wednesday— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —
23 Oct 1985
Dear Rose,
I got your letter today. First I would like to say
I’m sorry you had to find out I was off work. I’m sorry
because I know it hurts you when parts of my personal life
that you don’t know about surface. I’m sorry because I
don’t like to cause you hurt.
There’s a lot in your letter that needs to be
discussed. It’s plain how you see things from what you’ve
written, but, as always, there are two sides to things and
they both need to be thought about after the anger
subsides. I’m going to go through the points in your
letter one by one and deal with them as I see them. Then
I’m going to raise a few points of my own that you may not
have thought about.
I wasn’t in a ‘special’ hurry to leave Monday. At
least not any different than I am many Mondays because I
like to avoid the rush hour traffic. We’ve talked about
that before on Monday mornings and/or Sunday evenings.
Three weeks ago when the post-coital exam came up
things were EXACTLY as I said they were at work. I was
not playing any games with you. I did feel quite bad that
things were such that it was hard for me to make it. I
remember calling you and expressing my feelings about it.
I’m not sure if I remember but didn’t I come the next day
instead for Chris’ school jog-a-thon? Do you only
remember those things which support your feelings in times
of anger?
I’m surprised at the sarcasm about the morning you
and I went to the lab. Am I supposed to sit at attention
waiting for your return while you go into the lab to have
your blood drawn? As I recall you were only in there two
minutes. That I took something along to read is not
unusual for me, but I want to discuss that more, later,
when I am making my points about things between us. The
errands we ran after the lab. ‘Real romantic’ is your
comment. Given the errands we had to run, what did you
expect? Romantic, kiddo, isn’t WHAT you do, its whose
doing it and what’s happening between them. Actually, I
thought wandering the mall on a weekday morning and eating
a croissant with you was kind of nice. Is it that it
would have been more romantic if I’d have treasured
another 15 minutes in the car riding all the way back down
to SJC just so I could get back on my bike and ride right
back where I’d come from? Is that what this is about?
I was afraid my working Friday would trigger some
suspicion in you about what I was doing and why. Its a
thought that crosses my mind whenever I work on the
weekends or do something special during ‘our time’. Well,
you are wrong. My motives and actions were just as
stated. Working later Friday had no connection with the
time I’ve taken off this week. I wanted the computer in
SJC (for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment) and I did want
to work late. Under the circumstances, staying at my place
and having you come by in the morning seemed like a good
idea. Changing things around sometimes is what keeps life
interesting.
Making love twice in a month says a lot about our
relationship. Yes, I guess it does; but what? To me sex
is for three things: To make children, to release
physical passion, and to share as loving play. You and I
haven’t talked candidly about sex between us in a long
time. Years ago it was a big problem between us. During
those years my sex drive was a lot higher than now and I
had no other outlets. Now my drive is lower and I do have
other outlets. So, what am I trying to say here? The
occasions when I want/need to release my pent up passions
are less these days when I come to you. The occasions
when we make love for another child are scheduled. You
let me know when and we do. So what does that leave?
Love making to share as play. This kind of love making is
‘participatory’. Both people alternately take aggressive
and passive roles. Either can begin. Love is made not
because that’s what you do if you love someone. Its made
because loving and love making are one. Its done because
you look at the other person and your love says I want to
make that person feel good. I want to melt our feelings
together and get lost in an intimate and secret space
between us. If both people feel this way, its one of
those gifts where the more you give, the more you get.
You go far beyond what passion alone would drive you to.
This is what people mean when they say true love making is
not just passion. They don’t mean true love making is
pure and above passion. If one person only expects and
only receives then the spirit for giving dies in the other
person and all that is left is physical passion and child
making.
Passion is one of the most subtle threads in our
minds. Its easily tangled or broken by adverse
experiences when we are young. Our society is so laden
with ‘messages’ about what’s right and what wrong with sex
behaviors that its hard to not get tangled up. But,
regardless of what’s happened to us in the past, we,
ultimately, are responsible for ourselves and what we
experience. I love you and I have loved you for years. I
have been patient, frustrated, suggestive, helpful, and
about sixty other things with you on the issue of sex. I
guess at some point, given that basically I’ve never seen
much change in your attitudes over all our years together,
I shutdown and decided, ‘how it is, is how it is’ between
us. I’ve hoped that other lovers might have woken you up,
stirred you participatory passion, helped you understand
sex as ‘giving love’, broken through somehow where I’d
failed to but if they did its remained a secret between
you and them.
There I feelings I’ve been having for sometime now.
