I woke up around 3 am and slept restlessly for the rest of the night. I had two disturbing dreams. In the first, I was tutoring a fourth-grade class. The teacher was distressed by my methods and wanted me to use hers. She felt that using my methods instead of the ones approved by the school was rude. I was volunteering to boot. When I go into a classroom these days, I make it clear to the teachers ahead of time that while I will work on the skills they want me to work on, I will work on them my way; I will not just help students complete assignments just so the teacher can have a grade for their records. While I have mastered the skill of getting myself out of a situation like that in real life, I have yet to figure out how to do it in my dreams.
The second dream was a familiar one. I dreamt that Mike came to me and told me he was leaving me for another woman. For starters, Mike would never do something like that even if he had been very unhappy in the marriage. He would have left first and then found another woman, which he did in his first marriage.
When I got up, there was Mike's towel lying on the floor. I haven't moved his towel since I came home from Oahu. Okay, A little later in the day, I was sitting in the front living room while Kathrin was in the bathroom taking a shower. Suddenly, her bathroom door flew open violently as if a strong wind had come through the house. One problem, there wasn't even a subtle breeze. As Damon said, "It looks like Dad's moved back into the house." When he was alive, I would tell him I had that dream, and he would hug me. Guess hugs are out and dropped towels and slammed doors are in.
I mentioned this dream about Mike leaving me to several women who said they have had it too. I wonder if it is common even in the best of marriages. I doubt that many women had the dream in previous centuries because it was stay in the marriage or be shunned by the community. There were impressive reinforcements for marriage. These didn't guarantee that the marriage was good, only that is was, is, and would ever be.
Despite knowing full well that Mike would never have just come to me and announce he was leaving, the dream still hurts. It did while he was alive, and it does now. While I'm doing well, writing the blog helps a lot, there are painful moments. I find I envy elderly couples when they demonstrate affection or connection. In the past, I viewed envy as a signal that it was something I wanted. I knew the solution was to go after it. But now what I want is the relationship I had with Mike, which was carefully built over 45 years. How can I ever replace that? I do talk to him, but it is not quite the same.
For the most part, Kathrin is a delight to live with. We converse well, and we share silence well. She tells me what she is thinking, and we can engage in lengthy discussions. Mike was mostly silent. I miss his quiet presence. He'd accuse me of bibble babble. If it came into my mind, it came out of my mouth. I always wanted him to converse more, to tell me what was on his mind, to discuss his ideas with me, but no. As much as I enjoy Kathrin's sharing, I now understand what he was complaining about. 'Be careful what you wish for.' I shared this story with Yvette. She got a good laugh. She understands completely.
Note: as my relationship with Kathrin develops, I can say I’m not up for conversation now. This is turning out to be the best of both worlds.
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Musings: I'm putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
I would modify Jung's image of the dot in the circle to represent the small ego in relation to the much larger total self. The ego is a growing, changing thing, not static. It's not buried in the center of the self. It has contact with the outside world. I suppose you can use Jung's image and picture the ego having contact with the world in front of it. But it's hard to illustrate the ego engaged with the external physical and social world from that vantage point in a 2-dimensional illustration. Also, my image of the ego is more ameba shaped instead of a neat little circle. The ego has to be at the edge of the large self so it can move beyond the boundaries of the self to reach out to the external world. Its shape is determined by what we include in and exclude from our egos.
Our first job as children is to define our egos in terms of the external world, with a slight nod to the inner world. Being overly focused on the inner self too early in life can create disturbances, especially when that focus is on disturbing impulses.
Children are forced to experience these negative or inappropriate impulses prematurely by external circumstances. A child who has been molested winds up inappropriately aware of their sexuality; a child who is verbally or physically abused by a parent becomes inappropriate aware of the capacity for anger and hatred; a child who suffers from a lack of basic material comforts, food, shelter, clothing, becomes inappropriately aware and preoccupied with their need to have things; a child who loses parents when they are young becomes inappropriately aware of the unreliability of the people who supposed to take care of them and assure their survival. I'm sure there are more possibilities. A child should hopefully be appropriately aware of their capacity to love and be loved. It is also normal for the negatives to raise their head during childhood, but hopefully, these are comparable to the seasoning on a meal instead of the main course.
However, praise for the people whose childhoods were difficult and overcame their past. They were forced to acquire wisdom and have much to contribute to society. From a societal perspective, there is no lousy childhood, only those who were not blessed with finding a secure pathway to healing and survival. Life does not guarantee a lovely experience.
By the time we are adults, even someone who had the best of all possible childhoods has seen enough of others and themselves to know that not everything is love and light, not only in others but in themselves. Several psychologists talk about adults turning to learn more about their spiritual selves, maybe we can say the internal selves. They have to learn that there is no escape from the human condition. We are born with a capacity for negative emotions. Deal with it. Some can't or won't. They are the world's blamers. Their lives get smaller and smaller, narrow and narrow more and more uncomfortable. Life discomforts are never, never their fault. Oh, dear.
