December 30, 2008

My wife was drunk tonight, but she was also affectionate and pretty nice to me, so I can’t complain. It was a nice change from the usual.

December 29, 2008

Last night was another bad one for my wife. She came home drunk. She started things off by being uber-critical of the chinese food I ordered her for dinner. I got her the General Tso’s chicken combination she asked for. I got it with the white rice she has always asked for in the past. When I showed up with her dinner, she looked at it and said, “Why did you get me white rice? I only eat white rice when it is juicy or Minute rice.” This was so blatantly untrue that I was dumb founded. Then she got mad that I didn’t get enough Duck sauce and got to much soy sauce. I got her a duck sauce for her egg roll and doubled up on the soy for her white rice. More lecturing about things that were exactly the opposite of what she has done for the last twenty years. Okay, this is typical when she is drunk. She suddenly claims that she hates something she has eaten for years without complaint or even told me she liked. Annoying, but I ignored it as much as possible. Next time, she can order her food or at least be more specific in telling me what she wants.

 

Then she started in on the kids. I don’t remember exactly what she was saying, but she was just over critical and down right mean. At bed time, she launched into an attack on our son, saying she would kill him by shoving his head on the bed post if he came downstairs tonight. Finally she staggered downstairs and I was able to read to the kids and tuck them in.

 

My in-laws were having a dinner party and my wife was getting nuts listening to them talk. One of the guests is an opinionated bigot and dominates the conversation every time he comes over. Last night he was blasting the Florida Keys, saying that they were all the same from Islamorada (which he seriously mispronounced) on down. Nothing but hotels and bars and a long bridge. Duh! They are islands, moron! How else do you drive from one to another? And as far as drinking being the only thing to do, you get what you look for.

 

Then my wife started asking me if I wanted to go back to Florida. She apparently got an invite to stay at a house in Port St. Lucie. I like it there, although it was about twenty years ago that I was last there. It was right after I got out of the Navy. My sister and her husband had a liquor license they needed to operate for a year so they could sell it and they needed someone to stay there and do the job. Didn’t work out for me though. They decided they didn’t really want to pay me very much for it so I came back up here to Connecticut where I had a job through one of my Navy buddies. BFM (Big Fucking Mistake!) But my wife then got pissed at the opionated bigot (whose house it was), so going down there wasn’t going to happen either.

 

She said that we should try there because Tallahassee sucked, that apparently we couldn’t go back to St. Pete because she ruined it. (God damn right she did. I am not headed that way unless she stops drinking and apparently that isn’t going to happen. I didn’t make her fuck shit heel.) Then she started asking me if we were ever going to get a house again. How do I answer that? As long as she is drinking, I am not moving anywhere with her unless I can afford to make the payments on my own, in case I have to kick her out. Then she started getting maudlin and telling me that we would never have any money, we would never have a house. Then she asked me if she ruined everything. I told her not to do that to herself. I didn’t, and could not truthfully, say that she didn’t ruin everything. I don’t blame her for me not doing the things I should have, that is my fault. I don’t even blame her for becoming a drunk. But I do blame her for her continued drinking without making any real attempt at stopping or getting real help. I do blame her for cheating on me. I do blame her for the horrible way she treats me and the kids when she drinks. I guess it is my fault that her drunken alter ego sucks the life right out of me and I lose all motivation when she comes home and gives me that sullen angry look that only drunk bitch has. There were other things I wanted to do to try to make extra money, but between having to do all the cooking, grocery shopping, much of the cleaning and a lot of the child care duties (on top of work!) because she was to drunk to be entrusted with them and just the way she crushed my motivation with her drunken bullshit and the ugly fights and the horrible things she would say or do while drunk, not to mention how badly it fucked me up when she allowed herself to be seduced by that shit bag who masqueraded as a friend of ours while he was lusting after my wife over Thanksgiving dinner with my family and scheming how to get her alone and drunk so he could seduce her AND THE STUPID DRUNKEN BITCH LET HIM, I just couldn’t get anything going. Now we are totally and truly fucked and stuck up here in her parents’ basement, so I guess I do blame her for her share of it. I know that I am to blame too. I should have done what needed to be done and if she couldn’t handle it, let her go her own way, but back then I thought we had something special and I thought it was worth saving. I tried to do things her way to make her happy. I bought the house instead of the boat we had talked about living on. I didn’t even get a dog when we had our little house in St. Pete to make things easier for her. Then our something special turned out not to mean shit to her, at least not enough to not fuck that shitbag. I should have left her, but how was I going to tell my then four and six year old kids that Mommy wasn’t coming home with us? Not to mention that I was suicidal and who was going to watch the kids when I was gone? After she cheated on me, I couldn’t concentrate at work. I knew I would not be able to keep my job. When she suggested that we come back north because she, “wouldn’t be able to drink like this in front of her family” I jumped at the chance. I didn’t know what would happen to us if I lost my job and we didn’t have the rent money. So we came back up here and I lost my career. I haven’t been able to get a programming job and I have been underemployed since, even when I had a job.

