Feline Warrior

I now have “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction in my head. Dang it. (Love that song, but it’s hard to write now.) It throws me back in an almost violent way to a different time of life.

Back to the point of the post:

Agnes was crying. Finally she broke through the tears to tell me that she’s feeling worn down. Her man apologizes but then does the same stuff over and over again - rendering the apology meaningless. The other related habit he has is to do the double-back apology: He apologizes but then blames her. It has the same result, nullifying the apology.

How the double-back apology works is this: Say you and I are at the grocery and somehow you run over my foot with the grocery cart (called, in some places, a “buggy”). I yelp, “Ouch!” and you look at me kinda mad and say, “I’m sorry but YOU should watch where you put your feet!”

That’s the double-back apology. And really it’s not an apology at all.

So Agnes is all sad and blue and I don’t know how to console her, except to do more of my rather stupid suggesting of ways to repair it. You know, “Well, you could try using ‘I’ language and tell him how you feel, how it hurts your feelings.” If you’ve ever done that with a friend, you know how colossally pointless it is. And it just makes it worse.

The double-A word combo for today is Agnes / apology. Agnology… ? Apolognes… ? Either way, it sucks.

I am calling it a beginning, but for all we know, if could be a beginning and an end. Agnes may call the whole thing off - who knows?

An explanation: Agnes is my friend. Her real name is not Agnes - I’m only allowed to tell her stories if I use fake names and switch up some of the details. She feels -and probably rightly so- that if her identity were revealed, she’d have a mess on her hands.

(And really, for the record, unless you know me personally and know that this is my blog, you don’t really know my true identity, either!)

Back to Agnes… It’s her story, after all.

She’s a lovely person - smart, funny, not bad looking at all. She’s in a relationship that can only be described as strained. Or stressful. Or painful. Not easy. (Well, no relationship is really “easy.”) This is beyond the traditional “we have to put a lot of work into our relationship” statement.

I’ve asked her why she doesn’t leave and she won’t talk about it. She loves the guy, he loves her, it’s “just difficult.” There is no physical violence - she’s sworn that to me and it doesn’t appear that she’s lying - there have never been any indications that she gets hit and while I don’t see her every day, I think I would know about physical violence, one way or another.

So her man -haven’t decided on a name for him yet- is generally pleasant when friends come calling. He’s polite, charming, not unpleasant to be around. I understand from my own experience that people can be one way in public and a totally different way in private. My father, dragged to marriage counseling by my mom, turned on the charm to two-hundred-twelve degrees Fahrenheit and had the therapist thinking my mom was a loser by the end of the first session.

I can’t say for certain what’s going on there, but I’ve been listening to Agnes’ stories for quite some time and decided to start recording them. (And then it occurred to, oh, ASK her if it’s okay!)

In case you’re wondering, I chose the name Agnes for Saint Agnes, who became a martyr at the age of 13. Her feast day is January 21st, a day of some significance to me, but for completely different reasons.

I’ll start with some stories either later this evening or early this week. As with everything else, it depends upon the availability of time.