November 20, 2008

A drinking night, but pretty good as far as drinkng nights go. She was a little short with the kids and was just a little confused and slow witted. She went to sleep watching TV fairly early. All in all, not a bad night at all, just not as good as a night with my wife would have been.

November 19, 2008

Once again, my wife is drinking. She isn’t horrible, but she isn’t herself, either. She is just short tempered, mean, and ignorant. We tried watching a movie and she couldn’t follow it, so she derided the movie as stupid. Maybe it wasn’t the best movie or the most realistic, (it was Vantage Point) but just because her drunk self couldn’t follow the plot doesn’t make the movie stupid. Stage whisper: “maybe it was her vodka impaired brain that was stupid?” She gave up on the movie pretty early. I asked her if she wanted to watch something else and she didn’t really answer me and went off to her smoking lounge.

Later, I could hear her whispering to the kids. She is talking to them about her drinking and other problems and she doesn’t want me to hear what she is saying. I am trying not to eavesdrop, but they are only a few feet away and it is hard not to hear some of it. I get the gist of it and tonight it doesn’t seem to bad. But, I do worry about what sort of things she might say to the kids. She can be mean and unreasonable when drunk and she has been kind of nasty to the kids already so I don’t really want them to get more upset then they are now. This is one of the things that bothers me about her drinking. When sober, she is good with the kids and pretty tolerant of the little things kids do and don’t do. When drunk, she often gets very angry over small stuff. She often decides that she is going to straighten them out, usually by getting unreasonably strict with them. Given that she is usually sloppy drunk, angry and mean and doesn’t remember the new rules she laid down the next day, this leads to confusion for the kids (and me, too.) She will yell at me for being inconsistant with the kids, but how much more inconsistant can you be then nice, loving, tolerant mother one day and drunken psycho bitch dictator the next? And she gets mad at me for ‘not backing her up.’ But I do, when I think she is right and even sometimes when she is questionable, just so there is some consistancy and we show a more united front. I also tell the kids constantly to respect their mother and do what she says. But sometimes the things drunk bitch demands are just to outrageous for me to go along with. The kids and I often retreat to their bedroom and talk to them and read them to sleep while theri mother rants and rages downstairs. It can get pretty ugly.

She went on a rant about how bad her job was and how much she wants to leave it. At the end of her rant, she said something about how she would like to do something about it but can’t because I am not working. Like I want to not be working or it is my fault her company treats her (and its other employees) like shit. I don’t understand how my not working prevents her from looking for something better. Maybe it keeps her from quitting, but it certainly doesn’t mean that she can’t look at the want ads or web sites and apply to places that might interest her. I told her this the next morning. She said that she would start looking, but no indication that she was wrong to blame me for her problems with her job.

I am working at becoming detached from my wife and her problems, especially while she is drunk. It isn’t easy and I still think that if I am detached from her, what is the point in staying married to her? I didn’t find much I liked at Al-anon, but they did say the only way to live with an alcoholic was to detach yourself from their drinking and its consequences. Much easier said then done. I guess it is the only way to stay with her and not go insane myself. But it still isn’t what I want. I would like to have my wife back. Failing that, I want to be in a loving realtionship and this current relationship with my wife is not it. It isn’t like I am looking for someone else, I don’t even want to. And even should events force me to leave my wife, I know it is going to take me time, maybe a couple of years, before I am over this enough to be good with someone. The whole idea of being with someone else makes me kind of ill. Part of why I can’t understand how she could cheat on me. The whole idea of being with someone else just feels bad to me, just not right. But she did it. So she was drunk. She still did it. Drunkeness doesn’t really excuse it. Not even close. Sorry, I don’t want to go down this road any more. It leads to rage and self pity and frustration. I can’t change what she did and it hurts to much to think about it any more.

November 17, 2008

Another Monday, another drinking night. Shortly after she came back from work, my wife started to reek of vodka. She also refused to eat the mystery meat and leftover crap my mother-in-law served up for our evening repast so she was drinking on an empty stomach. I was helping my daughter with her homework. She was doing math, and there were questions that involved long division. She was getting tired and frustrated. I was getting annoyed because she kept forgetting her times tables and would just sit there getting angry and sulking. Finally she got through it all and I sat down next to my wife and watched Jeopardy. I was answering the questions and my wife started giving me this dirty look. Then she said something about how the kids were more like her and not like me. That I was smarter then they were and that was why I got mad at them when they couldn’t do their homework. I told her that wasn’t why I was getting annoyed and she interrupted me to repeat herself, that the kids were more like her then like me. I said, “If you would let me finish my sentence and make my point you would find out that I wasn’t mad at her for not being smart. I was getting annoyed because she knows her times tables and she knows how to do what she was trying to do. She was just being careless and getting frustrated and forgetting to do the things that I know she knows how to do.”

