From the Window

I’ve been doing midterms and before that I was away with Cher for the weekend and before that I was doing derby stuff. Probably tomorrow I’ll have some free time after I attend four ice skating programs (performed by my amazingly talented daughters.)

I should be finishing a paper right now but I thought I’d pop over to sit a spell and take a moment to watch the world.

Outside of the window where I’m sitting a group of daycare children just walked by two by two in a line. The first thing I thought when I saw them was “Oh, wow, look how those children are learning about socialization.” They are being socialized and their teachers are socializing them even though they have no idea why or how they’re doing it.

There’s a guy standing in the Park blocks yelling at the top of his lungs–I assume he’s preaching. Another guy is confronting him and they are having an argument. The preacher guy looks like a professor I had last year, but it is definitely not him. Now another man is confronting the guy who is confronting the preacher guy and now I really wish I was one of the people outside standing by a tree, smoking a cigarette so I could hear what they are saying. (I don’t smoke anymore but everyone out there standing against trees are smoking.)

I can sit here and make all kinds of assumptions about the people I’m watching (outside of the fact that the confronting guy looks like my former professor. It’s not him. It’s definitely not him.) I wonder if Mr. Notmyprofessor is in a cult and he has to do Park Block preaching in order to pass a test of some kind. Does God require this? I automatically don’t like him for several reasons. First: I don’t like his jeans. Second: He’s loud and people are trying to enjoy their cigarettes and short glimpses of sunshine. Third: I assume that he is probably saying bad things about my deviant gay lifestyle and how I’ll burn in hell and how I don’t deserve to have children. Ah. It’s so tiresome, but I suppose he has the right to annoy people and I have the right to not like his jeans. It’s only fair.

Before I depart and finish my paper I will make some other short observations:

• Leggings are not pants. Period.
• There are very few pigeons in the park.
• Walking and typing on a laptop at the same time is just wrong.
• I love it when the bells ring and noon and there are 12 gongs. I always count the gongs.
• There are a LOT of women who go to school at Portland State who wear big head scarfs. I don’t know what they are called but they are pretty. I also wonder if they coordinate the scarfs with their outfits or is it just random.

Finally. Mr. Notmyprofessor is finished and his friend has taken over. He is not wearing jeans.

What’s going on outside of your window? It’s really fascinating if you really take the time to take a gander.

Overwhelming

What am I doing? Why did I think that going back to school was a good idea? Really?

All it is doing is putting me further in debt, taxing my wife and stressing everyone out. I don’t have enough money for things that I want and need and I’m a complete burden on Cher. I try to tell myself that I do a lot. I take care of the house, pay the bills, cook, clean, grocery shop, run kids around, volunteer and a million other things but then I remind myself that I would have to do that stuff anyway–even if I was working and earning a salary. I try to tell myself that Cher gets something out of it (someone to cook, clean, pay the bills, grocery shop, etc.) but then I remind myself that if she wasn’t with me, she wouldn’t need someone to do those things for her–she would only be taking care of herself.

I’m not feeling like things are equitable in my relationship and in my life right now. I feel like I’m taking advantage of my wife’s generosity and eventually she’s going to resent me for it. In a way I feel like she already does. I really fail to see how anything in this relationship benefits her at all and I’m just waiting for it to all fall apart.

I don’t like being dependent on someone. I especially don’t like feeling like my dependency is a cause of contention in any way but this seems to be a recurring theme in my life and I’m not quite sure how to get it to stop. I want to finish my degree, but at what cost?

Love only goes so far. Sooner or later people start to keep score and compare and figure out that they’re not getting back what they’re putting in–whether that’s financial or otherwise–and then they start to question what they’re doing. That’s what  I fear.

It was different when I was married. My husband and I had our children together–we made a decision on how to raise them, with me staying at home with them. The girls and I were his responsibility because we were the family that he helped to make. Cher doesn’t have any responsibility for my girls, we are not the family that she helped to make. She does things for them because she loves me and loves them, but ultimately it’s not her weight to carry.

I like to think that if the situation was reversed that I would look at all of my resources as shared and realize that each person contributes–some more financially significantly than others–but that it is all ours. I don’t know and I can’t know because I’ve only ever been the one doing this part of the partnership–the unpaid part. I have no idea how I would feel going to work every day while my partner went to school–maybe I would be resentful too.

It’s all too overwhelming.