August 28, 2008

She was drinking. She was obnoxious to the kids. She kept telling them that they had to “step up” as we were tucking them into bed. I figured out that she was talking about their schoolwork and homework, but I don’t know if the kids understood what she was talking about. She also decided that some bug bites on our son’s face were blackheads and kept trying to squeeze them, even though it hurt him. And they weren’t blackheads at all.

Later, she and I were watching a video and she couldn’t sit still and watch and she couldn’t follow the plot. She had drunk herself so stupid that she couldn’t follow the plot of Weeds. Finally she gave up and went to bed.

August 27, 2008

Tonight, our daughter had very bad stomach pains and we eventually took her to the emergency room. We thought she might have appendicitis. My wife found out about this on her way home from work, I called her trying to get her to pick something up for our daughter. She finally answered the phone and I told her what was going on. She didn’t drink much, but she did smell like vodka and later I found a half empty 375 ml bottle of vodka.

August 26, 2008

I had been depressed this morning and told the wife I needed to talk to her but that I had to go to work and that I was afraid the morning was the only time I would get to see her. I can’t consider the person she becomes when she drinks the same as her. She told me she wouldn’t forget and would be there when she came home.

She was. I talked to her a little, but I had come to realize that I could not talk to her to much. She tends to take the things I say to her when she is sober and twist them around in the worst ways and throw them back at me when she is not sober. Plus, I felt that hammering her to much would just hurt her feelings and make her feel guilty, all to no purpose. So I told her why I had talked to her about her father. We do need to find out what is wrong with him so we can make our own plans. Plus, it may impact our children genetically. And I told her the other reason, whatever happened to her father and made him the way he is now happened while we were in Florida. It isn’t her fault.

I also told her that for a variety of reasons, I should probably leave her. I don’t want to, but I probably should. I also told her that one of the things that really depressed me was the sense that I would never live the life I wanted to live. I just wanted to live on a sailboat with my family. I have wanted to do this since I was in the Navy, and maybe even before then. She knew that when we got married. I didn’t beat her up about it, I just pointed out that it would probably never happen and almost certainly not in time for me to do it with our children. Which was really a large part of the point in doing it.

She got drunk after that. We didn’t argue and things were pretty good between us. I still wish she had stayed sober.

August 25, 2008

I knew she was drinking when she sat down to the computer and couldn’t get on the Internet. Apparently vodka makes her computer illiterate. But she didn’t seem to bad so I ignored it. Her grandmother was eating with us. The poor woman recently fell and broke her wrist and has a horrible black eye. She isn’t doing to well, but she is 91. My wife kept giving me the look, which is supposed to mean something to me. We had all been talking about how her grandmother had hurt herself and the kind of care she was getting and the lack of quality and vast expense of it all.  I didn’t quite know what I was missing and the mystery only deepened when I was washing dishes and my wife hissed at me, “You just don’t get it, do you. You don’t have a clue.” By then I could see I was going to be in for it.

Afterwards, my wife was very upset. Apparently she had tried to get her mother to tell her about the results from her father’s CAT scan and her mother just ignored her and turned and asked her grandmother if she wanted pie. My wife was very upset by this and came in and told me about it. I tried to tell her first that they probably had not gotten the results yet and didn’t really have a diagnosis. She got mad at me for that. She kept saying that she had to know what was wrong with her father. I kept telling her that as far as I had heard, they didn’t actually know what was wrong with him. They haven’t been able to figure it out and they should have started trying three years ago when they first saw there was a problem. She kept telling me they knew what was wrong and wouldn’t tell her. My wife got even more upset and stormed downstairs. I went down and tried to tell her that her mother probably didn’t know what was wrong with her father and then I made my big mistake (other then opening my mouth in the first place!) I said, “When your mother can see that you have been drinking, she pretty much stops talking to you.” My wife yelled, “NO, NO, NO!!! It’s YOU! She can’t tell when I am drinking. She has been drinking wine so she can’t smell the vodka. Only YOU can tell when I am drunk.” I tried to say that she certainly could tell, and it isn’t because of her breath. Once again, the point has been made. Never, never, never talk to  a drunk about their drinking while they are drunk. Unless you really like pointless screaming fights and listening to blatant stupid denials. My wife just kept getting shriller and louder and more argumentative so I finally said that I am going for a walk. I did.

As I got back to the house, her car was gone. She needed more booze. Or at least, she went and got some more. I picked up some of my son’s toys on the way downstairs and got blasted when I got down there. She seemed to think that I sat upstairs and didn’t go for a walk. At this point, I ignored her as much as possible. She kept trying to pick fights with me, asking about my mother and what was wrong with her and how did my father die. Later, she demanded to know where I was when my father was diagnosed with his malignant brain tumor. I was in the Navy. She knows that and I told her so again. Her point was that I wasn’t there when Dad was diagnosed. Never mind that I was in the Navy and got leave and went down as soon as possible and stayed as long as I could. I was there for a month with him and he died a week or so after I had to go back. My wife seemed to think it was just a marvelous thing that we knew what was killing my father as opposed to what her father is going through. She demanded to know how long it took the doctors to figure out what was wrong with Dad. He had a tumor the size of an orange in his head, it didn’t take them long to figure it out. As I told her, he showed his first symptoms at the beginning of December and he was dead by the end of March, with a fair amount of time in a coma towards the end. It wasn’t marvelous. Maybe it was a mercy it was fairly quick and we knew what was going on and while he was conscious, he knew what was going on around him. He didn’t lose his mind the way my wife’s father is. But how is this something for us to be fighting about? I wouldn’t have chosen either illness for either man, not did I. Finally my wife passed out. For a bit. I heard her crying and tried to sit and comfort her. She let me for a minute, then she pulled away from me and cringed, Then I got yelled at and she tried to pick a fight again so I walked away from her and sat and watched the idiot box with the kids for a while.

