20 Something

Today I’ve been reading this book called 20 Something, 20 Everything by Christine Hassler. I picked it up because I was looking into the whole quarter-life crisis thing on a whim since my girlfriend of three years broke up with me around a week ago. Apparently, this is actually a real thing. My ex-wife had told me about it when she was leaving me some years back, but I sort of ignored it on account of being pissed off that she had actually left me (at least to some degree) to sleep with our roommate, or at least the guy helped facilitate it. My girlfriend is involved in one of these, I guess, the whole overwhelming sense of the unknown we all feel in our twenties that is generally comprised of such tings as Who Am I?, Where Am I Going?, and What Do I Want? Well this book, specifically geared toward women in their twenties, aims to help you answer these questions. It doesn’t answer them for you, mind you, it’s full of self-analysis factors that help you answer them for yourself. Thus far there is a lot of self-empowerment and emphasis on doing what you want over what society, your parents, friends and whoever have asserted that you should do. This is good, and good advice. The problem thus far is that when our author tells us that the book targets women in their twenties it really seems to target middle-class raised white women in their twenties. I must say there is some very good advice in there, but it’s hard to get to it between the overlain thickness of Oprah please pick me! that seems pervasive throughout. So whether or not there is a good advice message in there (and, to its credit, there is so far) – it’s not likely to easily place a great impression on my ex-girlfriend (I dislike that term, by the way) unless she is feeling very open-minded at the time. I suppose I’d have to tell you about her to give you an idea:

My girlfriend-prior (I like that better) is the kind of girl you could write a book about and people would actually read it, unlike most of us. She has a father who walked out at a very early age and then had the indecency to remain in her life just enough to make it really miserable and difficult, but he keeps pictures of her and acts like he was a part of it. Dad gave his lovely daughter, who he takes care of and you remember that, a 1985 Toyota Corolla with an engine assembled somewhere in the bowels of the abyss from spare parts of cars that time forgot. It leaks every conceivable type of fluid and runs about as well as one of those dogs you see that have tumors and think it’s really sad, but they keep trudging along so you can’t bear to shoot them. Probably due to this and being raised by a single mother who grew up in the flower-power days and didn’t move on to suburban America, she spent much of her younger life indistinguishable from a boy, except boys at that age generally are lacking in woodland survival, tracking, literary sensibility and anger. I’d have been willing to bet boys at that age couldn’t kill you as fast either. Home-schooled, well-traveled (at least in-country) and educated to a degree that would make Big Brother very unhappy, this girl is generally everything you never see in miss public-school-middle -America. Hence the lack of faith in such a book beginning to look relevant to her situation. Since the age of seventeen she’s been living out of her mom’s house, working and has gone from one long-term relationship with a guy you would never want your daughter to date to another (me, an ADHD nutjob with chronic nightmares, two kids and a religion you’ve never heard of) – which is why the audience should cut her some fucking slack before you play bad ex-girlfriend on me.
Now it’s not all fun stories here, folks. As my brother Felix might say, this girl has more than issues, she has subscriptions – when I met her she was a recovering Anorexic (not bullshit anorexic like your teen-angst emo chicks, the real deal) and a cutter (also here no whiney paper-cuts – I’m talking about bloodletting) and, well, a lot of ups and downs. What followed over the next three years was a roller-coaster of drama from getting on and quitting Meth to long nights spent driving each other crazy with our own stubbornness and a lot of crying and self-deprecation. If it seems like a really unhealthy relationship to you, it wasn’t, because this was also balanced out by a lot of genuine communication and growth together and a loyalty and honesty you don’t find today in the real world. NWPS. If you don’t know what that means, you never will, so don’t ask. The great dilemma here lies in the fact that the poor girl got more than she bargained with in me I suppose; she met a guy who at the time was very social and had two kids on the weekends. A generally broke, but happy writer with a dream that was actually coming into reality. I suppose somewhere in there reality came down on this fractured fairy-tale relationship like a cartoon anvil from the sky and made everything a bit less technicolor. What was two weird folks living a somewhat-alternative lifestyle turned a one-eighty when I had to go get a 9-5 (by that I mean an 8-7 or 10) and my ex-wife decided to have a second quarter-life crisis and leave her second husband. She moved into a garage and my -girl-previous decided she didn’t want my kids to go through all of it and that they should come live with us. With her having quit her job at my behest (it was a long commute with few hours, I had the money and I wanted her to be able to focus on school) and me working 60+ hours a week, she decided to do full-time school and take care of the kids.
Did I mention that some three months or so prior this girl had just turned twenty-one.
So not only did she go to school, she played supermom – making dinner, supplementing public education with actual learning and still took time to talk to listen to me bitch about my bipolar boss after work. A meltdown was not only possible, it was immanent, I suppose. Somewhere in there I bought a house and she started realizing that she was domesticating (again) at 21, only this time it had everything but a white picket fence to go with it (my small picket fence is not painted, actually). If you’re reading this and thinking “she had it perfect” I invite you to go back a few paragraphs and read about who this girl actually is, then kindly piss off, because you’re not getting me. I wasn’t getting it either, though, but I suppose given the end result that may be obvious. So now, living in a house, she realized that she was burning out on taking care of the kids. My job cut me down to part-time (still paying me enough money to make bills, actually) and I took full responsibility of the kids again. I didn’t see her as much and she mentioned moving out, still being with me, but finding herself. We fought a lot…she worked, I worked and took the kids…we saw less of each other, you get the idea. It’s a downward spiral that should have ended in a screaming break up, and believe me there were times it almost did. It didn’t end that way, however. This chapter of our story ends with my-girl-before upset and frustrated walking into my house after working her ass off and realizing she couldn’t be there anymore and feeling terrible about it. The girl cried when she broke up with me and has not exactly been out on the town since. I suppose you can see why I’m not bitching about her.

