You're all right, of course -- I can't PREVENT. I just need to PREPARE. It's the old Army Operations Officer mantra -- plan for the worst, pray for the best, expect some outcome in-between.
N.B.: As it's used in German, a "Zusammenbruch" is catastrophic. In colloquial American English we've kind of denuded "catastrophe" of feeling (I blame Irwin Allen). But in German it's got the same resonance as one finds in the colloquial Arabic use by Palestinians of the noun, al-Nakba -- the "Great Catastrophe" (the founding of the State of Israel and the dispersal of the Palestinian population -- without comment on the legitimacy/validity of the interpretation, etc.). The news weekly Der Spiegel ran a 60th-anniversary of VE Day cover a few years back, and it had a photograph of a German soldier sitting with his face buried in his hands, amidst the rubble of Berlin, disarmed -- the headline was Der Zusammenbruch. The ending of the DDR -- East Germany -- is referred to as Der Zusammenbruch.
So it's more than just collapse -- it's Total Collapse. And that's why I fear it's looming out there.
@Gypsy and @Kett are correct -- this is who she's been all along, or at least part of it (I think the MLC is really exacerbating (highlighting?) certain of these characteristics). I knew it, but I was okay with it, because the way I conceptualized Couplehood, She has 100% of X and 50% of Y, He has 50% of Y and 100% of Z, and together 100+50+50+100 sum to 100 -- The Couple Complete.
Now that "we're on our own," as she likes to say," I confess to do fear the consequences of that missing 50%
And that's one of the really weird things about this stage of the Saga of Smiley's Person.
I was tidying up the kitchen this morning after getting Girl-Child's birthday cake in the oven and was replaying in my head a bit of the now-Usual Snippitude the soon-to-be-former-Mrs.-SP had snippily snipped at me before departing on her most recent Freedom Getaway (and don't get me started, lest I puke, at her enthusiastic ravings about going to Burning Man this summer -- she is so NOT Burning Man it's incomprehensible -- her idea of "camping" is taking a nap on the sofa in a suite at the Four Seasons).
"I don't know why you refuse to talk to me about anything but the kids. It's like I don't even know you."
Yeah -- that's right. And the gods know I don't know her. Or this manifestation of her.
But the weird thing is that I'm increasingly comfortable admitting to myself that, if this is who she "really" is, I don't really care to know her. This is not the kind of person I like.
And holy smokes, man, what a thing to admit! I mean, we met in 1987. That's a whole lot of Gone, that Gone that's gone, know what I mean? But this...creature...that looks vaguely like the person I knew? Blechh.
And though it's a topic for another day, this leads to another fear/concern of mine: How do I respect my own feelings -- negative though they be -- without allowing them to poison my observations about/references to/engagement with the mother of Themselves such that it doesn't impact THEIR observations/references/engagement?
