Choose Your Battles

Choose your battles, an Alanon friend once said to me, You can't fight on every front at the same time.

I relay this to Michael – currently at war with the IRS, our former website designer, our advertising agency, the asset-grabbing company who is laying claim to his house, a dozen or so deadbeat ex-clients, four dogs and of course, two defamation of character lawsuits – and he just growls at me and changes the subject. We are hip deep in trying to make sense of deductions for his back taxes and his mood is black. He desperatley needs to get health insurance but he can't appply without knowing his income. He can't know his income until we finish going through a year's worth of shoebox receipts and bank statements. Everything he needs to do to salvage the business costs money he simply doesn't have. It makes me think of my dear friend, Tricia, and her theory about why cleaning out closets is such an impossible task. She always tells me you can't clean out the closet until you've cleaned out the drawers and you can't clean out the drawers until you've cleaned out the cabinets. You can be defeated before you even start and Michael, who has – to be kind – a kind of Scarlett O'Hara mentality about anything and everything he doesn't want to deal with, is a lost cause. He puts all his troubles neatly into tomorrow and then out of his mind. It's a fine policy until the invariable moment when they all bubble back to the surface and explode like an untended pressure cooker. Denial is a comfortable and low effort strategy but it does have its limitations, which of course, you can deny once you get really good at it. Practice does indeed make perfect.

After a few hours, we are both bleary-eyed and beginning to be bad tempered. It's a welcome distraction when the puppy breezes through – once with a Gucci dress shoe clutched in his teeth, once with a roll of half eaten paper towels – I discreetly relieve him of both and don't even scold him. On his third pass, he's dragging an obstinate doormat.

Let him have his fun, Michael says tiredly and I congratulate myself on not telling him about the Gucci loafer.

It's a choose your battles kind of world.