The classic bit about this is that I, while you might have painted a nice picture of a really sweet if not slightly sardonic single dad, am a man’s man. See, I hate when men cry and I hate doing it. My idea of sports involves hitting people, with my fists or padded sticks or regular sticks – whatever. A meal to me involves meat or it is an hors d’oeuvre. I’m fairly self-aware and sensitive, I guess, but I’m a stubborn son of a bitch just like any other man and in a lot of our fights I would assert that she should be fine with everything and that, of course, I was doing the same thing when I was 21 and only wishing I was so stable. It came to me when she posted me a message saying she knew I wouldn’t understand and that her decision was irrational that I did understand and that were I her I would probably have taken off earlier. What started out, drama or not, as two people spending most of their time having a wonderful time together turned into two people sitting in the same room without sometimes saying a word for an hour and those words usually being something irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of good times in there and there was a lot of love. But, no offense to the Beatles, love is sadly not all you need. You actually need to be happy, too. You need to laugh and talk about things you have opinions on. Your fights should be over differences in things you like and they should end in smiles rather than cries, to coin a reference.

After all of that she didn’t take off because she finally realized that our relationship had disintegrated into something resembling the water you find in post-Katrina New Orleans, she didn’t leave because she figured out that she could have just about any guy (and a lot of girls) she meets. She left because she’s gone from one long relationship to a second one since she was 17 and at 21 she has no idea where to go.

Most days lately I spend wondering if I should go stand outside her place with a radio held over my head blasting Peter Gabriel or just wondering if I might have made her cry that day without ever having been there. I suppose I decided to write this whole bit today because, like the dumb ass I can be, I happened to drive down Scripture, one of the only streets she might be on, to get across town and I saw her driving, so I get to wonder of maybe I upset the hell out of her. Because she hasn’t been out going crazy or sleeping around or bad-mouthing me to her friends, she’s been upset about me.

So here I am, 11:20 p.m. with the kids in bed an my cat gods-know where failing at prowling the night listening to old Jazz on Winamp and typing a blog of all things. I spent part of my day reading a book that I got with her in mind not because I thought it might make her want to take me back (in point of fact the book so far would encourage her to stay away from me), but because I do want her to find the answers to those personal questions that plague us in our twenties.

In retrospect I should probably just go back to reading The Descent.