November 29, 2008

I knew getting her that bottle would be a mistake. She was actually good on Thanksgiving. Didn’t drink a drop, which really surprised me, pleasantly so. Today is a different story, though.

She asked me to make a pitcher of bloody mary mix. I felt like a drink, so I did. We got some funny movies and some muchies and I thought things would be okay. But as she got into her second drink and started getting drunk, she started getting angry. Then she tried to talk to her mother about something. My wife asked her mother if she had seen her name in the paper, as her mother walked in the local turkey day 5K road race. It is actually a pretty big thing and thousands of runners do it, along with some world class runners, guys from Ethiopia who run it in twenty minutes. But my mother-in-law just looked at my wife and said, ”I don’t have anything for dinner. I hear you have been eating all day.” Totally off the subject and completely nasty. What a bitch! My wife went into an angry tailspin after that. Fortunately, she wound up passing out on the couch before five fifteen. Maybe that will be the end of the evening for her. I hope so. I am going to toss the rest of the vodka we bought. No point in keeping it around. I don’t want it and if she drinks it, there will just be nother bad day for me. I know that is selfish on my part, so sue me.

Addendum:

She came to later and we sat down to watch a movie. She couldn’t follow the plot. The look on her face was awful, she had turned mean and angry and it was stamped into her features like a warning sign. She got mad at the movie because she couldn’t understand this kid who talked with a French accent and then got mad at me because I didn’t give her the remote quickly enough. Then she demanded to know if I was being “pissy” with her. I said she was being pissy with me and maybe I was responding to her. SHe got pissed at that and went to bed. She did the up and down thing, and managed to scare us all by dropping a glass down the stairs. We thought it was her at first. She got mad at our concern but then she finally went and passed out for real. That was when I discovered that she had drunk almost the whole bottle of vodka herself.

November 26, 2008

Another drinking night for my wife. She was edgy and a bit weird. My sister called, and my wife wanted to know if she were drinking. My wife certainly was. Plus, my wife wanted to go get a bottle of vodka for Thanksgiving, and for some reason she was insisting that I go with her. As the closing time for liqour stores approached, my wife started to get really antsy and I had to cut my conversation with my sister short. 

I told my wife that my sister and I had been talking about my mother and Mom’s drinking problem. Her health is in a downward spiral and a lot of her health issues are caused or made worse by almost thirty years of slugging down a liter or more of vodka a night. Now she has damaged the nerves in her limbs, particularly her legs. Who knows what else swilling that much poison has done to her? I tried to tell my wife that my sisters had been debating the merits of getting Mom to quit. Should we make her miserable and put her through detox and a treatment program that I am sure she won’t want and won’t think she needs or do we just let her finish her days the way she is choosing to, in a drunken haze. Do we force her to quit drinking in the hopes that she will live a little longer or do we let her go her own way and die sooner? 

Well, my wife wanted to know how my mother was getting her booze. I tried to make the point that it really didn’t matter, Mom would figure out a way to buy booze even if she had to take a cab to the liquor store. My wife just kept obsessing over how Mom got her booze. My wife was calling my sister and nephews enablers and other things and wanted to call them out for it. This on our own way to the liquor store to buy her booze, which I guess makes me an enabler and I know it isn’t going to turn out well. But if I had refused, she would simply have gone herself (driving drunk at night in the rain) or she would guzzle from the bar her parents will put out for their guests. Also making my point that drinkers will figure out how to get booze somehow and the actions of so-called enablers in this regard are meaningless.

I was trying to get my wife to understand what my sisters were discussing, and all she wanted to do was investigate how my Mom was getting her liquor. Like it mattered. She couldn’t get past that question and concentrate on what I was trying to talk about. She started to demand that I call my mother and ask her how she was getting her booze. It was very frustrating and fortunately we got to the liqour store before we started really arguing about it. She told me she wanted vodka and marched over and picked out a 1.75 liter bottle. I said I don’t think so. She put it back and settled for a one liter bottle, which is still way more then enough to make Thanksgiving a disaster. 