When I put the kids to bed, she came up and made reading to them awkward until she just left. When I came downstairs, she was asleep again. I decided to sleep on the couch because I didn’t want to spend another night with her hitting and kicking me and crying and swearing at me. Instead, after a bit, she came over and starting kissing me. We tried to have sex on the couch, but things didn’t work out and in the end, we were both left upset and unsatisfied. We moved to the bed and things weren’t any better. I hadn’t been expecting anything like her approaching me for sex. I was sick (I had an earache and a sore throat) and I was mad at her and kind of disgusted with her. The whole thing just felt wrong to me. I don’t want to go any further about this.

In the end, I felt used and abused. I never tried to fight with her, all I did was try to comfort her when her mother treated her poorly and later when she was crying herself to sleep in our bed. For this I was scorned and verbally abused. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

August 20 – 21, 2008

My wife drank all of these nights. But she was pretty well behaved and we did not fight. She was definitely drunk and sometimes irrational, but she was also being nice to me so I guess it wasn’t to bad. But I still have severe misgivings. I know she is hurting herself and I hate to see her do that. There were a few near misses but I guess what ends well is well.

August 19, 2008

My wife was pretty sloshed tonight. She was drinking and then asked me, again, if I wanted to go out with her to get more booze. I decided that I would rather drive her then have her drive drunk to get more booze, so I took her. We bought a big bottle of vodka and then a friend of mine called. My wife answered the phone, as I was driving. She babbled drunkenly at him. It was funny to listen to. It was a nice night as far as it went. We didn’t fight, she just got really drunk and then passed out. But after a bit in bed, she woke up and announced that she wanted another baby. Then she said that we can’t afford it. I didn’t know what to say so I just hugged her until she went back to sleep.

I wouldn’t mind another baby, but we really can’t afford it and after six or seven years of heavy drinking, I’m not sure how smart it would be to try even if we could afford it. I wasn’t about to say that to her, though. I love my wife, in spite of the shitty things she has said and done to me while drunk. It tears me up inside to see her like she is now. I wouldn’t deliberately hurt her, she does enough of that to herself.

August 18, 2008

Another night of drinking. Tonight, my wife got all maudlin. Her grandmother fell this weekend and broke her wrist. She is in her nineties. My wife had to go check on her when we got the call from the Life Touch alert. The poor woman was lying outside with a broken wrist, a sore leg and a swollen, soon to be black, eye. The EMT’s had already been called and everything was under control, but it still upset my wife, her grandmother is getting pretty frail and she is the last of my wife’s grandparents. Plus her father is ill, there is some sort of dementia and other stuff going on with him.

My wife was drinking, and she sat and chatted with her parents, her grandmother and her aunt and uncle. Appparently it was to much for her because she came downstairs upset. First she declared that they were the most boring old people in the world. Then she got all weepy because they are clearly in decline and we don’t have a pile of money to take care of them. Plus, my mother is getting old and frail and we can’t really support her, either. So my wife was all upset about our poverty and inability to care for our parents. This led to her saying that we have two kids to care for and what were we thinking? Why did we start so late? There wasn’t much I could say to that so I didn’t really say anything. She went on in that vein for a while and then retreated to her smoking lounge.

After a bit, she came in and asked if I wanted to go get gas and cigarettes with her. I agreed. I knew what she really wanted was more booze and I was surprised that she asked me to come along. I foolishly allowed her to drive to the gas station. She was all over the road and insisted on lighting her cigarette as she drove and nearly went right off the road. She was chain smoking and burned through three or four cigaretes during our short trip out. We got cigarettes and the gas station pumps broke down. We stepped in to find out what was going on and talked to the guy who owns the place for a bit. My wife was drunk and not really making a whole lot of sense. Her comments were way to personal and didn’t really track the conversation. We got out of there and drove to get gas. She informed me that she needed booze, which wasn’t going to happen because we were to late, the liquor stores had already closed. I took her by one she thought might be open, but it wasn’t. I took her home after that. We put the kids to bed and she passed out.

All in all, not a bad night. We didn’t fight, which is always good. We even managed to be nice to each other. I just hate to see her get so upset by things we can not do anything about. Plus, I hate it when she doesn’t make sense when she talks. I have to wonder if she is causing herself real damage, brain damage.