After that, my wife got started to get that shrill angry unreasonable drunk tone in her voice that she gets. She announced that she wanted to take a leave of absense from her job so that she could “spend time with her son and be there for him.” Of course, saying that, while drunk and most definitely not being there for him started to get to me. And I couldn’t even argue about it with her. If I mentioned the fact that she wasn’t ’there for her son’ because she was drunk, again, she would have just gone ballistic. THe kids could see and hear that things were getting dicey, so they went upstairs. I did too. We sat up there listening to my daughter’s music. After a bit, my wife came up to see what we were doing. She was pissed and her feelings were hurt, but it was her drunken behavior that caused us to go away from her.

The rest of the evening was the usual. When the kids and I came down to watch the TV shows we like on Moday nights, my drunk wife kept grabbing the remote and channel surfing during the commercials. That would be okay, except that she often doesn’t get back in time to catch the show that we are trying to watch. My son kept complaining to her and asking her to change the channel back to our show. She finally got tired of that and got pissed at our boy, said a few nasty things and went to go pass out. Way to “be there” for your son, honey. You go, girl.

Unfortunately, passing out isn’t the end of it any more. Now she keeps coming to and swearing at me or trying to pick a fight about something. Tonight, she didn’t actually do any of that, but she did keep wandering upstairs. She doesn’t like to go out where her parents can see her, so she hovers at the top of the basement stairs trying to work up the nerve to go pee or whatever it is in her head to go do. And as happens occasionally, she fell down the stairs. She didn’t get hurt, but it was loud and scary. She slid most of the way down the stairs, bumping and banging the whole way. Crying and carrying on afterwards. And I can’t even ask her if she is alright. That pisses her off, like it was my fault she took the tumble. Or maybe it is my fault she is drunk so that she took the tumble. She got up and went to bed, so I had to assume that she was pretty much alright. Her trips down the stairs have cost us plenty in wallboard and spackle and paint. She has gone through the wall at the bottom of the stairs several times. They also have ended up in the Emergency Room once, for another four hundred bucks we are still paying off.

The next morning, I tried to point out the contradiction and futility of taking a leave of absense to be there for her son when the problem is that she isn’t there because of her drinking. That not working and being stuck here at her parents’ house with no money and the kids in school during the day would just lead to boredom and more drinking and less time being there for her kids. She just acted like what I said was so obvious that I was a jerk for bringing it up. Maybe, but I wasn’t the one who was insisting on it the night before. I am getting to where there is just no point in even discussing things with her when she is sober. She never says she is sorry and never takes any responsibility for the things she says and does while drunk. I am ready to throw in the towel here. She never shows any remorse. She acts like it is reasonable for her to say and do the things she does when drunk and it is unreasonable for me to object to them. I can’t live like this. This is the one life I have and I feel like I am wasting it trying to keep our family together when she won’t make any real attempt to face her problem, her drinking. When she is drunk, she constantly tries to pretend that she can fix things while being a drunk even though the root of the problem most often is the fact of her drinking and being drunk. The way to be there for her son (and her daughter, and me, and herself), is to quit drinking! Stop being an angry drunken crazy person. The evenings together would be enough, IF she were actually there, if she was sober. No amount of extra time will matter, if she is the mean, angry insane drunk she is now.

November 14, 2008

Tonight she had a Lia Sophia party to go to after work. On the one hand, I want my wife to have friends and to have fun. On the other hand, I know she will be drinking and then driving. She will come back much later then she said she would and be trashed when she gets back. Not to mention that she will feel obligated to spend money at this party, money we can’t really afford. 

