Plywood Violin

Whose house when

I usually pick the boy up at school on Wednesdays, take him to an afterschool course, and then we go out for dinner. Someone told me that Wednesday evening was the traditional divorced dads evening with the kids.

I mentioned that to Beth, and she asked me if that’s why I had proposed picking the boy up on Wednesday. “No,” I said, “it was just coincidence. I wanted to see him in the afternoon, and it sounded like you needed a night when you could work late.”

This is what I proposed: I pick him up from school Wednesday. He spends the night with me, and I take him to school Thursday. If it’s ‘my’ weekend, I do the same on Thursday and Friday, finally returning him to Beth on Sunday. She thought it was a horrible idea.

“You know he likes order. You know how he hates it when his routine is disrupted,” she said. “And I don’t really see you being able to spend that much time with him. Look at you, you’re with him all afternoon, and you’re already wiped out.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “I think I would have to work up to that. I’m not proposing that we do this immediately. I was thinking it’s something to build up to.”

She wasn’t convinced, and I’m beginning to think that this proposal is a little ambitious on my part. But I want to start getting used to putting proposal out there with Beth. It’s hard to talk to her about this stuff, and she usually asks me to stop after a ten minutes, but there are going to be lots of these conversations in the future.

Last night I went to see the boy’s therapist. We talked about how the boy is doing, and how to tell him.

She said, “You know, the boy is doing remarkably well. He seems very engaged and as if he’s opened up a little. I was able to have a conversation with him while he was doing something else, which is something I haven’t been able to do before.”

We talked about how to tell him. I outlined the general plan – to tell him after May 20th, the key points:

When we were having lunch on Sunday, I asked the boy how he feels when Mom and Dad fight.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “So I try to get involved so I can solve it.”

“You know,” I said, “it’s not your job to help us fix our fights. Grownups argue sometimes. Mom and Dad disagree about things. But we never ever argue or disagree about you.”

I keep trying to reassure him that we both love him.

The one thing I don’t know how to answer (if he asks) is whether we’re actually getting divorced or whether we’re separating to see what happens next. From what I’ve read, trial separations succeed only about 15% of the time. And given that we’ve been in counseling for three years already, I’m not optimistic. And finally, I don’t know whether I actually want to stay married.

This sweetly naive twenty years later. As if there were a chance we weren’t headed to where we were headed.

Beth told me she was reading one of the women’s magazines that has a feature called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” She said it made her think that our therapist didn’t do a good enough job. In the article, she said, the therapist had the couple make lists and do exercises; our therapist didn’t make us do that. “On top of that, there I was thinking she was the happily married youngish matron mother-of-four, and she’s really divorced!”

I don’t know that anyone could have really helped us.

We work very well together as parents. At least it seems that way to me. But we don’t work together as husband and wife. And that’s obvious to both of us.