September 25, 2008

I made the mistake of talking to her at lunch and telling her that her drinking always meant that I never knew what to expect on any given night. She told me that she “wasn’t planning to drink tonight.” Imagine just how surprised I was when I sat down with her when she got back here and I could see immediately that she had been drinking. I told her some little poem that our nine year old son told me (Scissors and string, scissors and string, when a man is single he lives like a king. Needles and pins, needles and pins, when he gets married his troubles begin.) She looked at me with her glazed and angry eyes and said, “That works both ways.” No laugh, no indication that it was just a JOKE. Or a silly poem that our son heard in school from his buddies. She was serious about our marriage being the source of her troubles. I walked away.

Later, she was bitching about the proposed government bailout. She said something like, “If the government can afford that, why can’t they pay me better?” I pointed out that she didn’t work for the government. She them muttered something about welfare. Then she said our kids were screwed and they wouldn’t be able to go to college. I said we don’t know that. She turned on me and demanded to know how we were going to be able to afford it. I said it was still a long time off and a lot of things could happen. She then declared that I had given up, had just quit. I said that wasn’t true and she she sat there sulking for a few minutes and then went and passed out (before eight o’clock.)

September 23, 2008

She is drinking again tonight. Right now she decided that she had to go to her grandmother’s house to see what pills she takes. Conveniently, right before the liquor stores close. Her mother wants her to watch her grandmother Sunday night. She has been really snotty about asking, with a lot of ‘can I trust you’ to do this, etc. Of course it pisses my wife off, even though she knows her mother has reason not to trust her. (My wife took her grandmother to church once, and was drunk and her mother caught her in the parking lot of the church, intoxicated with her grandmother in the car.) So things have been dicey. Let’s see what the rest of the evening brings. I doubt it will be good. It was a really bad decision for her to go over there while drunk. It sort of makes her mother’s point. Although I suspect that the real reason for her going was to hit the liquor stores before they close.

I wanted to have a few drinks tonight, but I chose not to, mainly because I knew my wife would be drinking, and the fights are spectacular when we both drink.

When she came back from ‘her grandmother’s’ she was hammered. She looked barely concious. When she walked upstairs to help put the kids to bed or go to the bathroom, I was afraid that she would fall down the stairs and hurt herself. She has done it several times, once landing in the emergency room.

She passed out early and then when I went to bed, she was very restless and had a cold. She was flailing around and blowing her nose loudly and frequently. I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight.

September 22, 2008

Drunk again. No fighting or outrageous behavior. She was a bit sharp with the kids, but they kind of deserved it. Then she got to stupid drunk to follow the plot of Heroes and passed out early. A good night, sort of. If that qualifies.

September 19, 2008

She had planned to go out for a Happy Hour at work. It fell through so she got herself a bottle and got drunk by herself. Then we went to the boy’s ice cream social at school. She was snippy and didn’t want to be there. Then we went out for dinner and she wanted to go to the most expensive place around. I had to push to get us to go to a reasonably priced place. It wasn’t a bad night, as they go, but she was weird and just not herself.

September 18, 2008

Another night, another bottle of rotgut vodka. Tonight, she actually ate a little dinner and then was only mildly obnoxious to us until she nagged the kids to take showers and took one herself. She somehow managed to break two of my disposable razors and threw the rest of the bag in the trash. I found then the next morning. Then she retired to her smoking lounge instead of watching TV with me and the kids. Okay, so far, as drinking nights go.

Then I hear her swearing and yelling at her iPod. At first I try to ignore it, but she gets louder and angrier and the kids are starting to look a bit nervous. I go out to see what the problem is. She can’t find some song on her iPod. I ask her which song. She doesn’t know the name, but it is by the Goo Goo Dolls. I bring up the Goo Goo Dolls songs and ask her if it one of them. She starts screaming that she doesn’t know the name of the song and there is something wrong with her iPod. I try to help her, but without knowing what song, what can I do? I leave the smoking area and try to watch TV again, with the kids. More swearing emanates for her lounge and I began to think she was going to smash her iPod. (She has smashed her cell phone twice, at least. Fortunately, it has gone back together and still works.) So I try again to help her and she immediately turns on me and starts yelling about how her iPod doesn’t work and doesn’t have her songs on it any more. I try to tell her that she deleted all the songs once and maybe I missed some of them when I reloaded. She didn’t remember doing the deleting, swore she didn’t know how and therefore couldn’t have done it. I don’t know how she did it, either, but I cleaned up the aftermath, so I know she did in fact, do it. She said something about her getting ready to explode so I decided to save her iPod from her and took it away from her. Then I walked out and sat down and watched TV again. Now she starts swearing at me. Then she decided to say the hell with it and went to pass out.

