Evan came up to see the husband today. We showed up at noon with takeout for lunch and the husband was in bed out cold fast asleep. He happily got up, I strapped his back brace on, and into the wheelchair, we went out on the patio and sat and ate and chatted for almost 3 hours. The husband was happy, engaged, participating and even attempted to boast that he is the shining star of the rehab, being as young and fit as he is. I could not let that one slide by. May have called him on it. But then the husband was done. Completed. We cleaned the picnic area, brought him back to the room, and he made it clear that he had had enough. Everything changed, his whole demeanor. He went from head of the table merriment to "Okay, you can leave now." So, we left, and that's fine, but I am sitting here feeling quite unnerved at his ability to turn on this charming buddy persona for short periods of time. It's the no longer smooth transitions from one version of him to the other that have clued me in to the extreme differences between them.
It kind of feels as if I married an actor, whose entire personality was not genuine, but a role he was playing. And then as the years wore on he began to tire of playing the role, and slowly, piece by piece he let the assumed identity fall away and be replaced by his true self, a less appealing version of an identical looking man. But he would never commit entirely to either the role or his genuine self and would slide back and forth depending on the occasion. Sometimes he would present himself randomly, substituting his other persona in the same situation where he previously asserted as the opposite. Those events would be especially confusing for one has observant as I think I am. And there I was with the memory of the role he had played so well and not understanding where that man went. And now that he is old and less capable I can see him switching back and forth, phony to true, phony to true, and it is crystal clear to me. It took me thirty four and a half years to really, deep down understand that he was just pretending to be the person he thought he needed to be. And I bet he would never even believe it today if someone told him that he used to be ... not nice.
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