I’ve just been sitting on them since I didn’t know what
exactly was causing them and what they meant. Things most
times seem stagnate between us. Not always, for you do
surprise me at times, but mostly ‘we’ seem in some sort of
limbo. There have been times when I’ve come down for the
weekend and it felt like I was almost an inconvenience to
you to have around. Nothing specifically said; more a
feeling. Like, inside, you’re thinking, ‘I wish my life
wasn’t arranged so that I have to put up with this jerk,
how did I ever let things get this way?’. You seem to
tolerate me being there as you walk around me maintaining a
neutral air.
About the time my conviction gets strong that I’m not
imagining this and I start wondering why I come down if
all you are doing is tolerating me, then you’ll do
something to make me doubt my perceptions, like cook
something especially for me. I don’t feel loved. I feel
ignored with brief, confusing, flashes of attention.
In the course of a weekend, ask yourself, how many
times will I walk by and caress you back or neck? Ask
for a hug or come and seek you out to how how you are
doing? Ask yourself how much you do these things. I know
people are different. I don’t expect that you will do the
things I do to express your feelings but, what worries me
is I think most times these things are such a part of
‘life’ between us that you are blind to me doing them and
don’t even see them happening. Do you?
You complain I always have my nose in a book or a
computer. Watch yourself when you and I are together
either alone or with other people. Alone, you are quiet
and morose or busy doing something. A few perfunctory
remarks about Chris or Danny’s school affairs or the condo
association or a bank closing down locally. There’s very
little that interests me that can get more than a ho-hum
out of you. So we’re reduced to discussing stuff like I
wonder what’s on TV or do you want to go to the market.
Now, let Ruth or Terri or Mary Lou walk it and you become
animated, your face gains expression, you begin to emote,
you begin to look alive, like you care what’s going on,
like you’re enjoying yourself.
You and I discuss my plans to go overseas not because
you are interested in something which is important to
someone you love but, it seems to me, because it’s
something which is going to affect your life logistically.
Have you and I ever talked about what it is I want in my
life that makes me want to go. Or is it that long ago you
decided you knew what it is and decided it’s shit and not
worth talking about? There’s a hundred things I care
about that I’d love to talk about and I do talk about with
other people. Are you and I just such different people
that we can find nothing to be interested in about each
other? I cherish many things about you; your love for
children, your honesty, your orderliness, that you are in
my life. I look around the condo and I see so much of you
and it pleases me. The furniture you cared enough to buy,
the doll collection you’re making, the family pictures
you’ve hung, the traces your mothering has left on my
boys, you wisdom with money. What do you see that you
like about me, Rose? It feels like we are in a contest of
wills most times to me. As if there’s painfully little
you like about me and how I feel and what I believe in and
how I live and what I want. My accomplishments, my
intellect, my career, my spiritual interests, my physical
fitness, my poetry. I like myself and what I do and
believe and feel. I feel alive, I seek life, I cherish it
and want more and it feels like you are constantly saying
to me, ‘you are wrong about almost everything you believe,
I wish you’d grow up’.
Reading is something I do when things are quiet.
Things are almost always quiet between us. And when they
are not they are nearly always about the immediate details
of our lives. Not about our hopes or fears, our interests
or cares.
In these last months this feeling of being down south
and being ‘tolerated’ has grown until I’ve started to
watch it from week to week to see if its my imagination or
not. Along with it a resentment has grown. So much of my
life I spend down there where I feel distained. So much
time when I could be doing things I would like to do like
entering poetry or writing letters. This is why I brought
the computer down, so that I wouldn’t feel that my time
there had to be time wasted for these things I could be
doing that mean a lot to me.
Tell me, Rose. When I’m down, if I wasn’t working on
Brent’s computer or reading a book what would I do? Your
hours are certainly not idle on weekends and most times
(not all but most) if you say I’m bored I’ll stop and
we’ll go do something together, even if its only go for
ride.
I don’t rag on you for your interests and if I kid
you its only kidding. Do I complain because you
embroider, or sew, or whatever? Have you never gotten
used to the fact that I am an intellectual. I read for
the joy of it. Life is short. I could spend my time
doing something charitable for someone like give
racquetball lessons to kids or be a scout leader but my
talents are better applied to computers. Do you know
someone else who could or would make Brent a computer?
I don’t think I’ve ever felt you be proud of me. Maybe a
few times, briefly, but not much. Almost everything I am
is ‘in spite of you’ and that’s a sad commentary on a
relationship.
Sometimes I think if I hung around with the boys and
cussed and watched sports and was sexually naive and
thought of you as my ‘good little woman at home’ and was
dumb enough that you could out think me, that’s what you’d
like. Well, I’m a far cry from any of that. Dead
opposite I’d say.
I want a woman to look at me and say, with deep pride
and love, ‘I love him’, and feel that the things I care
about are important. Maybe that can only happen when
people have the same beliefs in common, I don’t know
anymore.