She came to about nine forty five and started yelling at the kids for being awake. She had told them earlier that they could watch Kitchen Nightmares so they were up watching it. She started to yell at me that I treated the kids like they were forty and her like she was three. Then the show ended and I took  the kids to bed and she had passed out by the time I got back down stairs.

September 16, 2008

Once again, she was drunk. And she lied about it. Or at least, tried to pretend that she had stayed at work ‘talking and laughing in the parking lot’ with a couple of her work friends. It was her late night at work and I had called her to tell her about some things going on with her father’s condition. She told me not to bother saving her any food from dinner because she “ate a lot of cake and junk at work.” More bullshit. She often doesn’t eat on her drinking nights. So she was pretty much planning to drink and was trying to cover her tracks ahead of time. Once she got home, however, she was pretty nasty to me and sharp with the kids. She just always has this angry demeanor about her when she drinks and I just knew she was drunk.

She got psychotic about her father, demanded that I look up symptoms on the Internet and try and figure out what her father might have. The specialists can’t figure it out, how the hell am I supposed to? I am not a doctor. I suggested mini-strokes might fit, and she got all pissed off at me and kept arguing that she knew what a stroke looked like (she had been a CNA at a nursing home) and swore her father never had one. And that he never ‘froze up’ for a few seconds which might be a mini-stroke. I pointed out that she hardly ever sees her father, as she avoids him like the plague (especially when she is drinking although I didn’t point that out) and he is alone a lot, he could have mini-strokes when no one is around to see them. She got mad at me some more and finally we stopped that whole waste of time.

Then, our daughter asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I didn’t really, and said so. My wife offered to go and my daughter didn’t want to go with just her. My wife got pissed and declared to me that she has totally lost our children. I told her maybe so, but it doesn’t have to be that way and it doesn’t have to be permanent. That did not cheer her up any and I was dumped on some more. Like it was my fault the kids don’t like her when she is drinking and don’t respect her any more. I am not the one nagging them and making insane demands on them and reeking of vodka and being mean to them.  

When it was time to put the kids to bed, she came upstairs and brushed her teeth. She declared that we needed “a whole new slew of tooth brushes” up there. I said, “Don’t get me one, mine is new.” She declared that I was trying to start an argument with her. I said I wasn’t, I certainly didn’t have a problem with her getting new toothbrushes for her and the kids, but I didn’t need one. She said I said it in a nasty fashion. I don’t know, maybe I did. But if I did, it was because she tends to take charge and take action when she is drinking. Her judgement is really poor when she drinks and many of the actions she takes, though well intentioned are poorly executed and pretty piss poor judgement. I was afraid she might go ahead and just throw away all the toothbrushes. So I told her not to and she got pissed. Again.

Finally, she decided to go to sleep on the couch. I went upstairs to get ready for bed and when I came down she was in bed, instead. Her comment was that the couch hurt her neck and then she made one disparaging comment on our bed and my lack of ability to buy her a new one and then went to sleep. Fortunately, she went to sleep and didn’t wake me up repeatedly, for a change.

September 14, 2008

Yesterday morning, I waited until she got up and was reading the paper and I told her that I had to go. I was going to get a room here in town. She looked at the ad I had found and said, “No. You aren’t moving out.” We had a long talk, argument, whatever, but the end result was that she talked me into not leaving.

Tonight there is a big joint birthday party here at her parents’ house. She can’t stand these things and she apparently had another bottle around. She drank that and then started in on the booze her parents put out for her siblings and their in-laws. She is hammered and upset. I have tried to be okay with it, but she gets so insave that I can’t be around her. She is so negative, everything is personal, no matter what it is about. She told me she was suicidal. That she was going to kill someone, her sister is competing with her (maybe), if I don’t get her out of here she is going to kill me. On and on. I have tried to be non-comfrontational just to get through her drinking night without a big ugly fight or a scene. I don’t know if it is going to work. I don’t want to argue with her. She is insane when she drinks and I can’t reason with her, not even a little bit. Hopefully she will pass out without incident.

