Identity Crisis

I found the book Mondo Boxo by cartoonist Roz Chast on the bookshelf last night. From “The Flan Man” in this book of cartoon stories came Jim’s description of the quantities I could make when cooking: too much, much too much, and horse-choker. I smiled for a moment and then it hit me: I don’t know how to be who I am without Jim.

I married Jim shortly after I turned 24. It did not feel too young at the time, although I often said we might have waited but I knew I would not change my mind about him. I also said I was sorry that he had to be married to me when I was 24. I was a baby. Aside from a single semester when I lived on campus at college, I had never lived away from my parents. I moved from my father’s house to my husband’s apartment. My ever-patient husband then had to learn to wait for me to grow up.

And grow up I did. Eventually. In fits and starts. We stayed together and we were committed to each other and to our marriage and we worked through problems when they arose. We were Married, with a capital “M”. Married before the earth cooled, as my friend Keith used to say. We had no children, so we were always just us. Time was sometimes described as “BU”, which was “before us”.

When we married, Jim had just turned 30. He had adult friends. I technically had adult friends, that is, friends who were over the age of 18, but Jim’s friends were real adults. Some of them were married. Some had children. Some even had step-children. Some of them owned homes. They had real jobs and they were fully established as people, or so they seemed to me.

As I was looking at Mondo Boxo on the shelf, I realized that I had spent my entire adulthood, my true adulthood, that is, as the wife of James Upright. I have no concept of myself as an adult who lives on her own, because I never did that. And my interests and my sense of humor developed and grew during the time that I started dating Jim at age 22 and throughout our marriage of 27 years.

Despite all of that, I don’t see my identity as being that of Jim’s wife. I always felt that I had an individual identity as well as being my married self. For us, two did not become one. Two became two plus. Two individuals and a married couple. I am not just Jim’s wife. I am a Senior IT Manager at a multinational corporation, a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a friend, a researcher, a writer, a baker, an arts enthusiast. I am many, many things. But who I am as a person, my sense of my individual identity at my own core, was profoundly shaped and molded in my early adulthood by my relationship with Jim. What strikes me as funny, what I think is unjust, what captures my interest, all of these things are wrapped up in almost 29 years of shared memories and life together.

A psychologist told us once that we had a very strong intellectual bond. That feels like a good description of our relationship. We were far from being the same person. Jim was incredibly steady, calm, slow to anger, thoughtful, and one of the most intelligent and well-read people I have ever met. I am scattered, energetic, easy to anger, empathetic and emotional. Jim was deeply introverted. He sometimes described himself as “imploding” at parties or in crowds. I am somewhat introverted, in that I really need my alone time in order to regroup and function, but I am more comfortable in groups than he was by far and I get involved in things and volunteer and invite people over to the house. Despite those differences, or perhaps because of them, Jim and I connected at a deep level. I knew just what would make him laugh and was usually the person who started the joke, but Jim would build on it with me, the two of us in a frenzy to say the next thing that would make the other laugh a deep, strong, belly laugh. We had a score of jokes between us and a sort of shorthand for calling them up. I thought of myself as a funny person because, and only because, Jim laughed at me. Jim always said that I “notice” things, but my pleasure in noticing was in being able to point something out to him.

I have years of career left, I own a house, I like to travel, I do historical research and sometimes I do translation work and I give lectures. But who am I? The person who laughed at my jokes is gone. The person who shared with me when I geeked out about some random topic, like my historical research, is no longer here. There is no one to discuss ideas with, no one to point something out to, no one to text a quick idea or a funny word usage I heard or to make up a pun for, knowing he would groan and then laugh. There is no one to watch my face as Jim did. He knew when I was building a funny idea and that if he could just be patient for a minute, it would come out and we would laugh and then he would be able to build on it and we’d be off on a fantastical journey into topics more and more warped and ridiculous until we really and truly ended up on the floor, we were laughing so hard.

And now? Who am I? I was never just Jim’s wife. Of course I am my own person. Of course. It’s obvious. I have my own interests as well as our shared interests and that continues. Still, Jim was my audience of one and we were a party of two. Without my partner, without that one person whose brain could fire on the same lines as my own, I know who I am, but I don’t know how to be that person. When I lost Jim, I lost the part of myself that lived in our “plus” as well as that part of myself that lived only in him. I have gone from “two plus” to a “one minus”. I don’t know how to be whole.