Marriage and Family

Chapter Nine

Friday, April 28, 2028

I keep having this reoccurring dream where I'm sinking in quick sand. I'm slowly sinking and I reach out for Martin, but he's busy with his father and has his back to me. I call out to him, but he either doesn't hear me or doesn't care enough to turn around and help. So I just continue sinking into a big pit of blackness. I'm not Freud, but I have a pretty good idea what that dream means.

Victor's lived with us for over two years now. Has it really only been two years? It's hard to believe that. It seems like he's lived here forever.

I'm starting to get really worried about my relationship with Martin. There's a bad tension between us starting to brew and it can only mean trouble. I've noticed that we don't spend as much time alone together anymore now that Victor has moved in.

With the kids, work, and other things we have going, we didn't get that much alone time to begin with. But now we have even less. We don't talk about things much anymore and there are a lot of things that we don't do anymore.

I've already mentioned the whole dancing thing but that's just one of the things. We used to make sure that we always went out to dinner by ourselves at least once a month. We'd get all dressed up, make sure the kids had a babysitter, and go out to some really nice restaurant where we would talk about anything except the children. That was a forbidden topic for the entire night.

The dinners were a way for us to reconnect and help keep our marriage strong so that we didn't fall back into the old patterns that caused us problems so many years ago. And they had worked. Although we had many fights and arguments during those eighteen years, it was never even close to being as serious as the trouble we had previously.

But now that those dinners have stopped, I feel trouble coming back. It's just waiting in the shadows, watching and waiting for the right time to make itself known. I'd say something to Martin, but he'd just shrug it off again.

He doesn't seem to share my concern about our relationship. All of my earlier attempts of trying to convince him to go out to dinner with me have fallen on deaf ears. He claims it wouldn't be nice or wise to leave his father here by himself. I've even offered to find his father a babysitter, but he still won't go.

I don't know what Martin's problem is. This is just a guess, but Martin's never had a really close relationship with his father. He's told me several times that his father made his life miserable when he was growing up because of the high standards he was supposed to measure up to. He was supposed to be the perfect son, living out Victor's dreams with a smile on his face.

I think his father's high standards led him to act out, rebelling in the only way he could—by doing the opposite of what his father wanted.

He was supposed to go into politics and become a governor or a senator. But instead he entered the FBI. He excelled in everything he did. He became an excellent, resourceful, well-liked agent but that wasn't enough for his father.

He still wanted more from his only son. He wanted perfection. He wanted the impossible.

He wanted Martin to marry a senator's daughter. Instead, Martin married me.

He must have accepted the fact that Martin wasn't going into politics at some point and time because eventually he wanted Martin to stop working as a field agent and take a more upper-management position—kind of like the one he had. But Martin refused that too and stayed a field agent.

Martin's whole life has seemed to be about defying his father's wishes and isolating himself from his father. But now that his father is sick and Martin has to come to terms with his father's mortality, he seems to want nothing more than to cling to him.

When he's home, he hovers around his father, trying to do anything and everything to spend more time with him. It's as if he seems to think that he can cram decades of missed opportunities for father-son bonding into a few short years. Martin seems determined to make up for lost time and establish a good relationship with his father before he dies.

I'm not sure it can be done. I could be wrong through. I just hope that the cost of Martin getting a relationship with his father isn't our marriage.

"So what do you want to do today?" Danny asked.

"Actually, I have someone in town that I want to visit today if that's ok." Sam told Danny and Michelle as were finishing their breakfast the next day.

"Do you want to borrow our car?" Danny asked. He would be happy to let her borrow one of their cars, as long as it was Michelle's. He still had very little faith in Sam's ability to drive and didn't want to give her his car. It wasn't that he didn't trust her driving, he just…didn't trust her driving.

"Would you mind? I'll only be gone for a couple of hours." Sam hated to ask such a big favor from them.

"No, it's fine." Michelle told her. "I was going to do some gardening today anyway so I don't need my car."

"Here." Danny handed her a set of keys. "You can take Michelle's car."

"Thanks." Sam smiled. "I really appreciate it."

"It's no problem." Michelle shrugged.

Thursday, August 17, 2028

Family tradition #57 that has changed since Victor moved in: dinners with just Martin, the kids and myself. We used to have nice dinners with just the family. We'd talk about our day and share any funny or amusing anecdotes. We'd laugh and joke around with each other. We'd have fun.

Those days are gone now.

Now our dinners are spent with Victor feeling the need to use dinnertime as an opportunity to tell stories about his life. It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't always tell the same stories. Well they are kind of the same stories. He'll change the details around, but the general idea of the story was always the same.

I'm not even convinced that all of the stories he tells us are really about him. Some of the stories contradict each other and also the general timeline of his life. He'll reference things from his past that weren't around at the time in the story. His memory for some things is definitely fading fast.

When he's not telling stories about his life, he's constantly interrupting me when I talk. He's quiet while everyone else in the family speaks, except for me. I'm the only one that he disrespects in that way. Martin, Rachel, Sean, and Claire when she's home from college get treated with respect. He only interrupts me!

I swear it's like he is constantly trying to see how mad he can make me. It's like it's a game to him and for some reason I can't just shrug it off. I can usually ignore it when people try to make me mad, but I can't do that with Victor.

He gets to me and I hate that! Why can't I just let it go and let it roll off my back? Why does this have to bother me so much?

Sometimes I just want to scream. The only thing that holds me back is the fact that I don't want to get yelled at by him for making too much noise. I was already told three times last week that my washing machine was too loud and disturbing him while he was trying to nap.