January 29, 2009

She came back from work and I thought she was okay. We ate dinner and I had to run out to the store to get a couple of things. When I got back she asked me if there was enough money for her to get an oil change for her car. I told her it would be better if she waited until her next pay check. By this time I could see that she had been drinking. We settled in to watch “Hell’s Kitchen” and she made it through about five minutes and declared that she had to get up early to go to work the next morning and she had to go to bed right now. Okay, it was BS, but it seemed painless to let her go to sleep. The kids asked me to finish watching the show upstairs with them, so up I went.

As the show ended, I heard my wife screaming downstairs. I thought she was hurt or freaked out by realizing there was no one downstairs with her. I got to the basement door and there she was screaming, “Fuck. Where did all our money go? What did you do with our money?” I told her I wasn’t going to discuss it with her while she was drinking and she started yelling that I didn’t take her seriously. Okay, I don’t when she is drunk and insane. So I walked away from her and refused to get drawn into a fight. SHe went back downstairs and went to sleep. 

Later, the program over, I put our daughter to bed upstairs and our son came down to sleep on the couch, like he does. I got into bed with my wife and she starts growling. Then she goes, “Maybe you are right. We should get a divorce.” I told her our son was down there with us and she started going off saying that she couldn’t deal with me, could deal with my family, couldn’t deal with my brother. I told her I wasn’t going to fight with her and went upstairs to sleep on the couch. My son followed me, not wanting to sleep listening to his drunk mother rant and moan while he was trying to fall asleep.

A few minutes later, she comes up and glares at me. “Okay, you got me. I can’t tell you what I am feeling while he is here, ” pointing to our son. I ignored her nad she went back downstairs and a crappy night was had by all.

The next morning I confronted her and said, “Okay, the kids are gone. Tell me how you feel.” She had no idea what I was talking about. Didn’t remember any of it. I found that she had drank all but about an inch of a medium sized bottle of vodka. No wonder she was looney and doesn’t remember it.

January 27, 2009

This morning, I really ripped into her. I flat out told her that I didn’t know if I could take this job with her drinking. She swore up and down that she wouldn’t drink while I wasn’t there and she had to be with the kids. Bullshit. I know the little voice of temptation will be whispering in her ear that I won’t be there, how will I know if she just has a little… I need to see some sign that she is capable of enough sobriety that I can safely leave the kids here with her without them having to deal with Drunk Bitch. And she isn’t showing me that.

Once again, she came home drinking. I think she tried to moderate it and keep things under control. In fact, I suspect that she thinks she fooled me. That I didn’t know she was drunk. We didn’t fight and I am tempted to tear into her again when she wakes up, but what is the point? It is a conversation we have had countless times and she will always say the same thing. “It will be different this time. I won’t drink while you are gone and I am alone with the kids.” I don’t believe it any more. And when I tell her that she will get pissed but how am I supposed to believe her when she has slipped almost every single time she has told me she would stay sober? I can’t begin to remember how many kids functions she has ruined by showing up trashed. Teacher conferences, concerts, dances, sporting events, on and on. The night our daughter’s Brownie troop put on some skits and sang and served us refreshments in the church they met at and the whole time my wife was looking around drunkenly and swearing loudly. “What is this shit? Why are these assholes looking at me? Fuck this.” And then she wondered why all the other mothers looked at her funny afterwards. She says they are “cliquish”.

Well, I am going to have to risk it. At least her parents will be home so the kids won’t be completely alone with her. I need to build up some cash to get out of here, with her or without her. Unfortunately, her parents are pretty much useless. They will be upstairs and my wife and the kids will be down in our little basement room. The kids have learned to go upstairs if my wife is bad enough so I guess they will be okay. I’m going to have to talk to them before I start training.

January 26, 2009

With my new job come new worries. I have to train on second shift, meaning that I won’t be at home during prime drinking time. I told my wife that I was concerned about it. She told me repeatedly that I didn’t have to worry about that. And to prove it, she came home from work with a bottle hidden in her purse.  Way to show me that I can trust you not to drink while I am training, honey!