August 15, 2008

No doubts about it tonight, she is definitely drinking. I could tell early because she was acting a little weird. I was trying to talk to her about a book I am reading, “The Unnatural History of the Sea”. So far it tells about the amazing abundance that used to be in the oceans until man came and species by species and area by area stripped it barren. I was telling her about the sizes of the fish schools people saw regularly until they would then overfish them until they were gone completely. I realized she was drunk when she looked at me and said, “Did you know this already or are you just getting it from this book?” and then scurried off to her smoking lounge. It just wasn’t like her.

After that, she began the usual. Demanded that our son take a shower and wash his hair. Nothing wrong with that, but she also declared that he hadn’t had one all week, which wasn’t true. Then, when he was done, she insisted on combing his hair, ripping all the snarls out and hurting him. Then more playing with his hair and demanding that he get a haircut.

Then she got mad at me for drinking some beer. She declared that “it made her father crazy” to see  beer around. She doesn’t drink beer (it doesn’t pack the wallop that drinking rotgut straight out of the bottle does) and the miserable old prick drinks every single day, so  why would he care if I drink a beer on the weekends? I told my wife that her parents’ misconceptions were not my problem. Later, after more booze, she revisited this issue and also threw in that the real thing that pissed her father off was that I wasn’t working full time. That I should be working 24/7 for my family. At this point, I began to suspect that it wasn’t really her father we were talking about any more. How would she know what is pissing him off? She doesn’t talk to him, not since we moved up here and especially not when she is drunk.

So she is blasting me for not working full time, and apparently for not working all the time. Never mind that it was hard finding this job, which was part time, and my boss already wants me to go full time but I can’t until the  kids start school. Which she knows. Never mind that she used to bitch at me to get a job, even just part time to “help pay for gas.” I told her that I wasn’t going to fight with her about money while she was drunk. That pissed her off, too. She wanted to continue to fight about it, saying we never talk when she is sober. I told her that was her fault that she wouldn’t talk to me about stuff when she was sober. She just hides her head in the sand and pretends nothing is wrong until she gets a snoot full and then tears into me. I insisted on dropping the subject. She went and simmered some more in her smoking lounge.

I started using the Ped Egg my sister gave me. I get wicked bloody cracks on my heel and the Ped Egg has helped a lot. My wife got mad and told me to stop listening to my sister and stop using the Ped Egg. I told her it was helping my feet and I didn’t care who told me about it, I was going to keep using it. We got into a big blowout over this. Plus we got into a fight about my sister, with her ‘just drink on the weekends’ nonsense. My wife retreated to her lounge for more cigarettes and probably another guzzle. When she was back there she started screaming. Our son was reading on our bed, which is right next to her lounge and it was scaring him. I went in and told my wife to cut it out. Stop acting like an asshole. SHe swore that she wasn’t and I told her, ‘yes she was, she was in here screaming, she was picking stupid fights and she was drunk and she was too acting like an asshole and to cut it out.’

She then came in and started apologizing for all kinds of things. For being up here. For aging. For all sorts of stuff, most of which were not things that were her fault or that I would blame her for.  But not real apologies. She was pissed and just saying, “I’m sorry we’re up here” or what ever, in a snotty, angry tone that didn’t sound like sorry, at all. She apologized for everything under the sun except for the things she should have, like her continued drinking and her cheating on me. And stopping me from getting the boat I always wanted to live on, which she knew I wanted to do, long before we got married. And which she pretended to go along with, as long as we didn’t have the money to actually do it. As soon as we did, though, bang, no way she was doing that.

Plus she started telling me that she had blown it with our kids, that it was all on me now. I told her that she had, but it wasn’t irrevocable or irreversible, that she could still save things. She yelled it was to late and that she couldn’t and I told her that it was her choice and she could still make the right ones. She kept yelling that it was all on me, taking care of and raising our kids, and I kept telling her that it was still her choice. Finally I went up and just put the kids to bed so I wouldn’t have to keep listening to her. She was passed out when I got back down to the dungeon we live in. Good.

August 13, 2008

I think she was drinking, but I’m not completely sure. She was just acting a little off, we didn’t argue and she didn’t turn into her drunken alter ego.

August 12, 2008

Another drinking night. I guess the weekend wasn’t enough. I could tell she was drinking because she was babbling. Then it turned ugly. First she went off on a racist diatribe about the shootings in Hartford and people who immigrate to America but don’t speak English. Then she went off about the racial makeup of Manchester and how that was going to impact our daughter next year at the sixth grade academy. Then she informed me that she was no longer a part of our children’s lives. That they don’t listen to her. I told her that while she has credibility issues, she was certainly still part of their lives. She got mad at that and stomped off to her smoking lounge.

Later, I momentarily forgot that her parents were back from the movies. She accused me of “being as bad as her parents.” Whatever that means. I guess I am senile. She went upstairs and came back down and snarled at me, “No, I mean it. You are as bad as my parents.” I ignored her.

Then we sat and watched TV for a little while and she suddenly turned to me and snapped, “Why are you so tired?” She glared at me for a second and then stomped off to bed and passed out (it was nine thirty). I still don’t know what that was all about. I was just sitting watching TV, I wasn’t sleeping in the chair, I wasn’t even yawning.