June 27, 2008

She was drinking again. Came home from work drunk, nothing unusual. She was talkative and making the weird voices and accents she only does when drinking. We had a late supper, of which she was critical, also something she really only does when drinking. Fortunately, she decided to just go to bed and actually go to sleep at eight thirty so there were no real problems.

June 26, 2008

Drunk again. Wasn’t bad until after she went to bed at nine. I was hoping that meant a quiet night, but no.

 There was nothing I wanted to watch on the idiot box, so I was reading and I let the kids watch their Disney channel crap. My wife started growling and swearing and punching the bed about nine twenty. Then she started yelling at me because I let the kids watch their shows. Admittedly, I can hardly stand to listen to that stuff either but her reaction was way over the top. I told her that the show was almost over and then the kids were going to bed. Not good enough. She started yelling about how I needed to stop them from watching this crap, that I needed to stand up to my kids and stop doing things for them. There was a lot of nastiness in this vein, but I just tuned her out. Finally the show ended and I put the kids to bed.

Sadly the fireworks were far from done. I decided to sleep on the couch because I just didn’t want to listen to her muttering, growling and swearing at me while I tried to sleep, nor did I want to smell the waves of vodka and cigarette breath that eminate from her drunken carcass. I got yelled at for that. “If I find you sleeping on the couch, I’ll kill you.” She said. Later, she turned on the overhead light and came over to glare at me and swear at me some more. Then she disappeared upstairs for a while. I thought she went to sleep in our son’s bed as he had come downstairs complaining of a stomach ache and I let him sleep on the other couch after I gave him some Pepto. He fell asleep, the bed was empty, so I figured I’d go ahead and be more comfortable sleeping in it. I don’t know where she was, but half an hour later she came down, crawled into bed without so much as looking at me and passed out for good. 

She has a liter of vodka out in her hidey hole in her smoking lounge. Well, only half of it now. It is a conundrum for me. Do I dump it out? She’ll just buy more. Why piss away the money? Of course, if I don’t, it will be right there and I know she’ll be drunk again tonight. Maybe I’ll drink it instead! The trouble with that is that she will still go out and get more and the fights are much worse when we are both drinking. I haven’t hardly drank at all in the last four or five years. I quit for long periods, trying to help her. It hasn’t ever done a damn bit of good and all it means is that I can’t enjoy a drink.

June 24, 2008

It was another bad night. She came home from work drunk, but still functional. Over dinner she got into a conversation with her mother about her niece who is anorexic. My wife was concerned and wanted to make sure other people were aware of what was going on. Her family has a history of ignoring problems. But after a bit of a talk with her mother, it was clear to me that her sister and brother-in-law were aware and procedding slowly and carefully about the problem to avoid making things worse. Sounded reasonable to me. Apparently less so to my wife as she got upset about it after we came downstairs to the dungeon we live in. I took our kids next door to swim. My wife came over, drunk. Actually went part way into the pool. Then she went back home and returned shortly, dressed, and informed me that she was going to ‘put gas in her car.’ I told her I would do it the next day as I was taking the kids to the beach. She gave me that look like I am hopelessly naiive and pointedly said that she would go get gas. Meaning she was going to get more booze. I knew I was in for a rough night at that point. She left. I took the kids back to the cave.

The kids and I settled down and watched the idiot box. My wife returned and sat out in her smoking lounge. By nine, when Hell’s Kitchen came on, she was to blotto to watch and prepared to go to bed. Unfortunately, she decided the bed was all wrong and spent ten minutes swearing and growling at the bed while she tore the covers apart and then couldn’t put them back. She snottily told me that when I make the bed I have to REALLY make the bed, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. I just ignored her performance, but she was scaring the kids. She crawled into bed and I thought the fireworks were done. But she woke up enough to go pee and had to stagger past us, scraping the bookshelf and keeping as far away from me and the kids as she possibly could.

After the kids were asleep and the show was over, I came to bed. She woke up and started quizzing me on how much money I had inherited from my grandmother and then wanted an accounting of how we spent it. I played along for a bit until she started getting insulting and kept insisting that I was hiding something from her. I wasn’t and I wasn’t going to argue with a drunk who apparently wasn’t going to believe anything I said and was just spoiling for a fight. I told her I wasn’t going to argue with her about something that happened ten years ago and was pretty much ancient history, especially not while she was drinking. She went ballistic and started yelling. I grabbed her and told her to cut it out, the kids were down sleeping with us. She wanted to keep fighting but decided to shut up. I tried to go to sleep.

