February 26, 2009

My wife was staggering drunk when I got back from work. She is trying not to be so argumentative, and that is good, but she won’t be able to keep it  up. She is to angry when she drinks. She was rough housing with our son when I got back. She thinks she is just playing, and the kids like it, to a point. But she gets to rough and she hurts people. It is accidental, but so what? Fortunately, she didn’t tonight. But she was drunk and wierd. She was angry at her parents. My mother-in-law was out for the evening. My father-in-law microwaved a chicken that she had precooked the night before. He ate, without getting any for our kids. He left the chicken in the microwave and the kids couldn’t find it and thought he had eaten it all. They called my wife, who was on her way back from work and told her that Grandpa had eaten all the chicken. They were freaked, my wife freaked, and it was all for nothing. She got back here, found the bird in the microwave and fed the kids. I think she drank her own dinner, as far as I could tell from what she was telling me and from the way she was staggering around. She tried to get herself a glass of water and wound up spilling the Brita pitcher all over the floor and staggered down the stairs to go pass out. I wound up cleaning up after her rather then leaving puddles all over the tile floor. The last thing I need is for one of the in-laws to take a tumble and break something. 

I guess the night wasn’t to bad, but it wasn’t good either. We didn’t fight, but she was trashed and I never know how things are going to turn out. She could have spent the evening swearing at me and trying to pick a fight with me like last night. I know she thinks she did good, she wasn’t mean to me or the kids, but she can’t keep that up and she is deluding herself into thinking that she is handling things. It won’t end well. I try to be hopeful, but it isn’t easy. I am to much of a realist to delude myself to much.

February 25, 2009

I get back here from work and the kids are all, “Daddy’s home! Hi, Daddy!” My wife, instead, is sitting on the couch with that sullen angry ignorant look on her face and won’t even look my way, much less say hello. So I figure, goody, it’s going to be one of those nights. I go up and fix myself some supper. 

While I am making my supper, my wife comes up behind me and announces that, “Our daughter has a bush.” Okay, she is that age, what am I supposed to say to that? Of course, I know that this is just a lead in to how bad my wife’s menstrual cramps were and how bad our daughter’s are going to be. So I ask, “Are we prepared? Do we have supplies in case she starts?” “Yes, I bought them a year ago.” “Good, where are they, just in case I need to tell her where to find them.” “In the bathroom.” Then she tells me some story about how when she was a girl, she skinned her knee and started bleeding and because her clueless mother had only talked about things in the vaguest way possible, my wife thought she had started her period and wound up being quite embarrassed. Her mother was an ER nurse and the old bitch couldn’t do any better then that for her oldest girl? And then it really starts. My wife is absolutely convinced that because she had bad cramps that our daughter will. Maybe. But we won’t know until it happens. Until then, we should prepare for it but there is no point in worrying about it and certainly none in making ourselves crazy about it. Plus, my daughter seems to take after my mother and my sister and I don’t think they had severe problems like my wife did. (Admittedly, I was a teen age boy when that was going on and I might have been totally clueles and kept out of the loop on that one. But I never saw any evidence that anyone was going through severe menstraul pain.) So I refuse to get dragged into this drunken obsessive worry session, again. She has tried to have this conversation many times and I am pretty tired of it. She gives up and I finish making supper and go down to watch “Lost”. 

About two minutes into “Lost”, my wife looks at me and slurs, “You were right about TV. It isn’t important and I’m not going to worry about it. I have to worry about my children.” Then she goes out to her lounge and then to bed. All seems okay, but about ten minutes later, fortunately after the kids have fallen asleep, she starts muttering from the bed. I can’t really hear her most of the time but occasionally there will be a louder comment I can hear. “I’m done.” “I’m tired.”"Asshole.” “Go away.” She kept that up for over an hour and I just did my best to ignore her. I stayed up later then usual just so I wouldn’t have to try to get into bed while she was muttering nasty things at me. That would have certainly brought about a stupid drunken argument, maybe woke the kids up scaring them, and it would have been all for nothing. I’m going to ask her what I did to piss her off and I’ll bet she won’t even know what I’m talking about.