On this particular night, it is rainy and foggy. There are wet leaves all over the roads making them slippery. The party is about twenty miles away and my wife will be drinking and driving. Plus she can’t see in the dark any more, she often tells me her night vision is shot and I know it is worse when she drinks. She has told me that she would be back around nine. Around ten, I check my phone. She tried to call about seven forty five, but didn’t leave a message. I tried to call her but got no response. About eleven, I tried again. No answer. I don’t want to look like and obsessive, jealous husband so I figured I’d try again about twelve and if I hadn’t heard from her then I was going to bed and the hell with her.

At eleven thirty, I get a call from her. The first thing she says is, “I am in trouble.” Oh shit. Is she in jail for DUI? Has she wrecked the car or hurt someone? Has she gotten herself into some tawdry situation? All these things flash through my mind in an instant. Then she tells me she had a flat and she is stuck at a gas station just off the highway, but she isn’t sure where and she is lost. Fortunately, the guya t the Mobil station she is at tells her enough so that I can find it and her. I make sure she is okay and tell her I’ll be there soon. I get dressed and drive the half hour to where she is.

When I get there, somebody has already changed the tire, which my wife said was totally shredded. She said a bunch of rowdy dark skinned guys came in and one of them said something about her being a bitch. Apparently she snapped at them that she had just dropped and broken her cell phone and did any of you assholes know how to change a tire. Amazingly, they went ahead and changed it for her.

Then my wife tells me that she had been driving around lost for two and a half hours before she got the flat. I asked her why she didn’t call but she didn’t give me any real answer. I am a little mad and a lot concerned about her judgement. In two hours, I could have driven across the state and into New York CIty from where we live. The whole reason we have cell phones is so she could call me if she was going to be late or in emergencies. Here were both circumstances, and she never called. I am going to have a little chat with her about this, but she was still a little drunk and a bit shaky and had been through enough so I figured I’d save the lecture for some other time. She drove my car back to our dungeon and I took hers. She didn’t want to drive it any more.

November 13, 2008

It’s another night she said she would be there to talk to me about us and the ways her drinking is affecting our kids. So, of course, she came home drunk. She showed me some stuff she had printed off at work about the effects on children from being the child of an alcoholic. There were definitely some things that struck a chord. Our son has trouble sleeping, anxiety, and a lot of ‘head and stomach aches’ and our daughter tends to be a little parent to her brother. Then my wife drunkenly slurred that she knows what she is and she can see how it is hurting our children, but she doesn’t see how it is hurting me. I asked her what she meant by that the next morning and she doesn’t know. She still doesn’t want to admit that her drinking is hurting the kids, me and herself. She was getting in her manic mode, where she is going to take on our problems while she is drunk. She can’t do this sober, but she is going to fix everything when she is to drunk to frame a coherent sentence and stand up without wobbling. When she is angry and ignorant and mean. And, of course, no mention can be made of the fact that she is drunk or that a big part of what is wrong with us is her drinking.

Then she started telling me about one of her friends whose husband had his picture in the paper. He was a Vietnam vet and they dedicated some bridge here in town. She called her friend and they apparently didn’t know he was in it and suddenly my wife wants to go over to drop off a copy. She was in her PJ’s, it was very dark and raining and it just happened to be right before the liquor stores closed. Let us just say that I wasn’t to keen on her going. I didn’t want her driving around drunk, in the dark where she tells me she can’t see anything and with rain and all the wet leaves on the road, I could just see a disaster happening. I didn’t say no, but she could see I didn’t want her to go and she dropped it for a while. But she was pissed and sat there sulking for a while. In fact, she spent the rest of evening avoiding looking at me and staying as far away as possible. After an hour or so, she brought it up again and I told her I didn’t like the idea and she got even more pissed off.

When we took the kids up to bed, she got up there first. By this point, she was kind of staggering and pretty intoxicated. She got upstairs first and when I got to the kids’ room, she was starting to whisper to them. She got mad when I came in and told me she wanted to talk to the kids. Alone. About her drinking. She is at the point where she is going to fix things, while drunk. The kids wanted me to read to them so I started to do that and she got even more pissed off and stomped down the stairs hissing ”Fuck” over and over again, but it was so distorted I could hardly tell what she was saying. After that I read to the kids and went downstairs and went to bed. I didn’t want to fight with her any more.