 

I am trying to stay positive, but how do I do that?

 

 

December 27, 2008

Well, we made it through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day without any drunken BS. I suppose I should be happy, but given how awful she was this evening, I can’t be. She had to go to work for a few hours, they have mandatory overtime and the jerks she works for started it the week of Christmas instead of waiting until after the holidays.

So she came back from work drunk. She got manic, trying to clean things and straighten stuff up. She got a lot done, but I am already discovering that she threw away papers that shouldn’t have been, instructions for our daughter’s cell phone – that had her number on it, for example. She was getting on my nerves, but I played along. It wasn’t until after dinner that things got ugly. Her parents were gone and we were on our own for dinner. I boiled up some shrimp at her request and made the kids hamburgers – the little heathens don’t like shrimp. My wife spent the meal glaring at her shrimp like they offended her. Then she picked at the salad and informed me that I shouldn’t make salad becasue I am the only one who likes it. Never mind that both the kids took some and ate it (our daughter had seconds.) Then she got mad because I made the burgers for the kids, she decided that it was to much for them, to fattening. So she was mad at our daughter for eating what I made her and glared at her throughout the meal. Then we managed to get into the first fight of the night as she washed the frying pan. There was a lot of stuff burned on and I told her to soak it for a bit. She argued, saying that I never let her soak pans before, why was it okay now? For background, I generally am against leaving a pan in the sink ’soaking’ because usually it seems to be done as away of getting out of actually having to wash it. But, when a pan needs it, I have no problem with it. I tried to tell my wife that, and she just refused to listen to what I was saying and swore that I said she should NEVER soak a pan. Then, just to insult me, she started saying that I was just like her mother. I asked her what she meant, in what way am I ‘just like her mother’ and she couldn’t answer me. So I told her I wasn’t going to argue with her anymore as she was obviously drunk and not making any sense any more.  Amazingly, that just pissed her off more. I decided to stay upstairs with the kids, because everytime I went down to watch TV with my wife, she started in on me again. She dressed for bed and I hoped that she would pass out soon.

Nope. Just before the liquor stores closed, she apparently got dressed and snuck out to go get more booze. Like she needed it. I happened to go downstairs with my son and found that she was gone. I called her on her cell and she told me she was just driving around the block and would be right home. A few mintutes later, I heard her car drive by the house. She needs muffler work and it is obvious when she drove by. But as she got to the house, she floored it and sped off. Twenty minutes later, she still wasn’t home and I started calling her, repeatedly until she picked up. SHe said she was on her way home, again. I asked her why she did a drive by and she asked me if I was going to fight with her. I told her no and she said, “Can you see my dilema?” I had no idea what she was talking about and said so. She said she wanted to fight with me but I wouldn’t, so she had to leave.