February 23, 2009

A miserable night. I got back from work and there was a plate of leftovers waiting. I have told my mother-in-law and my wife that I don’t want them to leave me anything, I’ll make my own dinners while I am working evenings. I go ahead and take the plate downstairs and I told my wife, as nicely as I could, that if her mother did the courtesy of asking if she should make up a plate for me to tell her ‘no’. And my wife just went off. I could see right away that she was drunk. She had that ugly, angry, mean look on her face that she only gets by drinking.  She had come back from work right as supper was being served. My mother-in-law had cooked up a bunch of stuff my son doesn’t like and he wasn’t eating any of it. No shit! So my wife got dragged into that argument and was bitching at me and taking her mother’s side of things. My wife kept saying she was going to kill our son and that he had to just start eating what his grandmother cooks. I said, no, just have him make himself a sandwich if she is going to insist on cooking crap that she knows he doesn’t like. My wife and I went round about on that one for a while until I finally just said I don’t want to argue any more. She disappeared into her ’smoking’ lunge and shut the door. Meaning she didn’t want me to see her swilling more vodka. 

Then she starts with the iPod. Her iPod wasn’t playing as loudly as it used to. I looked at for a bit and switched the headphones and ear bud around and tested hers on our daughter’s iPod and finally decided that the problem was definitely with her iPod. My wife gets all pissed off and disappears again. When she comes back, she is waving her iPod at me and shows me that there is a lock on the upper end of the volume level indicator. Okay, I take a look. There is a max volume lock that you can set, I guess so you or your kids don’t blow your ears off. It has a lock with a combination. It takes me a while to figure all this out, I don’t use the iPods, I just buy them for the wife and daughter. But no one knows the combination. I figure someone accidently set the lock on and there is some random combination that we will never figure out. I tell the wife this. She swears she didn’t do it and one of the kids must have. She just KNOWS one of the kids did it. I know nothing of the sort, having seen what she has done to her iPod before. She once deleted everything on it and set it back to the factory settings. Of course she doesn’t remember doing that either. Now she is all pissed off at the kids and I don’t know if she is right or not. Our daughter has her own iPod and our son rarely listens to music. Personally I think she did it in a drunken stupor but I can’t really tell her that. I mean, I could, but it would mean a major escalation in her hysteria and a huge fight and I just don’t want to do that. So I try to tell her that I am sure someone did it by accident and we don’t really know who did it and she shouldn’t get mad or take it out on the kids. No go. She isn’t buying it at all. She just knows our son did it. So we argue about that for a while until I tell her again, that I don’t want to fight with her any more. She disappears again. At some point, she actually figures out how to reset the volume lock, either by random dumb luck or because she remembered the combination she used to set the damn thing in the first place, not that she would admit that to me. If she hadn’t, I would have just reset her iPod and reloaded her music, no big deal. So I go to bed and try to sleep.

Now she is sitting out in her lounge doing the drunken singing with headphones on thing. I love my wife, but not for her singing voice. Now she is just keeping me awake and it is kind of sad, listening to her. Finally she comes to bed. She has a head cold (we have all been sick for about three weeks and it is getting old) and blowing her nose and hacking and thrashing around in bed. I finally drift off to sleep, and my phone rings. It is almost midnight and one of my Navy buddies has decided to do some drunken dialing. Wonderful. Wakes me up and my wife. I talk to him for a minute and my wife is yelling obscenities in the back ground. 

I hang up and try to get back to sleep. Not an easy thing for me, it rarely is. After a few minutes, my wife says, “You know that book you are writing about the submarine stories? You should write about your life. You should write about how your father fucked some other woman and ditched your mother. You should write about the Sunday morning beatings.  You should write about how your brother fucked your step-sister.” The immediate retort that popped into my head was that maybe I should write about my wife fucking the back stabbing piece of shit I though was a friend of ours. Again, that would have meant a major blowout at midnight and I just wanted to get to sleep. I just told her I didn’t want to fight any more and rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. After a bit, I had to give up and read for a while so I could get sleepy again. Fortunately, she settled down and the evening’s festivities were over.