November 12, 2008

So this morning, I pointed out to my wife that we had been supposed to talk the night before but since she was drinking, I didn’t try and talk to her. There is no point what so ever in talking to her about her drinking when she has had even one drink. As soon as she has had anything to drink, any reference to her drinking being a problem, or causing problems just makes her bitterly angry. She gets very defensive and denies any connection between our problems or our kids problems and her drinking. It usually winds up in a horrible and pointless fight so I just don’t do it any more. Or I try not to anyway. She said, “Okay, I have to go to work right now, but we’ll tak when I get home.” I said, “Will it be you?” She responded that it would be.

Okay, let’s hear it. Drum roll, build up the suspense, here it comes, wait for it, wait for it. Oh wait no more. She was drunk when she came home. Not stinking shit faced drunk but drunk enough so that I couldn’t talk to her again. Later in the evening, she brought up our son’s wanting to talk to someone. She asked if maybe his hearing us have sex is what is causing his sleepless nights. I said that I am sure that hasn’t helped but that isn’t the real problem. What I should have pointed out was that his having sleepless nights was what led him to be downstairs on the couch in the first place. He wouldn’t have heard anything if wasn’t already having problems.

November 11, 2008

I kind of lost it today. It is our daughter’s twelfth birthday. The kids were off from school so I took them to a movie. It would have been fun, except that I was not looking forward to the evening. My mother-in-law had invited my wife’s sister and her kids over for dinner and ice cream cake. That was fine with me, but seeing her sister drives my wife crazy. It is almost always a bad drunk night. Plus, my daughter asked for cheeseburgers for her birthday dinner. I had said that I would make them, but come the day, I find two big packs of ground turkey in the refer. No fucking way am I serving my little girl turkey burgers when she wanted my cheeseburgers for her birthday dinner. One of her cousins is a recovering anorexic and my mother-in-law said that she wouldn’t eat a real burger. So the rest of us have to eat crap because she’s a bit whacked. I don’t think so. SoI am kind of on edge, I know my wife will be drunk, I am going to have some kind of stupid conflict with my in-laws when I cook up real burgers. My daughter managed to break and lose a pretty little gold pendant she was given by her grandmother within about three hours. Then, at the movie, she hands me a crumpled empty bag of M&M’s along with a ten dollar bill. She doesn’t tell me about the money and I think she just handed me trash. I threw it away and didn’t find out until later that I had thrown away ten dollars. I got pissed and snapped at my girl on her birthday. I had to apologize after. Profusely.

I called my wife and told her I was kind of losing it and she said we would talk when she got home. Of course, she was drunk when she came home and I sure as hell wasn’t talking to her like that. Just one more night she wasn’t there for me, at all.

November 10, 2008

It was Monday night, so it was a night to get drunk on. At first she wasn’t to bad. I mean, I knew she was drunk and I could see her sliding into her drunken alter ego, the one that doesn’t understand anything and is pissed off about everything. I just wanted to talk to her about my day and her day and she just wasn’t there. So I tried talking to her and I think all I did was give her stuff to stew about and get angry about. Her mother made this awful stir fry for dinner so of course my wife didn’t eat. She took it downstairs and threw it out. I couldn’t really blame her, it was pretty gross. But it meant she had just one more thing to get pissed off about and she was drinking on an empty stomach.

We settled in to watch Chuck on TV. My wife can’t sit threw commercials when she is drunk and channel surfs frantically while they are on. It gives me a headache and she always manages to miss part of the show we are watching. As the climax of the show we were watching was coming, she grabbed the reemote and went off to some other channel and got interested in whatever was there. After a mintue or so, my son and I asked her to change it back. She did and our show was back on. Then my wife accused me of yelling at her (I hadn’t) and making her turn the channel back to the show we were watching. She was pissed and she pissed me off. I told her it was rude to grab the remote and go channel surfing when other people were watching something and that she often made us miss something important in the show we were watching. (Okay, it is just TV and how important can it be anyway?) But she got really offended that I would dare question her right to take over the TV and just go channel surfing willy nilly all over the place and make the rest of us miss the show we were watching. She stomped off to her smoking lounge and sulked out there for a while.

Meanwhile, her mother was having a book club meeting upstairs and the old ladies were getting giddy on wine. Loud voices and a lot of cackling. My wife came back in and plunked herself down on the couch and looked at me with that pissed off drunk look and said, “If I had a bunch of girls over and we sat around giggling, what would you do?” I just looked at her and said, “What the hell are you talking about?” She popped back up out of the couch and stomped back into her smoking lounge for a few minutes. Then she came out and went to bed.