So she drinks and gets manic. She is running around cleaning things, mostly stuff that doesn’t need it. Then she showers and when she comes down she tells me that I am breaking her heart. That I am sitting there drawing boats and I should have fought more to buy one way back when. So I need to stop blaming her for not having bought  a boat. (And she is right. I should have just gone ahead and done it if it meant enough to me that I was willing to risk losing my marriage and my little girl. But instead I hoped that she would come around and I wouldn’t have to risk losing everything. And it didn’t work out that way.) Then she tells me that we have grown apart. No shit. I wonder why that might be? Then she goes off to her lounge and I hear her muttering and babbling things like how I shouldn’t blame her for my father. Okay, the man was dead three years before I met my wife, I don’t think I ever blamed her for how my father treated me. But in her alcohol clouded mind, that somehow made sense to her. She continued muttering things of that nature for fifteen or twenty minutes and then went and passed out.

January 23, 2009

The day started off well. I got confirmation that I do indeed have a job. There were some back and forth phone calls to set up when I start and train and how much I get paid. (I am going to do better then I have in the last four years!) So when the phone rang again, I thought it was going to be more about the job. Instead it was my son’s school social worker. Oh crap! I knew that wasn’t going to be good. Apparently my son had talked to her Tuesday because he had been upset that my wife had yelled that she wanted a divorce while drunk on Monday night. The social worker has some idea of what is going on at home. But to make it even better, my son and one of his buddies at school decided they were going to start a band. Apparently they thought a “goth” band would be cool. The other boy wrote a song and the little idiot showed it to his teacher saying it was a song he and my son were going to do. Well, the song was rather dark, shall we say. It talks about having nightmares come true and using knives and swords and filling throats with blood. My son denies writing this, he says the other boy wrote it, and it isn’t his handwriting so I (and his teacher and the social worker) believe him. But after seeing this, the social worker felt a need to “do a mini-assessment” given “what else is going on in the home.” Oh, goody. She decided that my son wasn’t disturbed or suicidal. Good thing. So I got to talk to her for about twenty minutes, telling her I was on top of things and that I would talk to my son. Then I had to tell my wife about this. Do you think that she then immediately decided to get sober and do whatever it took to get right with our son? Fuck no, she was drinking when she got back here.

We didn’t fight or anything, but she was drunk and she started ranting about work. Naturally, she waited until we started watching something and then kept trying to talk over the TV. I would have loved to just listen to her, but no, she has to do it while the idiot box is on. And as she went on and on she started making less and less sense. Finally she gave up and went to go pass out.  But not the end of the night. Apparently she has hurt her shoulder somehow. She swears it wasn’t anything she did while drunk but I have my doubts. She started just yelling and swearing because her shoulder hurt so much and she couldn’t sleep. I tried to be nice, asked her what was wrong, did she take any aspirin or ibuprofen or anything. She just got pissed at me, too. So I said the hell with it and rolled over and tried to sleep. Difficult to do with my wife randomly popping up for a smoke or piss and punching the bed or screaming “FUCK”. Finally she settled down and then I could, too.

I just wish that she could have given a crap enough about our son to realize that it is time to stop swilling rotgut vodka and destroying herself and our little family. Hurt me, hurt herself, but draw the line when you are hurting the kids. I know some people think I should just leave. But I know that will hurt the kids, too. It isn’t as easy as some seem to think. The last time I left her with the kids, my son got stress induced ocular migraines and was seeing black spots in front of his eyes. How the hell do I deal with stuff like that?

January 21, 2009

My wife came home drunk again. I could see it when she walked through the door. She was in a rush to get herself down to her ’smoking lounge’ so she could shut the door and slam down a few slugs of rotgut vodka. Of course, the kids (and I) wanted to see her and talk to her, but really the only thing she wanted was to get past us and onto better (in her mind) things. Now, I know that I don’t like to get rushed as soon as I walk in the door, but it is also true that I am not in a hurry to go slam down a few gulps of vodka, either.