February 20, 2009

My wife and I are both sick as dogs. I went to work, I have a part time, temporary evening job at the Census Bureau. I felt awful, but I had to go in for a little while as they werre giving us our ID’s and I didn’t want to miss it. Plus, they have thousands of job applications just waiting to fill any vacancies so they don’t have to keep anyone they don’t feel like keeping. I didn’t rally want to call in sick my first week. My boss eventually told me to go home, so I left after a couple of hours.

When I got back to the house, my wife had gone to the store to buy a bunch of chips and dip. The disgusting dip in the can, ugh! She only ate a little and she went to bed soon after I got back from work. She clearly felt awful, her eyes were watering, her nose clogged and she was coughing her head off. Later, when I walked out to her smoking lounge to get something else, I saw the real reason for the junk food shopping trip. She had bought a bottle. Shocking. She had only taken a swig off of it and must have decided that she felt so crappy that it just wasn’t worth it. I dumped it and pushed the bottle back on the shelf where it came from.

February 18, 2009

I came back here from work about 8:30. the lights were off, the kids were watching TV, and my wife was ‘asleep’ in bed. Yeah, like she ever goes to bed before ten when she is sober. So I knew she was drinkng. 

Then the kids asked if they could have ice cream. I said, “Sure, why not?” And they thundered up stairs the way only kids on their way up to get ice cream can and my wife comes to. She starts bitching that the kids shouldn’t be having dessert because they didn’t eat much at dinner. I’ve had my mother-in-law’s cooking, and quite frankly, I don’t blame them. So I asked my wife if she had told them not to have any dessert, because that would have pissed me off if they had snuck around her back like that. She said, “No” and then started bitching at me for letting the kids play me. I didn’t argue with her. No point. But it kept going through my mind that, gee, if you were sober and awake, you could have told me they weren’t supposed to have dessert and they would not have been able to pull a fast one on you. Plus, you didn’t tell them they couldn’t anyway so whose fault is that? Not mine and not theirs either. I walked away and ate my dinner, watched the idiot box and put the kids to bed.

After, my wife came to and got amorous. I never know when this is going to happen. No warning. I’m not complaining (much), but just once I would like things to happen on my schedule instead of only on hers and it would be nice if, occasionally, we could make love without her being stupid drunk and us having fought for a while first. The nights I think should be romantic and things should happen – nothing. Get her ripping drunk and spend two or three hours having a nasty, knock down drag out brawl, decide I am so pissed that I am going to sleep on the couch or as far away from her as I can on the bed and an hour later, bam! She’s rubbing my leg and starting to kiss me. I have no problem with make up sex, but I don’t think it should all be make up sex. And frankly, there usually isn’t any ‘make up’, it is just the sex. Again, I am not complaining to much, but still… It just doesn’t seem right. And, maybe I am a romantic fool, but I don’t think things should be like this all the time, every time.

I had started doing the laundry before I went to work. I got about half way through the five loads we build up over a week and my wife was going to finish them. The next morning, I went out and saw the piles of folded clothes on the ironing board. The piles started being neatly folded on the bottom (where I had done them) and then got progressively messier as you got towards the top where the laundry had been just dropped on, unfolded. It was like some kind of weird strata of drunkeness. I could see she had been sober when she started and then got progressively drunker as the evening wore on. The first layer was fairly neat. The next layer was folded, but not as neatly. Next the folds were definitely off, and now the clothes were inside out and the pockets hanging out. Finally the clothes were just draped on top of the pile, unfolded. The last load was sitting in the dryer. When she woke up, I was folding the last load. She was surprised that the last load had still been in the dryer, she couldn’t remember leaving them there.