It took me a while but I have come to love much that
you think is important and am willing to live AND accept
the fact that we differ on a lot of the rest. I sincerely
doubt that you’ve come to love much that I care about
(other than our boys) and I believe you silently detest
most of what I cherish. I don’t think much of either of
these points of view, yours or mine, when I think what
love in this life can be made of.
You and I are living a compromise. We hang on I
suspect because we do love each other because of all the
years we’ve shared. Because, in spite of our being so
different, the biggest part of our lives are inextricably
twined together through shared memories and two children.
Because life is a pretty naked and ugly business, alone.
Because, in spite of our differences, we cherish the
other’s attempt to make a go of things, their honesty and
their integrity.
And that’s all good. But what about now. What make
this thing; us, alive? Chris and Danny more than
anything, I think you’d agree. And now we want to have
another. I think if we do it will bring us closer
together. Certainly, Chris did. But is that what we’re
willing to settle for? That our children should be our
only glue? That, aside from them, we will go on to the end
in this silent struggle of values and beliefs? Love and
security balanced against habit and distain?
These thoughts, as you can imagine, have been
building for awhile. But that’s not new. So much between
us has always been silent disagreement and unspoken
tension. I wasn’t really planning to get into this with
you. I think I’ve been willing to live with it all for a
long time. Too much of my life is invested in living with
you this way to tear it all up and throw it all away.
I’ve been willing to just drift forward and vaguely hope
that the coming events; another child, and going overseas,
might shift the balances in some positive direction. Give
it a stir and maybe it’ll improve our we’ll get more used
to it and that will be OK too. I’d like things to be better
between us but I am willing to deal with them as they are.
But I’m not willing to see myself through your eyes.
I’m not willing to ‘settle down’. I’m not willing to
explain to you what I do on ‘my time’ nor am I willing to
pretend that I don’t believe and trust my own perceptions
about what is real and right in my life. If I meet other
people who will see me as I see myself and who understand
love as I understand it I am not willing to pass them by.
I don’t mean to be unnecessarily harsh with my words
and I don’t like to cause you pain but I do have to draw
lines and say, ‘Rose, I love you but these things are
parts of me I won’t give up’.
So, where from here? More bitter silence and
begrudging acceptance of life as it exists between us?
Buried resentments and frustrations. A deeper sense of
hopelessness as time goes by? If we cannot work on
building something new and alive between us and we only
manage to hang onto our current compromises, life and love
will pass us by. Distance can only grow between us as we
grow or wither in different directions.
I am NOT writing this as a suggestion to ‘break up’.
I am writing it as an attempt to open up a dialogue about
‘us’. We’ve never been very good at ‘talking’ and I admit
that I screwed that up for us way back when. We’ve also
never been very good at finding our way through sheer will
power and emotional pressure. That just leads us to
entrenched compromises based on stubbornness. Maybe
writing will help.
You wrote to get some feelings off your chest.
Here’s some of mine. What do you think of all this? Will
you write and say?
This weekend I’m going to stay here in Irvine. This
doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else but you and
me. In fact I didn’t decide this until I started writing.
I think you’ll get this letter Friday and this will give
you a bit of time to digest it. If you’d like to meet
somewhere maybe Sunday evening for dinner I’d like that.
I think it would do me good to spend most of a weekend
alone and get a feel for what life without you might be
like. I doubt I’ll like it from what I remember. It
usually turns out that when I’m alone the things I think I
crave so much like reading and poetry and pretty useless
compared to that empty feeling yawning inside.
Love,
Archive for October, 1985
1985-10-23 wednesday
Wednesday, October 23rd, 19851985-10-23 Mexico 85.
Wednesday, October 23rd, 1985 Mexico 85.
Man. child.
Your head on my chest. I hold you.
Your mouth on my breast, soft lips,
warm breath,
I feel. I feel ... you.
Your hands.
Your hands on my skin, touching,
fondling, touching.
Musky scents rising.
Glistening sweat. Body tensing,
arching.
I want to go. With you.
I want ... you.
Man. child.
Breath quickening, sweet sounds;
I see you behind closed eyes.
I hold you within me.
I hold you.
Now.
Lise
23 October 1985
Costa Mesa, CA
-----------------
(An attached note:)
This is not pretending to be
anything and if I had any sense I
wouldn't send it to you.
These are just words which
have been dancing in my head.
So there.
I love ... you.
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —
1985-10-25
Friday, October 25th, 1985Hurt drawn across her— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —
hanging fragile
in brittle, painful self-control.
What to say…
in a heart-storm.
No longer slash and tear
rip and run
but another note there
that I cannot recognize
in Rose of 15 years.
gallagher
25 Oct 85