That said, she was sullen and hard to talk to for the evening, but at least there were no big stupid drunken arguments. Unfortunately, after I put our daughter to bed, I found her sitting glaring at our son and he was staring up at the ceiling. She had been ‘talking’ to him about something but neither of them would tell me just what. Then she demanded that I, “talk to my son.” I said, “What am I supposed to talk to him about?” She said, “Tell him about life. Tell him why we are here. Tell him anything.” Then she stormed out to her little lounge. I told my boy that the only thing I wanted to talk to him about was going to sleep so he’d be ready for school the next day.

After, my wife came to bed and thrashed around. She coughs a lot when she drinks, maybe because she smokes a lot more when she drinks. Plus she does not sleep well, which means I don’t get to sleep well, either. At least she wasn’t yelling and swearing at me.

Yesterday, I sent her a comment from my blog. She knows I write this, but she has never seen or read it. I don’t really want her to. But I thought if she saw an example of what someone else was going through and could see that I wasn’t making the things she does up (she not so secretly believes that I make up stuff when I tell her what she did or said the night before) and also that she could see that there is some value to my writing and to reading other people’s stories, that it might help. She never mentioned it at all. Since she was drinking, I didn’t want to bring it up, either.

January 19, 2009

I wanted to talk to my wife, make some kind of a plan for getting the hell out of here. See what she wants to do, what kind of future she sees working towards. I had to go to the grocery and when I came back, there was her drunken alter ego. No conversations tonight. Instead she started on some rant about the overblown, beathless coverage of Obama’s upcoming innaguration. Okay, she was right, but she was definitely drinking.

At dinner, she was sullen and angry and spent the time either staring at her plate or bitching at the kids. She was over the top mean about our boy taking a shower. He responded by being a smart ass (not that I blame him, but she is still his mother and I don’t want him getting in the habit…)

Then she went downstairs and we tried watching the idiot box. She started whining about having to work and having to do overtime. Then she said that she just wnated to sit and read her book. I thought she was talking aobut the way things were doing the slow time of the year (which is most of it) where she actually can read at work. I told her that there weren’t many jobs where you could do that. She said, “Then why do you get to?” Okay, that pissed me off. I asked her if that meant that she thought I was a middle aged unemployed freeloader like my brother thinks I am. Her response was that it had nothing to do with my brother. That she didn’t care about my brother or my mother. Which really wasn’t an answer to my question and didn’t really make any sense at all. She started going into the shrill screeching mode and I told her, “Okay, you are obviously drunk and I am not talking to you any more.” That really sent her ballistic. I went upstairs and read until it was time to put the kids to bed. My wife spent the next couple of hours ranting and raving and banging things around until she finally passed out.

January 17, 2009

My wife came home from work. She had to put in some overtime. Of course, she came home drinking. Our kids each had a friend over, our son’s friend staying for a sleep over and our daughter’s friend staying for dinner and to play for a while after that. My wife went on a bit of a rant about work, and started asking me what would happen if she lost her job. She gets paranoid about losing her job sometimes when she drinks. She is convinced that she can’t put in the overtime they want and they will fire her. After getting all worked up about that, she informed me she was going out and asked me if she could get me anything. I told her I don’t drink any more and she left and got more booze.

Later, she really went off about losing her job and how I wasn’t going to see her until April because of the ten hours of overtime weekly they were requiring. I tried to be sympathetic and supportive and she turned on me and told me I didn’t know what it was like and I never had to work like she does. I guess she forgot the nights and weekends I had to work, with no extra pay (I was salary) and the oncall nights where I often had to go into work in the middle of the night and stay through the next work day. Apparently she forgot that I was a cube farm denizen and I hated it most of the time, too. She went to pass out and then kept getting up and wandering around the house, trying to turn up the thermostat and crying about how cold she was. I can only imagine what my son’s friend thought about that. Finally, she fell and I ran upstairs to see if she was alright. She apparently was but she got pissed at me for checking on her. I told her she was drunk and to just go back to bed. She would stay warm if only she would get under the covers and stay there. Plus she was turning up the heat (or trying to, I don’t think she ever figured out the difference between the thermostat and the thermometer on the heater control – she kept trying to turn the thermometer and swearing about how it didn’t turn.) She gave me that look and stomped off and finally passed out for real. Taking all the covers and putting an extra blanket on the bed (her side only, I guess I don’t get cold…)