Well, she passed out about nine. After being somewhat short and nasty to the kids and to me. I put the kids to bed and came downstairs. She was out cold, it was about nine thirty and I figured that I would just read a bit and get a good night’s sleep. Nope. She kept waking up and starting insane fights. She yelled at me for not knowing why her sister didn’t bring Patty, their dog to the party. Insisted that it meant that me and the kids didn’t deserve a dog. A little after midnight, she woke me up because she had decided to charge her iPod (at fucking midnight!) and had forgotten how to properly and safely disconnect it. Plus she didn’t know how to tell if it was fully charged. I had to get up and finish the damn thing. I didn’t know that booze makes you computer stupid, but apparently it does. If I had known how many stupid drunken fights that iPod would cause, I would never have gotten it for her last Christmas. I actually thought it would make it easier for her to listen to music when she was drunk! Almost three hours after I went to bed, I was finally able to get to sleep.

September 12, 2008

Well, she fooled me, for a while. I didn’t think she was drunk at first, just upset and angry. Nope. She was drinking and now I have to start looking for a place to go. She ripped into me about taking her debit card and refused to accept that I only did it to keep her sober so we would have any kind of chance to keep it together. Nor did it matter that it was her behavior, repeated over five or six years that brought me to this point. I was wrong to do it, just being a snobbish asshole, in her view. At first, I didn’t think she was drunk because I had her money. So either she had cash at work or she stole it from the kids or, more likely, her mother. Wonderful, a thief, a liar, a drunk and an adulterer. I know how to pick ‘em, don’t I? 

Then she started really getting wound up. Her mother went to bed early, she wasn’t feeling well. Well, you would have thought she was on her death bed from the way my wife was carrying on. Never mind that my mother-in-law takes care of her mother, her deteriorating husband, keeps the house up and has a slew of activities and exercises that she does. How could she be tired or simply get a cold? Not to my wife, she said she couldn’t do that and just kept getting nuttier and nuttier about it. I finally told my wife that she was insane. I still didn’t fully realize she was drunk. It wasn’t until she demanded to be allowed out to get tampons, even though we had enough on hand to get through the night. She got pissed when I hemmed an hawed at that, and I got pissed back and gave her back her card and told her to do whatever she wanted.

She went ’shopping’. Then she came back and, as I put the kids to bed, she asked me if I remembered the questions I asked her in a letter the other morning. I had asked her if she could quit drinking, if she wanted to quit drinking, if she wanted to still be my wife, and if she still wanted me as her lover, friend and partner. I said, yes, I remembered. I also said in the letter that if the answer to any of those questions was ‘no’, then we had no hope to stay together and I would have to leave. She looked up at me (she was sitting on the can, what a lovely place for this conversation – I didn’t start it) and said her answers to the four questions were, “No, no, no and no”;

So I guess I am looking for a place now.

Then last night, after she passed out, I went to bed. About midnight, she wakes up, starts thrashing the covers around and in the process punches me twice. I asked her what was wrong now and she said she had to go to pee. Okay. She gets up and starts kicking her shoes away from the front of the closet door and slamming the door open and shut. It kept getting stuck on her shoes. I asked her what she was looking for and she said she was trying to get out of here. I said, “That’s the closet.” She stopped almming that door and went upstairs, presumably to pee. When she came back down, she asked me why she went upstairs. I said you told me you had to pee. “No, why did I go upstairs?”

“To pee.”

“Are you sure?”

“That is what you told me.”

“Why did you wake me up?”

“I didn’t, you woke me up by punching me twice.”

“Are you sure? I think you woke me up.”

“No I didn’t.”

This went on for a bit and I finally just rolled over and pretended to sleep until she passed out again. Another fine night brought home by my wife and Bukof Vodka.

September 10, 2008

Drinking again. So much for the ‘rest of her days’ which were promised to me yesterday. She was mean to the kids, inappropriate at dinner and later tried to pick a fight with me over a VW service satisfaction survey call.

September 9, 2008

This is the first non-drinking night that I am writing about. After our talk on Sunday, she got drunk on Monday. I called her at lunch on Tuesday and told her that if she drank again I was moving out. That since she had promised not to drink and couldn’t even give me one day, I had lost any hope of her ever quitting. She told me she would stop and that she would give me the rest of the days. Tuesday, she stayed sober. But she started talking about some happy hour coming up at work. Kind of feels like she was giving with one hand and taking away with the other. We shall see….