I was far too wound up to sleep. I did a bit of laundry, fiddled a bit in the kitchen. Lumpy, my roommate, said he was sorry that I was living in hell. What could I tell him? I said, “It’s been worse. But thanks.”

At 3 the phone rang again. I was still numb from the evening, and acted without thinking. When a phone rings, you answer. It was Zelda. Who else would be calling?

In a very small, vulnerable voice, she said, “Will you just hold me for a while?”

Oh, yes, certainly. I always feel my most cuddly with people who are just done attacking me. I breathed for a bit. Why was this a hard decision? I knew this was just more games, this was just more wanting to be treated well without treating me well, more CONTROL. The right answer is “no.” I said, “I will call you back in a few minutes.”

I grew up in a churchless household, but spent ten years in a Boy Scout troop attached intimately to a church. They didn’t teach us Moral Exclusion; the scoutmaster, Mr. D., was and is one of the most decent people I have known, and tried to teach all of us to be. My father was the same sort of person. Both would, although I never heard either say these words, “hate the sin but love the sinner.”

Without going into the religious trappings — on which I am hopelessly muddled, somewhere between Pagan, Taoist, Christian, and Agnostic — I agree with the sentiment. When my children are bad, I am always most careful to tell them I love them, to hug them, and to cherish them. That’s when they need it most, it’s when they feel least good for themselves, it’s when they are hurting most. And, for years, I have said that Zelda is one of my kids.

But I am not obliged, morally or otherwise, to be nice to people who are attacking me. I am not obliged to reward ill behavior.

No, I’m not obliged. It isn’t anyone’s duty to act, well, virtuously.

And Zelda certainly deserves to feel lost and alone tonight. If you spend your time striking out at the people close to you, you deserve your solitude. You worked for it.

“Deserve”. Faugh! The word is all about justice. I have never, ever, wanted what I deserve. I want mercy instead. Hell, I want special priveleges.

I was spinning in circles of thought. I could do this all night. I went with my gut-level answer, although I knew it was the poorer choice. I held her until 5.

I guess I’d rather err on the side of “too-nice,” but I can see that ending soon, in Zelda’s case.

After the game, after I took Othello home, I held my phone in my hand. I knew what was coming. I actually got all the way home before it happened. The phone rang; it was Zelda.

She stated her feelings about my phone behaviors again; I should be available to hear the phone. Period. My statement: “We disagree. I don’t think that my mind is going to change about whether I should always be phone-accessable, and I don’t care to convince you that it is okay for me to feel that way. We seem to understand each other’s positions, and disagree with them. I don’t see anything to discuss.”

She told me, in full, why her behavior tonight was, in her mind, justified. “I don’t agree. I told you I don’t care why you do it. I don’t want you to.

“Look, I know you don’t agree. I know you think that there are good reasons to act the way you do. I don’t think there are. We don’t agree, and I don’t care. I’m okay with us not agreeing. I am probably not going to act the way you want me to, you aren’t going to change how you act toward me, and neither of us is going to change how we feel about that. I don’t have to agree with you. You don’t have to agree with me. Neither of us has to act the way the other wants. What is there to discuss?”

Silence. Renewed justification. Renewed venting. I said, over and again, each time, “We don’t agree. What is there to discuss?” Finally, I said, “It’s almost 2. I’m going to bed.” There were several more attempts to justify and berate.

Suddenly she switched tracks, and started pushing for me to bring my computer over and burn CDs, to leave it with the Troll and have her do it, to basically undertake several hours of work at the house instead of follow through on my plans for the day, or to let Zelda and Troll have my computer. I refused, and she pushed as if it were far more important than burning CDs.

Which it was.

I spoke angrily, saying this was a funny time to make this so important, and refusing. I had plans, and it was my computer, and CDs just aren’t that important. If they are, go buy them. Zelda said, “You sound angry. What’s wrong with you?”

I flipped, a little. I spent about a minute making an angry list of what she was doing to push my buttons tonight, emphasizing the number of times I had tried to disengage that she wouldn’t respect, ending with the non-sequiter “do it for your children” attempt at supplanting my life with her whims.

She said, in a beatific voice patronizing, serenity, “Feel better?”

I understood suddenly that this argument, like every other we have ever had, was only superficially about what it was about. It was actually about Control. I said, “Good night,” calmly and hung up.

Zelda was driving up into the mountains today, possibly coming back late. I asked her to call me when she was down and safe, then left my phone in the next room where I couldn’t hear it while Othello and I played table games with two other people. From Zelda’s point of view what happened was I asked her to call and then wouldn’t receive her call, metaphorically snapping my fingers under her nose when she was just feeling warm and happy that I cared that she was well. That seems a lot to read into a phone call, but perspectives differ. My point of view would be that I wasn’t where I could hear the phone, but no harm was done.

Anyway. Doesn’t matter. That’s piddly shit, all in all. The aftermath, that’s the interesting part.

Zelda arrived back in town, waxing wroth and building energy, and drove directly to my apartment. She threw open the door hard enough that it bounced back on her, yelled, “Hi, Fuckhead,” to me as she strode through into my bedroom, where she fetched out my phone and thrust it before me at the table with our son and our friends, to demonstrate that I had missed phone calls. She spoke angrily and abusively. I don’t remember what. Everyone else in the house, my guests, our son, my roommate, had frozen silent.

