getting old, he's going through that nasty mid-life crisis, and he'll come out of it a total mess of a man, all alone in the end.  Lost and alone.  It is sad as hell, but he chose that for himself.

These women are not the ONLY women out there who have gone through similar circumstances. They are jaded, bitter about their ex-husbands, and feel lost and alone.  They feel they have lost all control over every aspect of their lives, and can only control the inanimate objects they hold in their hands...whether it's fabric and a thread and needle, or crochet needles and yarn...that is the only form of control they feel they've got left, and they are now in the pattern of repeating it over and over and over.

So....I'll have to write more tomorrow. Pete's home.  Still don't know what he's going to do about it.

Bye for now.

Love, Rebecca