Finally she got back and she had her way. We had a big fight. I grabbed her purse from her and took her keys and then took the vodka she had bought and dumped it down the drain. Pissed her right off. I had ‘no right’ to toss her vodka. Then she started saying psychotic things about my mother’s drinking. Like that has anything to do with us or her drinking. I finally figured out that she was upset that I had told her that I was worried that she would turn out like my mother. (My mother has been drinking heavily for about thirty years now, since her divorce from my father and it has taken it’s toll. I think she is probably killing herself with vodka. I had told my wife that I didn’t want her to wind up like my mother.) I didn’t say she WAS like my mother, I just hoped that she would not go that way. I guess that was why she told me I was like her mother, too. In some twisted way, things were starting to make sense. Drunken, alcoholic, insane sense, but sense of a sort. Of course, the kids could hear all of this fighting and my wife’s parting shots after I calmed down enough to walk away from her and stop arguing with her, was that I was hurting our kids by fighting with her. No mention of her drinking, no mention of her taking off without telling anyone to drive around drunk, at night when she has no night vision, in a car with a bad muffler on a holiday weekend when the cops were out in force looking for drunk drivers. Nope, it was all my fault we were fighting. Finally she went down and passed out.

Amazingly enough, after four hours of drunken fighting, when I finally went to bed, she got amorous. Okay, I tried to ignore her, but she persisted and I am weak. Actually, at first, she smacked me in the head, ostensibly to find out who was in bed with her, me or our son, who is still having nightmare problems.  I didn’t think that was the best way to find out, if it had been the boy, she would have wacked him pretty good in the head. As it was, it hurt me, but not badly.

December 23, 2008

This morning I spoke to her about some of the things she said the night before. I didn’t get mad, I just told her she was unpleasant to be around. I also asked her if Christmas Eve was going to be a repeat of last year. SHe said no. She said she had to go to work and she’d be home later. I asked if it would really be her, or would it be her alter ego. She told me it would be her. It wasn’t.

When she got back from work, she reeked of vodka. She asked me about getting maudlin the night before. I told her when she listened to the Christmas Song, she got upset. She asked me to put it on again, but we don’t have the right version. I got several off iTunes, by Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Luther Vandross. She liked those, and then asked for Here and Now by Luther. It is one of her favorites and she had it played at our wedding. I downloaded it and played it. We danced. The kids wanted a couple of songs and we donwloaded them, too. The kids palyed their songs and were singing and my wife really enjoyed their voices. She kept telling me how proud she was of our kids. How much she loved them and me. How sorry she was for the things she said and did to us while drunk. Eventually it was time to put the kids to bed and my wife went to sleep. All in all a pretty nice night in spite of the drinking. I don’t get many of those and I cherish the ones I do get.

Later, about one in the morning, I heard her thrashing around on her night table. After a few minutes, I turned on my light so she could see whatever it was she was looking for. She says to me, “I’ll give you a dollar if you can find the prior claim.” (She works in insurance.) I said, “Honey, are you dreaming?” And she goes, “There is a difference between an initial application and a prior claim, many people don’t know this.” I thought , “Okay now, time to go back to sleep,” and turned out the light.

December 22, 2008

A bad night. She got all drunk and maudlin. She sat down at the computer and tried to start iTunes. Then demanded that I do it for her. I did. Then she wanted me to find the Christmas music for her. Did that, too. Then I had to find the song she wanted to hear and put that on for her. Then it started to play Christmas music on shuffle and she kept getting pissed off because it wasn’t playing theone she wanted. I told her to just double click on the song she wanted, but she didn’t know the name. Eventually we figured it out, but not without lots of histrionics on her part. Finally I got the Christmas Song by Nat King Cole playing, and she starts crying and carrying on. About how she hates Christmas now, how depressing this must be for me, how we aren’t getting the kids enough presents. (I think we did pretty well by them, all things considered. They won’t get a lot, but what they will get are the things they really wanted and they weren’t cheap. So we went for quality, not quantity.) I tried to comfort her, but she wasn’t having any of it. After that, I tried to watch TV with the kids. The Polar Express was on. My wife started freaking out because she doesn’t like ear bud headphones and then she started bashing things around on the desk trying to find and plug in some regular ear phones. It got to me and I went over and told her to cut it out. I plugged in the head phones for her.  She called me a douchebag. I jerked the headphones off  and told her to stop calling me names. That she was drunk and to just cut it out. I thrust the headphones into her hands and she told me she wasn’t drunk. Hard to believe since I could see the empty bottle and she reeked of vodka.