January 13, 2009

Double whammy. My mother is in serious denial about her alcoholism. This has led to a series of upsetting emails between my siblings and some disturbing phone calls, too. I spoke to my mother on the phone and she was seriously defensive and in denial about the seriousness and depth of her problem. She seems to believe that she is in control and taking care of herself. If that were true, none of this would be going on. Then, late in the evening, I found out that she had turned down a bed at the detox facility. It is a strictly voluntary program and without her cooperation, she is not going to get the help she needs. Since she is in denial, it doesn’t seem like she is going to do what she needs to. With that attitude, she is likely to find herself alone and unable to care for herself. I hope she turns herself around.

And, of course, my wife who knows all this is going on, came home drunk, again. At first it was tolerable. I sat through the half hour rant about her job, which was pretty normal except that because she was drunk it was more vehement then usual and less coherent. Then I found out about my mother refusing treatment and I tried to talk to my wife. She went off on a weird tangent about when my mother moved up to the north country. She was confused as to the timing and the history and when I tried to correct her, she got very angry. Her version of the history there sounded like she was making it up as she went along, all while drunk, with all the grasp of reality that a good drunk provides. I finally had to just tell her that I made a mistake trying to talk to her, sorry that I would try to confide in my wife, or expect to have her there for me to listen to my problems. That went over like a lead balloon and led to more tears and more angry words. I had to walk away from her. I went up and put the kids to bed and then went to bed myself rather then risk another confrontation.

January 12, 2009 again

I was sort of hoping that my wife would not come home drunk, knowing what is going on with my mother. It would have been nice, but I also knew it was to much to hope for. She was obnoxious at dinner. She ate about two bites, scowled at me and the kids and dumped the rest of her meal. Then she got into some confused argument about family meal times.

Our son was doing his homework, and he wanted to finish it up before he ate. He was sitting right there with us, so I told him go ahead. She got all pissed off that he wasn’t eating with us, saying that families that ate together, stay together. I tried to get her to see that he just wanted to finish so he wouldn’t have to do it after he ate and he was sitting right there with us, but she wouldn’t go for it. What I didn’t point out was that having Mommy drunk and confused, forgetful and obnoxious probably wasn’t good for keeping the family together and really wasn’t the same as if she, her sober self, were actually there eating dinner with us. That would have led to a fight and I didn’t want to do that to myself or the kids.

So she staggered around the kitchen, doing the dishes (the washer looked like a four year old had loaded it), threw away the recyclables so I had to pull them out of the trash. To which she said, “they are just going in a ditch anyway.” Finally, that ordeal was done and we went and watched TV. The second night of the start of ‘24′ was on and she couldn’t follow it. She ‘went to bed’ at the start of the second hour of the premiere.

January 12, 2009

This is the second post I have written that is not about my wife. I got a call last night from my sister. Our  mother is drinking herself to death. She has been an alcoholic for almost thirty years, since Dad cheated on her and she eventually divorced him. It broke Mom’s heart and she hauled herself way up to the North Country and has been alone and lonely and hurting ever since. My other sister followed her up there and made a life for herself. My mother has lived vicariously through my sister and her kids (and us too, at a distance, I guess) but she has had pretty much no friends her own age.

Now Mom is hitting the vodka pretty hard and seems to be on her way out. She isn’t taking care of herself or her little apartment or her little dog. She drinks herself into a coma by the afternoon and doesn’t eat much and doesn’t clean herself up. She often is incoherent and has trouble making a complete sentence or following a conversation. I know from talking to her on the phone when I call her to late in the afternoon, that she still obsesses about my father and her divorce, almost thirty years later. She can still get quite angry about it and will rant uncontrollably even now.

Her mother, whom I always felt a special connection to, was also a drunk and a Demerol addict although I didn’t know this until I was an adult. For years I thought she was a diabetic because that was the excuse she used when she shot up on a trip to Maine when I was little. She must have had the drinking pretty much under control when I was around, because as a kid I never saw it. But apparently it scarred my mother. Her stepfather sent her away to a boarding school for high school so she wouldn’t have to see her mother pass out in her plate at dinner any more. Now my mother is worse then that. And dying from it.