Pointless

I have to confess. Things have been feeling pointless lately.

My kids who are generally wonderful are also impossible often enough that I’ve begun to recognize a feeling of relief when they’re not around.

My wife, who I share this adventure with, seems angry all the time. Worse, when I do nice things, they trigger disappointment and self hate.

Like our anniversary this year. 16 years. I remade her wedding band (which she lost in the move). I pulled her aside from the bedlam of our life (her mother is here and our kids were yelling at each other) to give it to her. She thought I was ashamed of her and unwilling to state publicly what I said privately. Then she went into a funk when the ring didn’t fit her correctly, feeling fat and ugly and out of shape. The very sign of my commitment to her became a symbol of self-rejection and humiliation.

She gave me a tennis ball with a message about love written on it. She offered a short apology that the things she’d bought for me hadn’t arrived yet. After dinner, she sat apart from me and the youngest as we watched a movie. I asked if everything was okay. She said she was “thinking.” I took it she was thinking about the parents of a friend of our youngest’s who’d been asking us to make our youngest be his friend. They hadn’t been nice.

Her gift to me came the next day — a beer glass with the name of the first place we’d had pie together etched on it: The Utopia Diner in NY.

”I’m sorry the rest isn’t here yet.” I hoped “the rest” wasn’t a set of shot glasses.

Later the frustration broke out into anger. I hadn’t made the day special enough. I hadn’t done the things she felt I should’ve. She didn’t feel seen or recognized or understood. She told me how my pulling her aside made her feel like I was hiding from the day.

I asked why she hadn’t stopped and tried to send it all in a different direction herself.

Whether I was in the right or not, I was boiling with anger. Deep down, I thought, I hate my job, I hate this conversation. When I’m not at home I feel better. What the fuck am I doing? What’s the point?

A money machine is all I felt I’d become at that moment. Working a job that is robbing me of time and not panning out, a job I had to convince myself to love with people who don’t really get it.

I figure I’ve got maybe 15 years of good physical movement left. But instead of white water rafting trips, I’m being told we are not happy without a house we “own” and that in the meantime, we need to buy expensive backyard furniture.

I don’t even want to make love. Instead I make appointments to see doctors to get the non-narcotic sleep aids that don’t work well and definitely don’t keep my brain from racing through thoughts of sleeping with people who I don’t know.

I’m even thinking of having a beer on the weekend and just drinking it all away, because, well, why not?

It is all self-centered, self-pitying thinking. I know this but can’t get rid of it. Therapists, AA, sponsors, meditation, job changes, deep conversations — years of all it and I am still here, just not yelling as hard in the wind.

And I’m asking like Peggy Lee: Is that all there is?