I remember my neck being very hot. I remember hearing a rushing sound. I remember my shoulders bunching up and my hands being very, very dense and heavy. I remember that I said, in quiet, firm tones, “I think that we will continue this conversation, if at all, later.” I think that I was trying not to return fire. I think I was trying not to let the anger-genie out of the bottle.

My friends worked hard at facilitating the dentente, returning to the game and trying not to notice the exchange, or that Zelda remained, fuming, at the table, occasionally trying to start the exchange again in quieter tones. That worked for a time. Zelda eventually became bored and decided to go home. I walked her to the door.

Tactical error. She reengaged, or tried, and I parried for a bit. I don’t quite have it in me to rudely turn from someone talking to me and walk off. This is something I should work on, I think. At some point I did engage, there by the door, briefly, saying that we both had issues to address about tonight, and should do so later.

Zelda asked, “What issues do you have to discuss? I was the one blown off.”

I controlled my breathing. I was no longer concentrating on remaining disengaged. I thought about logical progression of arguments. I thought about illustrating points with specific examples. I thought about reasoning together for common goals and mutual benefit. And I remembered that none of those thing have ever worked with Zelda; she isn’t interested in some of them, and others are too hard for her to understand.

I said, “You walked in and were rude and intentionally hurtful to me. I don’t like that and I don’t want you to act that way to me. You keep doing it. I have an issue with that.”

She began to explain why she did what she did, relating it to her anger. I cut her off. “I don’t care why you did it. It doesn’t matter why you did it. There is never going to be a reason to behave intentionally hurtful toward me that I will accept. You could have great reasons. I. Just. Don’t. Care.”

She started to argue the point. I interrupted again. See? Working on that rudeness thing. I’ll get it. I said, “We’ll talk later.”

She left, eventually, after a few iterations. I tried hard to enjoy the game with my son, and sort of succeeded.

Othello has been suffering from acid reflux, which he attributes to stress burdening his life. This morning he explained to me, with obvious conviction but some hesitation, that the fault for his reflux lies with his sister and his parents.

“Troll (my daughter) is always telling me not to do things that she then does,” he explained. “And you and Mama … you are always pushing me to do things like school work, and that gets me all stressed up, too.”

I kept my face blank and considered his words instead of my reaction to them. “Uhm. Well, you’re spot-on as far as Troll goes. I’m going to have to think about the school work bit.” I thought for a moment. “Do you think, if we weren’t riding you about it, that you would be passing as many classes as you are?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well. I’ll have to think about this.” I thought another moment. “It might be good to not say this to your mother just the way you said it to me. She won’t hear what you said, she’ll hear what makes her mad.”

“Oh, yeah, I wouldn’t have said this to Mama. I’m surprised you’re taking it this well.” And he went to class.

Uhm. Well.

I keep reminding myself he’s 14.

I know that if I just tell him, “that’s life” or “live with it” or “pass your classes and we’ll lay off” that he will not hear me. He has actually thought about this — no matter how half-assed he sounds — and he will treat any pat answer as prejudice and will disregard it. What I need to do is quietly, non-aggressively, probably Socraticly guide his thinking ’round to a point where he realizes and says that the responsibility for passing his classes is his, and if he were to take that responsibility then he could be left alone.

I don’t really see a problem here. Othello and I speak and reason well together. I was just appalled to hear him dedicating blame with such a free hand. That’s normally the behavior I associate with weak minds, like, say, Troll’s or Zelda’s. I always sort of thought that thinking people, reasoning people, understood as one of life’s postulates that responsibility for the issues in one’s life belongs to the person living the life.

Last Monday, while I was out seeing Harry Potter with Nanook et al, Zelda sort of went wonky. That is inexact language; Zelda exhibited her ongoing wonkiness in her behaviors. Specifically, she entered my apartment, greeted one of my roommates, and searched my room, saying she was looking for a key.

Uhm. She did, in fact, look for a key (I don’t know what else she might have done), looking in all of the normal places, and in my laundry basket, and in the closet, and under the bed in the storage bins….

Ash, the roommate present, was a bit discomfitted. He felt a bit uncomfortable permitting Zelda’s search, but didn’t feel comfortable stopping her, either.

Today Lothario, my other roommate, asked if I knew where his DVD box set of “24″ might be. He asked me specifically because he suspected Zelda had it. I suspected that, as well; she had asked to borrow it a month or so ago while it was in use and then not followed up on it. Well, it appears that while she sacked my room she followed up, borrowing the boxed set.

I pursued this, confirming that she had borrowed it … told her it might be well, in the future to say something when borrowing things from other people, from their apartment, without their knowledge. I suggested, at the least, a note would be good, if arrangements had otherwise been made beforehand.

The thing is, none of us, my roommates and I, feel that talking to Zelda is going to change anything. We feel she will probably not borrow DVDs again, but that won’t keep her, for instance, from entering freely to fiddle with the houseplants or paint the bathroom or such. The immediate issue is resolved, but the discomfort continues, untouched.

And I felt very self-conscious, something I don’t do much of. I mean to say, I didn’t abscond with the DVDs, but Zelda wouldn’t be strolling in and stepping high, wide, and plentiful if I weren’t associated with the apartment.

In any case. Lothario, Ash, and I discussed it, and Lothario suggested it was time to lock the doors. And we have. It’s sort of sad, but I’m not certain why. Something about boundaries, or maybe about needing them.