Then she went off on a rant about how I didn’t understand what she did everyday for a job. (I may not know exactly, but I have a pretty good idea.) That she had to get up early and go to work. (It is after nine now and she is just now climbing out of bed – after I got the kids fed and off to the school bus at seven thirty and eight fifteen.) That I was doing nothing. It is true I don’t have a job, but I am looking and applying all over but right now things seem a bit tight. I am trying and it is frustrating not to be able to find a job. It isn’t like I don’t feel guilty enough already, I need my drunk and ranting wife to throw me a guilt trip, too.  Finally she passed out.

Until she woke up, turned on her light and then couldn’t turn it off. She was kicking me and banging her alarm clock over and over. I tried to ask her what was going on and she just yelled at me that her alarm clock wan’t working, (it is fine, on time and everthing) and that she couldn’t turn her light off. I guess the switch was to complicated for her to operate. But after a few minutes she figured that out and finally got it turned off and passed back out.

I am more then a little concerned that we are going to have a repeat of last Christmas Eve. We are invited out to her sister’s house. Of course, the kids want to go and be with their cousins. Last Christmas Eve we went out there and my wife got hammered. At one point, she went outside to smoke a cigarette and she must have fallen because when she came back in she was staggering and blood was pouring down all over her face. I saw her and rushed her into the bathroom. Her mother, a retired nurse, and I stopped the bleeding and cleaned her up. By then she was with it enough to accuse us of doing that to her and then of making to big a deal out of it. She wanted to go home and I took her, leaving the kids behind to come home with their grandparents. On the way home, she decided that I did that to her and that I forced her to leave. She yelled at me most of the way back to her parnets’ house but fortunately passed out soon after. Of course, I got to do the whole Christmas set up after the kids got home and I put them to bed. I got the presents out of their hiding places,  put them out under the tree and filled the stockings. All while my wife was passed out hard. Merry f!@#$ing Christmas, as my mother used to say when we managed to get into some stupid fight on Christmas morning. At least the kids had been upstairs watching a video with their cousins so they didn’t have to see Mommy with blood streaming down her face. A Christmas miracle!

December 21, 2008

It was Sunday afternoon and I thought I was safe. She hasn’t been drinking much on the weekends and the liquor stores are closed on Sunday. I didn’t know she had a stash. She has a new hiding spot and I don’t have the energy to search around and find it.

So we were sitting and watching the idiot box. We had sent the kids up to do a little snow shovelling. I had already done it twice and we figured it wouldn’t kill them to do some. Naturally it degenerated into a snowball fight and not much shovelling got done. My wife went up and apparently got harsh with the kids and made them do some of it. That was fine, but when she came downstairs and was telling me about it she started saying things like, ”Let me be the bad guy” and I knew right then that she was drinking. A few minutes later, she starts staring at my face and says, “You have a line on the bridge of your nose, just like me. You are getting old. You are just like me.” If I hadn’t realized before that she was drinking, I would have known after that. I just played along, trying not to provoke anything. So we went the rest of the night without fighting. Again, she was a bit harsh with the kids and couldn’t always follow the conversation or the movie. Typical for when she was drinking. But we didn’t fight, so I guess that was a good thing.

We even kissed goodnight, which doesn’t happen often when she drinks. But her kiss still tasted like vodka…

December 19, 2008

Bad winter weather was expected. School was cancelled long before the first snowflake fell, foolishly throwing away a snow day when a half day would have done the job. The state governor shut down the state at noon, again, before any snow had fallen here. My wife’s company shut down and she came back here about the time it actually started to snow, about one. She reeked of vodka. I didn’t like it, but I let it go and we didn’t argue or fight. She just was not herself, IQ down a bit, comprehension and retention dropped and a bit harsh with me and the kids. Tolerable, though, so no real problems. The one time she got really spun up it was about her parents. And I agreed with her, so again, no problems.

December 17, 2008

Tonight she got hammered. She came back from work intoxicated, but apparently not enough. While I was cooking dinner, she came up and informed me that she needed to go to CVS ’for tampons’ and to get something for the kids’ Christmas stockings. When she came back in she was staggering drunk.  She barely made it through dinner.