Then followed the usual crap with her yelling semi-coherent nasty things from the bed. Most of them I just ignored. But at one point she started in on why were the kids still up. We were watching Heros and they didn’t have school the next day so I let them stay up an hour later then usual. My wife then yelled at me, “Am I going to have to explain anything tomorrow?” I still don’t know what the hell she was talking about. And I told her that. After that she settled into moaning and hiccuping and the occasional blast of flatulence and eventuall passed out completely.

November 7, 2008

I could hardly talk to my wife this morning. I was pretty upset with her. She decided to scurry aff to work rather then try to talk to me. She told me we’d talk when she got back from work. She said she would see me later and I asked her if it would really be her. She said it would.

Nope. She was drunk when she got back from work. We didn’t fight or anything and she wasn’t mean to the kids. But there was no way to talk to her. She wasn’t herself and she wasn’t there for me. Again.

November 6, 2008

Bad night. It started early. First, I had to tell her that if she raised a hand to our kids when she was drunk again, I was taking them and leaving. That was a happy start to my day. 

Then, I got a phone call from the school social worker. My son had gone in to talk to her and told her that Mommy got drunk and hit him. If she had left a mark or left damage, she would have had to report this to DCF. Instead she called me to get some kind of confirmation and see if I was aware of this and if I was doing something about it. She tried to give me some names of places to go, Alanon, Alatot, AA. I told her I was an atheist, that I had been to those things and they don’t help and they just annoy. I didn’t mention that they have an abysmal success rate, although it is true. She tried to tell me that crap about how a ‘higher power’ isn’t christianity, but with sayings like ‘let go and let god’ on the table and the fact that every session I went to finished off with the lord’s prayer, I find that little bit of window dressing insufficient to hide the theist, mostly christian, basis of these 12 step programs. So after a half or so on the phone with the social worked, I called my wife and told her. She got so upset that she couldn’t stay on the phone with me. She said we’d talk later and that she would talk to our son.

Apparently, she felt betrayed. That is what she told me. When we finally talked when she got home, she was drunk. And angry and upset. No shit, her drunken shit could lead to some crappy state investigation that could get our children taken from us. Wonderful. And she feels betrayed! I told her to cut it out, our son felt he needed help and tried to get it because he wasn’t getting it from his MOTHER and who shoulc really fell betrayed here? WHat he did wasn’t wrong. She wanted to hit him up with questions like, “Do you want another family?”  I told her not to do or say anything that would make him think this was his fault. She went on a drunken tirade. Telling me such gems as, ‘we shouldn’t have had children’ and ‘I knew having kids was a mistake.” Like she could see into the future and know how fucked up things were going to get. At the time, she either had no reservations about kids or was to much of a gutless coward to tell me about them. Then she was off about my mother’s drinking problem and how much my siblings drink and her parents’ problems and all kinds of stuff - everything except her drinking and the way it is affecting our children. Which was all I wanted to talk about. And I just wanted to talk. I wanted to try and make plans about what we do now and in the future to make things right for our kids. But she wouldn’t talk. ALl she wanted to do was rant and she kept calling me names and telling me how betrayed she felt. I startd to lose my temper and told her to join the club. How betrayed did our kids feel when she was being a drunken asshole to them? When she wasn’t there for them, five or six nights out of the week? How betrayed I felt when I caught her fucking some one else? When, after that and after making us come up here, she still hadn’t quit drinking? How betrayed I felt when, after finding out that our son felt that he was hurting enough to go to the social worker and tell her he was stressed out and needed help, her response was to go get a bottle? I got myself under control and refused to argue with her any more after that. She kept crying and ranting for a bit but I just went to bed.

Earlier, I had asked her if she were drinking, and she swore that she wasn’t. I knew she was and her lying in my face just pissed me off. She got mad too, and told me that of course I immediately assumed that she was drinking. Told me how wrong and unfair that was. And she was lying through her teeth, right in my face the whole time. When I told her I wasn’t going to argue any more with her, I told her I knew she was drunk. She told me to stop fixating on her drinking. Like somehow ignoring the most basic fact at the root of our problem makes any kind of sense. At that I knew it was just time to go to bed. SHe showed no shame at being drunk, no shame at lying about it, no remorse, no nothing. Just her hurt and betrayal because our son tried to get some help.