February 15, 2009

We travelled down to see my cousins and their kids. It was a fun trip, but they don’t know the extent of my wife’s problem and whenever we all get together, the beer flows. Today was no exception. My cousin extended a beer to me and I hesitated, I was thinking about how to tell them that I don’t drink any more without having to get into a long embarrassing explanation about it. My wife, who never drinks beer, grabbed the one being offerred to me. I took the next one rather then open that whole can of worms. We all had several beers and then a margarita with dinner. I guess drinking beer and a mixed drink rather then guzzling vodka straight out of the bottle slowed her alcohol intake enough so that my wife could manage to keep herself under control. We had a nice time and I can’t really ask for much more then that.

February 13, 2009

Another bad start to the day. I told her that some of the things she had said the night before really disturbed me. That when she told me that our kids needed to ‘just get over it’ and ‘deal with it’, I feel like she is tossing off any responsibility for the pain she has caused onto us. Her drunken behavior hurts us? Not her fault, it’s our fault for being hurt. Hurts me that she allowed the neighborhood scumbag to seduce her? Tough, she can’t do anything to help get through that. It hurts the kids to see their mother stagger around stupid drunk and be mean to them and their father? Tough, just get over it. It hurts the kids to see their parents fight because their mother is drunk and ranting and acting insane? Tough, just get over it. I basically told her if that is really her attitude then I have to take the kids and get away from her. I can’t deal with this any more.

She of course immediately swore that she wouldn’t be mean to us any more. I told her there was only one way to guarantee that, she has to quit drinking. She told me she would. That she would fix it.

Guess what! Drunk again, just a few short hours later. Tried to tell me that I should be proud of her because one of her friends from work had a bad day and “needed a drink” and she didn’t go out with her. (To be fair, while I think her friend is trouble, she also doesn’t realize that my wife has a drinking problem. She has kept it hidden from her co-workers.) I might have felt better about that if she wasn’t obviously under the influence. Just how happy was I supposed to be?

My wife wasn’t mean to me or the kids, but I can’t get to excited about that either. She can usually pull that off for a drunk or two and then she slips and it’s right back to being full bore drunk bitch. She got a little weird. At one point she told me I could get her some butter toffee from Munson’s for Valetine’s Day. I had already planned to do just that and I told her so. She started going off on how that just shows how right it is for us to be together. Then she almost slipped totally into wacko land. She said I should never talk to her again like I did this morning. Then she backed off and got herself under control, but I could see her grip was slipping. I could have pushed her over the edge. I could have argued with her. I could have pointed out that just because I knew what she liked after twenty years together, that doesn’t really say to much about our future together. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to make her lose what control she had and I didn’t want to fight with her any more. Fortunately, she went to bed right after that.

February 12, 2009

The day started out badly. I told my wife how much her drinking was hurting me. That the things she says and does while drunk were killing our mariage and hurting me and our kids, not to mention the damage drinking was doing to her. I got kind of upset with her. She told me things would get better and she would stop treating me like crap. That she would stop drinking. Guess what. Apparently not tonight.

She came back from work drinking. At first it wasn’t to bad, other then the fact that once again her promises to stop didn’t even last ten hours. She broke into her usual rant about her job. Then we sat down to watch the start of Survivor. She got through that and then decided that she wanted to watch the Office. As that started, she kept telling me that she didn’t remember the lead in, the things that happened last week, and was she drinking while we watched it? I tiold her I didn’t remember. Then she asked me a question that we had talked about the night before, and I answered it and told her we had this conversation the night before. I didn’t add that she was drunk. She said she didn’t remember. Our son piped up with, “You did Mom, I remember it.” Great. Even the kids can see how forgetful she is now.

After the kids got put to bed, my wife starts yelling at me, “What did you tell the kids in North Carolina? Go up and talk to them. Tell them their parents just don’t always get along any more. Tell them they need to just get over it.” When she said that, I got pissed and said, “You mean I should tell our young children that their mother is a selfish drunken pig and they should just stop caring and ‘get over it’?” That shut her up for a minute. She sat there giving me the hairy eyeball and I said, ” I told them what I have always told them. This isn’t their fault, their mother is sick and has gotten caught up in something she can’t control and it makes her say and do things she shouldn’t. That their mother loves them even if she can’t show it all the time.” I emphasized that it isn’t their fault and both of their parents love them. Then I went upstairs and made sure she hadn’t upset the kids while I was out of the room. When I came down she had passed out and stayed that way, fortunately.