Afterwards, she was very forgetful. I asked her if it was okay if we watched ‘The Pink Panther’ and she said fine. A few minutes later when we sat down to watch it she asked me what was I putting on. She didn’t remember my asking her just a few mintues earlier. Then she kept telling me the kids wouldn’t understand the movie. It isn’t rocket science, a lot of it is straight up slapstick. Stepping on a rake and getting bopped in the face, that kind of thing. Of course the kids could understand it. My wife didn’t last long, she went to bed and passed out after about a half an hour.

Then she got all pissed off at our son. He was planning to sleep in our bed, while I slept on the couch. She got all mad and started telling him she was going to kill him if he moved around in bed. He tried to sleep on the couch, but he got scared and I let him into the bed and traded places with him. My wife kept waking up and yelling at him or growling at him. Probably scared the crap out of him. Finally, after she woke me up three of four times yelling at him, I told her she could sleep on the couch and I would take the bed. She wouldn’t go for it, but she did stop yelling and growling and went to sleep.

December 16, 2008

Another work day, another drunk night. She isn’t to bad, we tried to have a conversation about her work, but it is just tiring. She is so angry and mean spirited when drunk. Plus, her IQ drops into the toilet. She can’t follow even the simplest conversational gambits and she either takes offense or needs explanations. Even watching TV is usually to much for her mentally. If the program is more complicated then Stupidest Criminals or America’s Funniest Videos, she can’t get it.

Tonight, she ranted a bit about her work. She is going on mandatory overtime and her bosses this year are both inexperienced and haven’t been through the busy season yet. So she has a lot to vent about. I try to listen to her, but she gets ranting and repetitive and profane and after a while it gets old. Then, a show comes on the idiot box. I started to watch it and she made a huffing noise. Okay, try something else. I put on something different and she didn’t want that either. I gave her the remote and she started her manic and frenzied channel surfing. It is like she has ADD. She can’t settle on any actual show and as soon as a commercial comes on, she is off and clicking. I start to get interested in something and ‘click’, away she goes again. After a couple of minutes of this, I said that I was going to go read. I can’t stand the constant channel surfing. And she tends to settle on mindless crap I can’t stand to watch anyway. Entertainment TV or VH1 or ‘reality’ TV or video clip shows. If we were trying to watch something, we always get there late, missing parts of the show the rest of us were interested in watching. So rather then get a headache from the constant bouncing around and kaliedescopic channel changing, I just wanted to go read. She gave me a look, offended by my lack of desire to sit with her while she wears out another TV remote. She said, “Never mind, I’ll go to bed.” And did, at eight. Again. If she is sober, it is hard for her to go to bed before midnight.

This is not why I got married. I want to be able to talk to my wife and listen to her gripe about her day or otherwise tell me how her day went. I’d like to be able to talk to her without worrying that I was going to verbally trigger some hidden landmine and set off an explosion. Instead it is a constant struggle. I can’t just relax around her when she drinks.

December 15, 2008

When my wife came home at 6:30, she was fine. I had made dinner, including a recipe she had found and been after me to try. By the time dinner was served, she was downstairs, drinking and dialing. She ate very little dinner (although she did say the bacon and cheese cups were tasty).

After dinner, she started trying to takl to our daughter. There is an after school program to expose kids to different kinds of exercise and to teach them how to eat healthy food. My wife and I had talked to her about it and she wasn’t open to the idea. I didn’t realize it, but in the description of the program they talked about rockclimbing and kayaking. My daughter is scared of hieghts and she doesn’t like kayaks, to tippy and she feels trapped inside the little hulls.  I talked to her about it and told her that she wouldn’t have to do anything that scared her, that we had to interview for this program and we could ask questions and if the answers weren’t reassuring, I wouldn’t make her do it. So we settled things there, try the interview and see if it would work for her. Then my wife staggers back upstairs and starts talking about this program. But instead of trying to convince my little girl, she starts asking her things like, “Do you see your mother? I never tired anything. You need to. I’m scared to try stuff and you shouldn’t be.” All of this in her drunken angry slur. My daughter started getting nervous again and I told her we’d leave things like we talked and steered my wife away from our girl.

We went downstairs and my wife passed out by eight. An hour and a half from normal to stupid drunk and passing out. I wonder what her friends thought of her drinking and dialing conversations?