She came back to bed and spent the next two hours muttering at me and growling and swearing. At one point she hauled off and kicked me in the leg. When I ignored that, she waited a second and said, “Nothing…nothing.” More muttering and growling and punching the bed. I was laying there, pretending I was asleep and thinking that she sounded like someone possessed. I was waiting for her to hit me with something or maybe even stab me in the back. (My brother’s first wife woke him up twice by breaking a vase over his head in a drunken rage after he had gone to bed rather then stay up and fight with her.) Maybe I am a little paranoid, but you didn’t hear her muttering and growling and swearing at me while I tried to sleep.  

June 23, 2008

She is drinking tonight. I found what was left of her bottle, not much. So far she isn’t being obnoxious, but it is only seven-thirty. She has drank most of a pint of vodka. Let us see how the night turns out.

She killed her pint and was short with the kids, but whenever she started to get agitated, she moved out to the smoking lounge. I guess she is trying to avoid another blow out. Which is good, but it isn’t really enough any more. I didn’t marry so that I could be alone with a woman whom I can’t talk to, never shows any affection and I can’t count on or trust. I want to be in a loving relationship (and I can’t tell you how weird it is to write stuff like that or to feel like I have to write that.) And that means to be with someone who is there, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, too. Someone who wants to be with me not just because we are financially entangled or connected because of our kids. I don’t want to deprive the kids of their mother, but she is already doing that, much like she deprives me of being with my wife. She often claims, while drunk or when I confront her the morning after, that she is still here, but she isn’t. She goes away and leaves this drunken troll behind. Or just flat out passes out. How is that still being with me or the kids?

June 20, 2008

It was a bad night. It started slowly, but it was like a slow motion train wreck. She started out in manic mode. She was obviously drinking and and was nasty to the kids. She made our son take a bath, which he needed, but then she kept nagging at him. He had spent the night before in the emergency room because of a pulled muscle in his neck. In fact he missed the last two days of school because he couldn’t move around. She was nasty and kept pushing him to let me cut his nails. I did. She only does this stuff while she is drinking. 

The kids wanted to sleep downstairs in the A/C so I let them. She was out in her drinking and smoking lounge. She started coming in and trying to pick a fight with me over whether I was doing anything about finding work. I pointed out that the kids were down here and didn’t need to listen to this. She went ballistic. Hissing and cussing at me. Demanding to know why I let the kids sleep downstairs when she wanted to fight with me. She kept trying to pick fights with me and I just kept telling her that I wan’t going to fight with her. Finally she came to bed.

Unfortunately, the night and the train wreck was not over. She was in bed with me, but she couldn’t just lay there. She kept growling and swearing at me or punching the bed and running out to smoke more. One of the stupid things we fought about was that she gets this nasty cough when she drinks. I told her that she smokes like a fiend when she drinks and she gets this cough all the time. She refused to believe that and wanted to fight about it. She got mad at one point and started telling me that she can’t deal with her mother or her father and that I needed to deal with my mother. My mother has a drinking problem, but there is nothing I can do about that. I don’t live near her and I don’t have money to get her into treatment. There is nothing I can do to help her and the only reason for my wife to bring it up is to hurt my feelings or piss me off and get me to fight with her. Then she kept accusing me of not doing anything to get a job. I told her I was trying to get work and, in fact, I had an interview Friday and another on Monday. Not good enough, apparently. Just another thing to get obnoxious and nasty about and to try to get me to fight her. But I refused and finally she calmed down and passed out.     

June 18, 2008

It got ugly last night. She was drunk when she got back from work. I had salvaged some wood from a bookcase/desk that one of our neighbors put out for the trash. The wood carcass looked like nice wood and I thought I’d be able to make a coffee table out of it. Apparently her father dragged her mother down and confronted my wife, not me, and asked her, “What the hell is that?” Like she would know. Why the mush brained old fart didn’t ask me I have no idea. Anyway, my wife got all upset and nagged at me about it. Then she started getting really drunk. She walked by me to go upstairs and take a shower and whispered that she was sorry as she went by. By the time I put the kids to bed, she was hammered. She came up and rough housed with the kids, but drunk and overly rough. She bounced our son’s head off the night table. Then she passed out on his bed for a while. She got up and made her way downstairs. She was staggering. I was afraid that she would take a tumble down the stairs (she has done that three or four times.)  

She was out at ten, but kept waking up and growling at me. Literally growling. Then she started swearing at me and telling me I needed to get a job. I do, but having her drunken incarnation bitch at me about it isn’t going to help me get hired any quicker. I told her I was looking (and this morning I got a call for an interview on Monday). She swore at me some more and broke into this dry rasping cough that she does when drunk. Amazingly, she smokes like a fiend when she drinks and then she coughs and hacks. She told me she couldn’t understand why she was coughing so much. I told her she does that just about every time she gets drunk. She got pissed at me for blaming her coughing on her drinking and smoking and swore that she never does that. I said that,” Yes she did too, and how would she know? She is so drunk by that point that she has blacked out and doesn’t remember. I am the one who has to hear her and I am the one who remembers.” She didn’t like that much either and kept trying to pick fights with me and I just told her I wasn’t talking to her any more and ignored her until she passed out for the night for real.