February 11, 2009

Another psychotic drunk night. It started out with her just drinking and sliding into lunacy. She told me that she wanted to watch Top Chef so I should record Lost. I set up to do that and as we sat down to watch Top Chef, she tells me we should be watching Lost. Okay, no big deal. I wanted to watch Lost anyway. Then, five minutes into it, she scowled and said, “I can’t do this” and went to bed. But not to sleep. It was the up and down thrashing and swearing kind of going to bed.

After a while, she decides to yell at our daughter for still being awake. Okay, I take her up and put her to bed, fifteen minutes before I was going to do it anyway. Our son had stomach problems and went up to go to the bathroom. My wife had to go at the same time and went all the way upstairs. My son called for me to tell me he had diarrhea again. I went up to see that he was alright and my wife came down at the same time and started yelling at me. Asking me where our son was. I told her and she couldn’t understand. What was so difficult about, “He is in the bathroom and he had diarrhea again.” She kept yelling at me and then started screaming about something her mother said to her. I didn’t hear her mother say it and I still don’t know what was said, but my wife was quit upset and just ranting and raving. This went on for about ten minutes until finally she went to bed. Again. This time she went to sleep, but not until she had pulled all the covers over to her side of the bed. I had to carefully lift them and gently pull over enough blanket so I could sleep when I went to bed. I waited for a couple of hours so she wouldn’t wake up when I got into bed with her.

February 9, 2009

She came back from work with a bottle, again. But this time it wasn’t so good. When Obama came on for his hour long press conference and screwed up the TV schedule, she (and I) were a bit annoyed. 

I started talking about why Obama’s plan won’t work, he doesn’t understand economics and this so-called stimulus plan is just going to suck the economy dry of needed savings and prolong the recession, maybe turn it into a depression. This isn’t a political forum, and I don’t want to get into this here to much, but it is relevant to my evening with my wife. She was confused and I tried to explain what I was saying to her and she couldn’t follow the discussion. She began to get all frustrated and saying things that really didn’t track the conversation. She got all weepy and angry and I eased out of the conversation and she got mad and went to bed. Sort of.

Our daughter is sick. Last night she had wicked stomach cramps that hurt so much they made her cry, along with vomiting and diarrhea. I was up, pretty much all night with her, cleaning her up when necessary and holding her hand and comforting her. She was better tonight, but she had planned to sleep on the couch downstairs. Our son, true to form, was going to sleep on the other couch. My wife, laying in bed, started growling and yelling obscenities and eventually both kids decided they would rather sleep upstairs. Plus, the little woman was yelling about kids being downstairs. So I took them up and put them to bed.

When I got downstairs, I stayed up for a while and watched some more of the idiot box. I was hoping my wife would settle down for the evening and I wouldn’t have to listen to any crap. I went to bed about 11:00 and she woke up and started bitching at me about our daughter sleeping upstairs. My wife was afraid that our daughter would throw up on the floor or something. Possible, but I didn’t think it was likely. Plus, I didn’t want to mention that her drunken psychotic behavior drove the kids to sleeping upstairs in the first place. I can never mention the fact that her bizarre behavior while drinking causes problems. That inevitably sends her into a screaming, shrieking rage. Not what I wanted to start at nearly midnight. So I just kept quit and let her bitch at me.  

Then she dragged out the tired, “Oh, poor me. I have to work in the morning. I have to do my overtime.” Well, maybe it would be easier if you didn’t have to get up with a hangover. Maybe, if you weren’t drunk, you could get some real sleep instead of this up, down, thrashing and psychotic behavior thing all evening and you would feel a bit more rested when you do have to get up and go to work. Most people figure out that getting blotto and then having to get up for work is just not worth it and I have run out of sympathy for you on that one. Sorry, I guess.