"How was your summer?"

So I am heading back to school and facing that question. I'm having a difficult time answering it.

I need to remind myself that when people ask they don't really want details. They're just being polite. It is not really more than a greeting. So I am reminding myself that I should just say, "Fine, how was yours?"

Of course, "fine" is a big fat lie. We sold the property in Maine. I learned that my husband ran up debt behind my back which is producing continual ripples of tension in our relationship. My mother was diagnosed with early Parkinsons. We are waiting for her to a couple of biopsies, although the doctors don't seem worried, and I wasn't able to visit her like I said I would (see debt issues above).

The thing is that I can't really tell people the whole truth without getting upset, and these are my colleagues. There are couple of them with whom I can be truly miserable, but mostly we keep our relationship on another level.

I did tell a couple of people that it was not great and then just followed up with the information that we sold the property in Maine and went for the last time. Most people know how attached we are to it and accept that as sufficient reason for my report of a "not great" summer.

I do a medium job of healthy compartmentalization, by which I mean leaving home issues at home and work issues at work. Sometimes it is an effort for me. It is more difficult though when someone in one world asks about the other world. I'll manage.

The thing with Roland continues to be complicated. He is helping by drastically changing his spending habits (he really has), and letting me take over the finances. A continuing issue is my need for him to do particular things or find particular pieces of information. There is a monthly subscription he needs to cancel. I need for him to find out how much we pay every year on taxes for the cars. Stuff like that. He is genuinely and truly busy with the start of his new job. I've politely asked every day. My plan now is to give him a list of things I need from him and ask him to commit to a time in the very near future when he will do them. Like Saturday.

But there is this quiet irritation between us. We got our "allowances" which we are calling "discretionary" or "petty" cash. Now there is some tension about what we are supposed to be spending it one. Roland asked me the other day what category to put something he was going to buy for his classroom and I said, "Didn't we agree that work expenses like that were part of discretionary cash?" Just a minute ago he called and said, "Well, it turns out I was wrong about what time Brian's school's open house is. We have an hour, do you mind if I buy us some dinner?"

And I responded, "Of course not. You can spend your discretionary cash any way you want to."

I said that without even thinking about it, given his emphatic nodding when I gave buying Brian and Gary lunch in The City when one had an appointment at 11:00am and the other at 2:30pm as a time when I might have used discretionary cash. I mean, there weren't a lot of options then, and it wasn't because I didn't read a notice right and end up in somewhere an hour early.

See what I mean? Tension. Little things. Fairly constant.

I keep thinking that things will get better after we have our next visit with the financial planner, of course we can't schedule that until after I finish filling out the paperwork, which I can't do until he finds the frickin information I asked for!

So how was my summer? Kinda crappy, yours?