June 17, 2008

After a three day hiatus, Drunk Bitch (hereafter referred to as DB) made her return. Not a triumphant return, just a return. Actually she almost wasn’t to bad. My wife was sick as a dog Monday and only got out of bed when her intestinal problems force her to. My mother-in-law thought she skipped work due to a hangover. Go figure. I had to set her straight. But she went to work today and hit the liquor store on the way home.

I knew she was drinking, but she was keeping her temper mostly in check and I could tolerate it. I knew things were going to get dicey when she tried to set a big glass of water on the end table and put it down on a pen and dumped the water all over the floor. She snarled at me as though it were my fault one of the kids left a marker on the end table and she was drunk enough not to see it when she put her glass down.  Then she went to hook up her iPod and had trouble with it. Her coordination sucks when drunk and her patience is non-existant. Then she decided to get nasty. A couple of weeks ago, I built a desk to replace the crappy Wal-Mart pressed board desks we had our computers on. I hoped there would be enough room for the kids to do their homework there, but instead, papers just accumulated on the once open spaces. So my wife glared at me and snarled, “I thought you built this desk for the kids to do their homework on.” I said I did and refused to rise to the bait. She sat there muttering, “I told you a thousand times..” I got annoyed and jumped in with, “You have not told me anything about that desk and quit your damn muttering. I don’t want hear it.” She got mad but instead of arguing, she slunk back out to her drinking room and sought solace in more vodka. After that she just didn’t talk to me the rest of the evening until she passed out.

June 13, 2008

Wow, two nights in a row. She was drinking but it didn’t cause any problems. I don’t think she has done this in years. I wish I thought it would last.

June 12, 2008

She was drinking tonight, but she was rather pleasant for a change. She still wasn’t herself, but at least she wasn’t trying to pick fights all night.

June 11, 2008

She showed up at our daughter’s softball playoff game reeking of vodka. She wasn’t acting badly, yet, except for cheering to loud, but that only embarrassed our son. I don’t think anyone else knew what was happening. But by the time we got back to the house, she was well on her way to drinking herself comatose.

Her mother had left some stuff to make these Tuscan turkey cheese melt sandwiches. I finished making them for us and when I called my wife up to eat, she took one bite, said, “This is disgusting.” Picked her sandwich apart, and wound up giving it to our son to eat. She took some cream cheese and crackers down to the lounge to eat, but I don’t think she ate much.

For some reason, she likes to handle the hamsters when she is drunk. It scares the crap out of the kids, especially our daughter. While the rest of us were still eating our dinner, we suddenly hear “Oh, SHIT” and we all rushed to the door thinking she had let the hamsters go. Fortunately not this time. She was cheering for some game show on the idiot box. The kids and I finished dinner and then went outside to play a little ball game. My wife made some nasty comment about it being to dark to see. It wasn’t, we played for half an h our or so. After that it was bedtime, so I took the kids upstairs and put them to bed. While I was reading to them, my wife made the climb up and then just stood in the back of the bedroom. Never said anything to me or the kids, just stood there for a minute, then muttered something about not being able to handle this and staggered out.

When I got downstairs, she was passed out face down on her table in her lounge with her iPod cranking in her ears. I turned off the light over our bed and turned on one over where we watch TV. I like to read during the commercials. I often skim through cookbooks to get ideas. Sometimes I look at yacht designs, or sketch things. So I like to have some light. I went over to where she was passed out and asked her if she wanted to go lie down. She came to enough to glare at me, but instead of going to pass out, she came in to watch TV. The finals for Top Chef were on, and we have followed it. She got mad at me for having a light on. I ignored her.

Then the kids came down. Our son had nightmares. I think the heat in their room makes it worse. So they curled up on the couches and went to sleep in the AC. She got mad at that, muttered some more and went to bed to pass out. A couple of times she got up to go upstairs for water and the bathroom and every time she came down the stairs I thought she was going to  fall down them, again. She could barely move and was staggering, bumping into things. When she was in bed, there was a lot of muttering, most of which I couldn’ t make out. But at one point I did hear the word “divorce”. 

Another night ruined by her drinking. At least there was no real fighting, but mainly it was because she was to drunk to stand up and deliver. It was kind of pathetic watching her stumble around, barely able to move.