After we got back to her parents’ house, the kids wanted to have a tickle fight on our bed and we did for a bit, my wife too, which she usually doesn’t do. But after a couple of minutes, my wife announced that she was tired and going to ’sleep.’ Which she did and soundly instead of the usual up and down and yelling at me.

November 25, 2008

The little woman went psycho last night. Full disclosure here, I drank a six pack of Buds last night. Plus two more beers that my brother-in-law left in the fridge a few weeks ago. But until my wife started in on me, I was a happy drunk. She was drunk when she got back from work, so I wasn’t the trigger for her. That trigger was already pulled.

She started to lecture me about getting angry with the kids. The night before I got a bit annoyed with my son and told him he had to stay in his bed because I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in over a month. Maybe I was a bit harsh, but I was tired and cranky. But all I did was raise my voice a little. No name calling, no hitting or anything like that. He seemed to get over it pretty quickly.  And I didn’t get a decent night’s sleep that night either. He came down about three and I let him crawl into bed and finished out the night on the couch. I didn’t get mad at him then. But my wife, drunk, felt she needed to lecture me about how I should feel. Then she got mad because I was drinking the last beer I had, in front of the kids. Now, my kids aren’t scared of me when I drink. They are of her. Mostly, they say they can’t even tell when I am drinking unless they see me. They can with their mother. I told my wife that she didn’t have the right to tell me how I should feel and that pissed her off. Fortunately, it shut her up for a bit, too.

Later, as it was getting time to put the kids to bed, she took me aside and said, “They are playing us, you know.” Talking about our son and his sleeping problems. No mention that his problems probably stem from her drinking. I told her I knew they were and we’d try to see if he could sleep in his bed all night, again. I got into the kids’ room a bit after she did and she was leaning over our son, whispering nasty things at him. She stood there with the ignorant, mean look she gets when she is being nasty to someone (me usually). WHen she saw me come in the room, she scurried away down stairs and passed out. If only that had been the end of the evening.

I settled in to watch the series finale of The Shield. She woke up enough to start yelling, “Where are you?” I said I was right there and she started asking me what I had written back to my sister about my mother. My mother, is having some age related problems and isn’t doing so well. Maybe is starting her final decline, I don’t know. My wife started yelling at me for not helping my sister, not helping my mother, not caring that my mother is having problems, all sorts of stuff on those lines. I asked her what she thought I should do and she yelled at me that she wasn’t getting dragged into caring for my mother. I told her she wasn’t making any sense and I wasn’t going to keep talking to her. As always, that sent her ballistic.

She laid there in our bed, crying and yelling at me to ‘do something.’ When I refused to respond, she started telling me she wanted a divorce, that I had to get the hell out of her life, that I was a fat fuck and needed to ‘do something.’ Then she lay in our bed crying and muttering shit at me. I hate listening to her cry and have to stifle the urge to go comfort her. It never works out well. She will let me touch her for a mintue and then she turns on me, snarling and yelling and cringing away from me. So I let her cry it out until she finally passed out for real. Then I could go to bed.

November 24, 2008

The weekend is over and so is my respite from her drinking. It was another maintenance night. She got drunk and passed out around ten, but she didn’t kill her bottle and she didn’t get nasty to me or the kids for a change. She seemed more or less okay, so I tried to talk to her but she was distant and siconnected so I let it slide and we just watched TV until she ‘fell asleep’ on the couch.

Non-fighting nights are nice, and so are the non-drinking weekends, when they happen. It is almost like having my wife back. She acts like herself, she is good with the kids and we connect, again. But that causes its own pain. I always know that Monday when she gets back from work, she’ll be drinking. The connections remade will be undone. The glimmer of hope will get extinguished. Sometimes I think it would be easier if she were a drunken asshole all the time, then I could give up and move on. And maybe I should. But it still feels like I am walking out on my sick wife. It feels like I am giving up on love. It feels like I would tearing my children away form their mother.

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.