When things began to change

I guess things began to "change" in the spring of 2009, around when she moved in to the house, and before we went to Asia to collect V. in June. She had been staying over most of the time since Christmas, but still had her room in this professor's house in the west end. Around April or May we kind of decided she should move in. I say "kind of" because I remember particularly how unceremonious her moving in was. We never sat down and planned it at all or discussed the pros and cons or money or anything, it just kind of happened. I did not realise at the time that this type of approach would become the norm for the next two years. There was a vague sort of cloud of logistics which kind of coalesced around the idea, such as collecting her son, her furniture, evicting my tenant, saving the expense of her room, etc., but it was an unfamiliar feeling for me to embark on something so momentous without any concrete discussion about it. But I was surprisingly not bothered by this approach, I had this self-assurance where I just knew I loved her and she loved me and that things would work out and as a result I was immune to feelings of insecurity about it. I was grounded and plans were just something that insecure people fret over.

I felt it would be weak of me to try to include her in the "planning" talk that I felt compelled to have when she clearly did not want to be. And I was scared to push anything so I just kind of let things happen. Despite the fact that the financial arrangement was pretty tight - I was touching more money every month from the tenant I would be evicting than she was paying for her room -- we never discussed it in any detail and I never asked her to contribute any particular amount to the household. She settled into a pattern of signing over random paycheques to me, but it never amounted to much, certainly not even what she had been paying for her room, and we never talked about it - we did not need to, I was strong and capable and knew how to take care of my woman.

As random as it may have seemed to me at the time, it turned out this would be one of the better examples of coordinated planning on our part. Her distaste or even revulsion for "talking" about almost anything to do with our partnership or our home never wavered. I would not always be so stoic about it, and recall time and again being frustrated when trying to draw her into having a discussion of planning about our lives, finances, travel plans, plans for V. (school, cub scouts, heritage language lessons, even haircuts!), decorating  the house, renovating the house, career plans for me and for her, everything. She wanted nothing to do with it. She certainly had opinions about all of those things, but she had no interest in talking about them with me. It was as if every element of our collective lives, everything we did, every item in our house, every movie we watched was a discrete manifestation of an idea of hers, or mine, but never a mélange of the two, and she was allergic to discussing either one. She much preferred going with my idea even when she despised it (and she often did) than to spend time discussing it. Even more awkward was the violence and hatred she exhibited when I tried to insert myself into her own personal affairs, such as restructuring her debts or rehabilitating her suspended driver's license, or of course her son.

Eventually and perhaps inevitably, the source of my self-assurance was exhausted, and with nothing to draw on when I got scared I turned to her, and she had nothing for me either. I was empty, and she felt like the victim of a terrible bait-and-switch: I had sold myself as a superior man who knew how to forge ahead and slay dragons for her, and suddenly I was fallible and fragile and therefore pathetic.